Monday, February 25, 2002

I've been addicted to building tools for a long time. I've always loved it when people used my code. One of my favorite memories is the time I saw my student number scrawled on the desk for one of the student terminals in college. It was scrawled there by someone who was trying to remember the location of one of my utilities. It meant that people were using my stuff! I can't help myself. This is also really exciting because 2001 sucked for me creatively. It's like I locked up and couldn't get any ideas to work. Getting laid off was bad, but not being able to get a job for such a time was really a blow. I'm happy to be working again, and I'm also very happy to be hacking on tools again. 6:40:12 PM

I've finally gotten email that tells me that someone other than me got the Python IDE to work. Thanks, Joe. If anyone else is using the tool, could you drop me a line and let me know how it's going? Just a quick note that says that it works would suffice. Problem reports and feature suggestions are always welcome as well. As someone who likes to produce tools, the best part is when someone else finds the tool useful. The worst part is wondering if anyone is actually using it. Is there somewhere on the radio.weblogs.com machine that will give a traditional access log? I'd love to know how often the tool got downloaded. Yes, I check my referer log too often as well. 5:49:17 PM

Python Abuse is about the only way I can describe this. I wrote a utility at work that converted Excel CSV files (and all of their "allowing anything in a quoted string, including newlines" wonkiness) to a naive XML format. I went completely overboard when converting it to use list comprehensions whereever I could (I was wielding a new hammer), and thought I'd done a pretty good job of obfuscation, but after looking at that page, I see that there is much farther I could have gone. 5:38:17 PM

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