Eevee grew to level 25!

Ho jeez what have I even done this year.

• Left a job I was unhappy with and scored an infrastructure gig at Yelp. If I ended the list right here I still ought to be satisfied with that alone.

• Acquired mel and husband.

• Got a cat. I realize as I type that that I haven't actually posted about that. Or anything, in a while.

• Hacked on... a few things. I'm in a weird place with hobby programming and need to make it fun again, but...

  • floof got a visual refresh and a port to Pyramid.

  • raidne got, eh, not really anywhere.

  • Started sanpera, and got it basically functional, and learned Cython in the process.

  • Jumped ship to github, which is pretty cool.

• Met some ancient friends I hadn't seen in years, if at all.

• Contributed to mel's DA PMD group canon by actually writing fictional prose for the first time.

• Got on hackernews once, and reddit at least twice.

• Started collecting Pokémon plushes oh god help

I feel like everything is crazy all the time and it leaves me never wanting to really sit down and work in my spare time any more. Maybe that should be more okay than I pretend it is.

I'm so tired of passwords. So, so, so tired.

Most people don't understand this. Most people use the same password everywhere. Most people can just mechanically type out password3 in every password box, smirking to themselves at how clever they are, because who would ever guess 3 instead of 1?

I don't do that. Let me tell you what i do.

I generate a different password for every service, based on a convoluted master password and the name of the thing. I do this because it's what you're supposed to do; it's what security nerds (including myself for the purposes of this post) tell everyone else to do. "Ho ho!" we all chuckled to ourselves after the Gawker leak, and the subsequent breakins to various other things that used the same passwords. "If only these chumps had been generating different random passwords for every service!"

So my passwords look like 'fC`29ap5w78r3IJ, or Ab3HE4 2Iv5hJk\K, or mw@\_h<~o04neHiJ{. Those are actual examples i just generated. I'm eating my own dogfood, so to speak.

It's not without its drawbacks.

• I don't know my Google password. I think there's an h in it somewhere? So when Google asks me to verify my password–which seems like once every 18 hours–I hav...

I just wasted way too much time migrating all of my git repositories to GitHub. It's way less janky than the old thing, and the guys running it seem to be acceptably hipster-nerdy.

I'm still using Redmine as a bug tracker, and i have a cron going that updates the old repositories regularly, so commits will still appear in tickets and whatnot. This is just a change of canon.

I am considering giving GitHub Issues a shot for small new projects, just to get a feel for it. Redmine is powerful but feels like it's targeted at my manager. GitHub is, i must admit, very much targeted at the people on the ground doing the hacking.

Anyway, here is a story.

GitHub has push notifications for a variety of services. One of them is IRC. It will actually fire up a bot, connect to your server, join your channel, and spit out new commits. This is totally awesome, except that the bot doesn't hang around (understandably), and i don't really want join/part spam surrounding every single commit.

The bot can try to notify without joining the channel, but i couldn't find a way to let a specific client punch through +n, and IRC server developers kind of frown on hiding joins because it leads to crazy spying from opers. I was considering just...

It's reasonably well-known by now that, if you don't have a Google+ name that looks sufficiently white and Anglo-Saxon, they'll suspend your account and require photo ID.

This raises a couple questions that i don't think have gotten adequate attention.

One: Why is this okay?

Yes, i know it's legal, and you can use another service, and whatever apologetic tripe. That's not interesting or constructive; shut the fuck up.

I want to know why it is okay—that is, humanly inoffensive. Most of the conversation has been about hypothetical political outcasts on the run from their curly-moustached evil dictators, and how those people clearly need to use pseudonyms.

Okay, well, i'm not one of them. And i doubt you know any such people. I doubt most of those engaged in this conversation know such people. Maybe you know some people with quirky fetishes they'd like to talk about with a separate identity, but that doesn't really conjure the same dramatic image.

Still, i admire the devotion to principle here. So here's another, far more simple, principled question, which few have come out and asked: why is it okay for Google to tell me what my name is?

I'm not a political dissident, or a closeted hard B...

Hello here is what's going on.

job

I work for Yelp now. PERHAPS YOU'VE HEARD OF THEM.

In all seriousness, it's pretty nice to work for a place that maybe people have heard of. For four years i've had to mumble something about taxes and Florida and quietly realize i barely understood what i was doing, either. No longer!

Enjoying myself so far; it definitely has the feel of a company of engineers who build stuff just because they like building stuff. The difference is night and day.

grammar

I'm no longer capitalizing "i" as though it were a proper noun. Right, okay.

psych

I'm kind of liking this whole full-disclosure thing with my dumb glitches. In the past week i have noticed:

• I still try way, way, way too hard to find elegant solutions to problems. I said this before in some form, but i had engineering in mind. This week, i needed to get an Android device for Mel so she could use Square to peddle her wares at a con this weekend. I put considerable effort into figuring out how to re-juggle wireless service, or excuse buying a tablet because it'd be cheaper than a family plan, or whatever the goddamn fuck.

