And that's also the bad thing. But I'm not the first to bring this up.

6:39:56 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

Yeah, he's old, and he's certainly not the fastest guy around the bases, but boy can he hit. As long as he can keep moving men around the bases, we should be proud to let him. That, and I would really like to see him have the sort of longevity and performance that will get him into the Hall of Fame as the first DH. He certainly defines the position.

1:24:55 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

Now I just have to find the spot in my house that has steady reception. That's the problem with living in a house with aluminum siding (came with the house, I didn't choose to have it put on, but if I don't have to paint the house as often, I'm happy). I can have great reception outside, but as soon as I go in the door, boom. Reception goes away with the exception of strange places near windows.

Here's hoping it shows up soon. hope hope hope.

1:21:41 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

It's looking like I won't be able to be there, but my wife is going to tape the landing for me. I'm really going to regret not getting a chance to see Concorde fly.

Here's hoping that somehow I can get free before 3pm tomorrow, even if it's only for a quick jaunt down and back.

On the other hand, I'm also very pleased that I bought a membership to the museum, since members will get to tour the bird a week before the general public. I have to say that I'm very impressed with the number of historically significant aircraft that we have in this museum. This is a good area in which to be a plane freak.

I wonder if the final flight to BFI will have a supersonic leg. I know that Concorde was restricted in overland flight because of the sonic boom issue, and it would be a shame for its final flight to be a subsonic flight.

10:25:23 AM    comments ()  trackback []  

The post about the Global Interpreter Lock brings back some memories. When I was doing some heavy duty Smalltalk programming, I became dismayed that Smalltalk threads were software threads (although the method of launching them was pretty nice -- I think it was the "fork" message sent to a block). I was doing something that needed some serious hardware, and it's still easier to add more processors than it is to wait for the performance to improve to the next level. But the software threads wouldn't be helped by a multiprocessor box. The answer was to refactor the application into a bunch of cooperating processes -- one would catch incoming requests, another would send on the results, and then we had one or more processes devoted to just doing the heavy lifting. It ended up being a better choice, and last I'd heard (I launched the app in 1997), it was still running, in mostly the same form architecturally.

I think people complain about the Global Interpreter Lock because they hate being told that there is something that has the potential to get in their way, rather than if it really DOES get in their way. The whitespace issue with Python is the same thing, I suspect.

His article about templating is one to think about as well. I'm usually frustrated by simplistic templating system, and his description as to how this causes markup to spill into non-templating code is right on. I've had to do that more times than I could count. The result is code that is tightly bound to the view code.

While making things easy to do is admirable, there are some jobs that are hard to do, and need string tools. Wouldn't it be preferable if we just did a better job of explaining the complexity? Are we doing anybody any favors by making it look like this stuff is easy? It isn't, really.

9:01:36 AM    comments ()  trackback []