We were out in a restaurant for Al's birthday meal and Connor was playing with the door where we were sitting. We warned him not to do that or the waitress would come over and tell him off. Five minutes later, the waitress came over and the boy's first reaction?
"I'm not touching it!"
Not blogged for a while. Usual issues:
I don't think much of the English chances, but bring it on!
Update 1 9 - 17. The French seem to be choking. Lots of basic errors and not converting their chances. The Pumas are really going for it. We could be on for a massive upset and blow to the hosts (and favourites in some eyes) chances... (Loving Will Greenwood as a pundit as well).
I was watching Steve Yegge's talk from OSCON about branding, and one of the things he touched on was Amazon's brand is books, and they want to get out of that since Jeff Bezos thinks that certain consumables will become totally digitized. My current thinking is that they are focusing on other things anyway (hosting, anyone?) and maybe this is taking away from their original core competency. Recent orders of mine have taken a lot longer than they used to. Previously, I'd order stuff on a Monday and it would arrive on Wednesday or Thursday the same week, with Super Saver Delivery. Now it takes a lot longer. So I'm still waiting for the Erlang, ANTLR, Haskell and REST books to arrive that I'd hoped to read on holiday.
Got numeric and decimal working today in between contractions in the Central Delivery Suite at Frimley Park Hospital today. Nearly got categories working as well, except I'm not clear how CPython has implemented unicodedata.category for undefined codepoints.
e.g. Python 2.5 uses Unicode 4.2 for the Unicode database. The integer codepoint 13313(decimal) / 3401 (hex) is not defined within Unicode 4.1.
3400;;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
4DB5;;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
It isn't defined in Unicode 5.0, which is what I've been using to do the Jython implementation.
3400;;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
4DB5;;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
So how does CPython define unicodedata.category(unichr(13313)) to be 'Lo'? And it doesn't seem to be just 'Lo' in all cases of undefined items. I'm speculating that it might be falling back to the preceding valid codepoint category. Think I need to post to a CPython list to confirm.
I am directly subscribed to Sam Ruby's feed. I recently added Planet Intertwingly as well, which contains Sam's blog. Both feeds are served as application/atom+xml. In Google Reader, duplicate items show up (for Sam, Steve Loughran, and others that overlap from my other subscriptions. I don't want to remove individual subscriptions in case Sam removes them from Planet Intertwingly.
From my readings of the spec a while ago, that was an explicit rationale for having id's associated with each entry. As you would expect, the id's are the same. From Planet Intertwingly:
<entry>
<id>tag:intertwingly.net,2004:2619</id>
<link href="http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/07/31/Agile-Financial-Publishing" rel="alternate" type="text/html"/>
<link href="http://intertwingly.net/blog/2619.atom" rel="replies" type="text/html"/>
<title>Agile Financial Publishing</title>
...
</entry>
From Intertwingly:
<entry>
<id>tag:intertwingly.net,2004:2619</id>
<link href="2007/07/31/Agile-Financial-Publishing"/>
<link rel="replies" href="2619.atom" thr:count="1" thr:updated="2007-07-31T12:15:28-04:00"/>
<title>Agile Financial Publishing</title>
...
</entry>
Those atom:id element IRIs appear to be the same to me...
So I'm being completely upfront in the title as to where I am on this one, but I think that it's worth giving some airtime to a few of these. Readers might care to note that they should route around the "grumpy Yorkshireman that doesn't like change" for some of these. You never know, I might get some comments explaining why I'm a bozo when it comes to Windows.
Update: LazyWeb to the rescue, at least about the disk thrashing issue.
There was a bag of sweets up on the kitchen top. Connor spotted these and was after them, but I told him "Not for breakfast". After I'd gone to work, he asked Al the same and got the same response. His reaction?
(Al continues ironing. Some time passes)
(More time passes)
After an hour, the ironing is done and Al's about to phone me to say how well-disciplined the boy's been, just holding the sweets. So she takes the ironing upstairs and comes back down to see Connor doing his Muttley laugh and just shy of shovelling all of the sweets into his mouth! Gamed by a 2 year old.
I posted a comment on this but I thought it worthwhile going a little deeper.
Blogger doesn't support Trackback so I'll just post and link.
My point was not to argue about how little code is required to implement sending an ETag and checking an ETag based on the MD5 hash of your content (that's pretty much a library issue which should level out to be equal over time) but to go a little deeper into ETags.
I've been reading Sam Ruby long enough to have had the benefit of ETags drummed into me. The posts that Bill links to are focused on the network savings aspect of conditional GET. But you can also save server processing power, if you put a little more thought into your application model.
So we come back to the requirements for Java frameworks to support ETags such that it is possible to avoid doing the bulk of the server side processing. Caveat this could well be premature optimization, and is merely me thinking out loud. Struts is the one I'm most familiar with and I think with the struts-chain RequestProcessor, this approach could be used, but anything that works as a chain would do for this (so pure Filters would also work).