  In the end i just strolled into Best Buy,...

How did I write this? I don't know what happened. I was just jotting down notes and prose came out.

I wrote a whole thing about Shell and Unity before, but it was kinda knee-jerk ranting. With my newfound blog fame, here's a lame attempt at a more constructive list of specific criticisms of GNOME 3, now that I've actually used it for a while on my laptop.

I know that GNOME 3.2 is in progress, so maybe some of this is addressed. I had a look and I can't find anything that conclusively tells me; there's a roadmap on the GNOME wiki, with a handful of papercuts listed, but no hints at substantial behavior changes. There's a Planet GNOME, but not a lot on it about GNOME itself.

This has also given me some ideas for what I would like to see in a window manager, but it's a little harder to explain without cobbling together a mockup. I'll try to do that. Someday.

• The Super key cannot be rebound for anything else. I use it frequently for global operations: changing input method, running common programs, activating a launcher, WM shenanigans, and so forth. It was fantastically useful, as virtually nothing but WMs have Super bound to anything, so I have a whole keyboard for personal custom shortcut use. Now I'm bound to the bland shortcuts GNOME gives me.

  I also don't much like that Super brings up the Activities dashboard on its own—it's a modifier, and I frequent...

I lurk in #python. It gets a lot of questions that are, shall we say, frequently asked. This is my attempt to catalogue interesting and useful questions. The answers will gradually become separate posts—perhaps on other blogs if someone else gets to them first. Let me know if there should be other questions, if the answers are unclear, or the answers have bugs in them!

Variables, operators, and functions

• How do I pass by reference? Does Python pass by reference or pass by value?
• Why can't I create closures within a loop?
• How do I change a variable in an outer scope?
• How do I access a variable whose name is in a string? How do I use "variable variables"?
• What does is do? Should I use is or ==?
• Why doesn't division work correctly?
• Why are floats inaccurate? What type should I use to handle currency?
• How do I test whether a variable is defined?

Classes, objects, and data

• How do I make a tuple with one element? What's this trailing comma?
• How do I check what type a variable is?
• Why can't I just do super(type(self), self)? How does super work?
• What's ...

Ha, ha! A hilarious and original pun.

I've had several conversations now about Perl 5's level of deadness and Perl 6's level of disastrousness. So here is a followup, which surely won't get as much attention because it's not as potentially inflammatory.

To recap

What does "dead" mean? I have no idea. And neither does anyone else. Everyone agrees that it's a bad thing for their pet language to be called, but I can't really find a definition that applies to, say, COBOL but not Ruby. The best we have is, er, "like COBOL".

Let's be more precise then: I feel Perl has a dire problem on its hands, and as a developer raised by Perl, this saddens me.

(An aside: one acquaintance told me he doesn't think I even like Perl, having seen me complain about it a bit too frequently. I had to think about this. I suppose I like Perl, but I don't enjoy it, which is precisely what frustrates me here. I want to like Perl, but I don't know that Perl wants me to like it.)

The Problem

The Problem isn't even so much the language itself. I fear a dark cloud of insulation hangs over the Perl community. I submit the following.

• Recall that Perl 5.8 went five and a half years before another major revision. That's nearly a quarter of Perl's entire lifetime, and it happened whi...

Pyramid is, to skip a lot of history, a successor to Pylons. It's a Web framework for Python. (And there goes half my audience.) This post is about dispatch: mapping URLs to the code you want to run. (There goes the other half.)

Pyramid supports traditional URL routing, which looks like this:

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config.add_route('cats.list', '/cats')
config.add_route('cats.view', '/cats/{id}')

@view_config(route_name='cats.list', renderer='cat_list.mako')
def cat_list(...

I'm currently hosting a small pile of projects on a combination of self-hosted gitweb and self-hosted Redmine. I keep glancing meaningfully in the direction of GitHub; it's code-oriented, it has wiki support, it has an issue tracker, and it can do simple site hosting via some contrived abuse of git. So why am I bothering to host my own stuff? There are actually a few reasons, thus I need the Internet to decide for me.

I'd rather go all-or-nothing, instead of having one foot in each approach. Thus moving to GitHub would involve moving veekun, floof, the old copies of both, the new dywypi, etc.

Pro Redmine

• Independence, not being a cog in the corporate machine, etc etc.

• We're already on it. Zero effort needed.

• More "pro inertia", but the biggest stumbling block is migrating issues to GitHub. Redmine numbers issues sequentially across all projects, whereas GitHub numbers issues per-project—and you can't force gaps. So I'd end up renumbering all the existing issues from 1, which would conflict with all the existing issue references in git history and be generally awful and confusing.

  I emailed GitHub support asking about this, and they p...