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response,
FilterChain filterChain) throws IOException, ServletException {
HttpServletRequest httpRequest = (HttpServletRequest) request;
/*
* Do something that works out what is required to render a response
* for this request and generate an ETag based on that. So here we
* have moved away from the approach of generating ETags from MD5
* hashes of the response body.
*/
ETag currentResourceETag = calculateETag(httpRequest);
ETag incomingETag = extractETag(httpRequest);
if (currentResourceETag.equals(incomingETag)) {
response.sendStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_NOT_MODIFIED);
} else {
filterChain.doFilter(request, response);
response.addHeader("Etag", currentResourceETag.stringValue());
}
}
You would need to be able to obtain the items responsible for determining the ETag value reasonably early in the request processing, before any really expensive operations. Not sure what implications that has for the layers in your application, or if you were using strict MVC how disruptive / worthwhile it would be to try this approach...
from test_support import verify, verbose
import sha
encoding = 'utf-8'
def test_mirrored():
h = sha.sha()
for i in range(65536):
c = unichr(i)
h.update(str(unicodedata.mirrored(c)))
print "%i : %i%c" % (i, unicodedata.mirrored(c), unichr(10)),
# Value returned by Python 2.5, which uses Unicode 4.2
#verify('91cd30c6c81911835dbcbed083f99fc9fc073e4a' == h.hexdigest(),
# h.hexdigest())
# Value returned by current Jython implementation, which uses Unicode 5.0
verify('595795a212ca0ac629d6b2dfb09c703a472adb03' == h.hexdigest(),
h.hexdigest())
# Add next test!
if __name__ == '__main__':
import unicodedata
test_mirrored()
OK, it's only for the BMP, but it's a good start. Supporting supplementary characters (in Java terminology) or the other sixteeen planes would need a more fundamental change to PyUnicode, methinks. Now I need to start adding the other unicodedata methods which should be fairly straightforward. Then I'll have a working implementation to post to the dev list. Maybe end of this month, unless Baby comes and I lose my late night hacking time?
for i in range(65536):
c = unichr(i)
print "%i : %i%c" % (i, unicodedata.mirrored(c), unichr(10)) ,
jabley@miq-jabley ~/work/eclipse/workspaces/personal/jython-trunk/jython
$ diff jython-mirrored.txt python-mirrored.txt
10177c10177
< 10176 : 0
---
> 10176 : 1
10180,10183c10180,10183
< 10179 : 0
< 10180 : 0
< 10181 : 0
< 10182 : 0
---
> 10179 : 1
> 10180 : 1
> 10181 : 1
> 10182 : 1
11779,11782c11779,11782
< 11778 : 0
< 11779 : 0
< 11780 : 0
< 11781 : 0
---
> 11778 : 1
> 11779 : 1
> 11780 : 1
> 11781 : 1
11786,11787c11786,11787
< 11785 : 0
< 11786 : 0
---
> 11785 : 1
> 11786 : 1
11789,11790c11789,11790
< 11788 : 0
< 11789 : 0
---
> 11788 : 1
> 11789 : 1
11805,11806c11805,11806
< 11804 : 0
< 11805 : 0
---
> 11804 : 1
> 11805 : 1
java.lang.Character.isMirrored(char), but the above is the result of diffing the output for jython and python running my test and diff-ing the output. Looking in more detail, Java 1.4 supports UCD 3.2, then Java 5 and Java 6 both only have support for UCD 4.0.
jabley@miq-jabley ~/work/eclipse/workspaces/personal/jython-trunk/jython
$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, May 18 2007, 16:56:43)
[GCC 3.4.4 (cygming special, gdc 0.12, using dmd 0.125)] on cygwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.unidata_version
'4.1.0'
A breakfast discussion with Connor:
Steve Yegge's recent post about the second most important course in CS made me smile. I discovered Eric Raymond's How To Become A Hacker fairly early on in my career, and to a Mathematics graduate with a job doing Visual Basic 6.0, that was eye-opening stuff. But you always have to remember that all authors have an agenda (including this one, obviously - Ed) and it has been commented by people other than myself that esr's HOWTO could be alternatively titled 'How To Be Like Eric Raymond'. Well, so be it. It's always the journey that's the interesting part. So can we consider Steve's post to be an equivalent 'How To Be Like Steve Yegge'? Doesn't matter. Again, it's the journey that has value.
As an aside, I had an email from Amazon today.
Your order #xxx-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx (received 27-March-2007)Note the order date as well. Three months to get that book. Ouch! But at least it's given me time to read these two, and I can interpret Steve's post (and Joe's comment) as a good barometer of where I'm heading.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ordered Title Price Dispatched Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.co.uk items (Sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L.):
1 Compilers: Principles, Tec... £47.49 1 £47.49
Shipped via Home Delivery Network Limited (estimated arrival date:
28-June-2007).
I took the boys to the park yesterday and Callum was very chatty. He noticed that I was quite snottery* and talked about how I had B-fever, rather than hayfever. Clever!
* I must have been married to a Scot for too long to corrupt the English language so.