Scott Yang's Playground

How to shoot yourself in the foot in any programming language. Very funny (if you happen to acquire different programming languages on your belt). For example, “Perl — You shoot yourself in the foot, but nobody can understand how you did it. Six months later, neither can you.”, and “Python — You try to shoot [...]

IronPython 1.0 has been released. IronPython has been on my “to-play” list ever since the start of this project, and being an “old school” developer I would love to take a look on .NET.

Christopher Diggins on closures and anonymous functions: … closures have a very clear downside: they increase code coupling. Passing a single closure can extend the lifetime of massive numbers of objects, leading to a huge performance hit. Closures are a very powerful feature, but dangerously so. They are arguably too easily abused. A language designer [...]

Jeremy Zawodny asked “Ruby or Python”, when trying to pick up a new language to add into his collection of tools. Many have contributed comments, and so far there seems to be more Python people on board, even though many have tried to comment subjectively (Ian Bicking for example). Interesting thread to watch if you [...]

Dries Buytaert, the head mocho of Drupal the PHP-based content management system, talked about software backward compatibility, and how it crosses Drupal’s core value. He left the dilemma for everyone to pounder. But what to do if many of your users slowly force you to change one of your core values? It seems inevitable that [...]

GvR quoted Neil Schemenauer on Library or Framework: A framework is just an application with a lot of hooks; you can design a framework in an entirely ad-hoc fashion by starting with an app that does one thing and trying to generalize in various directions. You can stop at almost any moment and call it [...]

Sorry that I have not been blogging here for weeks — very busy at work which translates very little time coding for my own. I wish I can just write about all the WTF I’ve enountered at work over the past weeks, trying to make a multi-threaded CORBA-interfaced Python app server scalable (note “multi-thread”, “Python” [...]

I have updated Bloglines2HTML, a small’ish Python script I have written over a year ago, to 0.2. Bloglines2HTML downloads your Bloglines subscriptions and feeds, and convert them into static HTML from a simple template. It enables you to easily “catch up” your news feeds without getting on-line. This script has been working fine for me [...]

This idea is actually implemented after Glen’s comment on a possible Greasemonkey plugin. Instead of re-bundling Scripturizer for Javascript into a Greasemonkey user-script, where very limit number of users might give it a try, I have made it into a “bookmarklet” instead, where clicking on a button can scripturize any webpage that you are currently [...]

Update: It seems that this patch is OBSOLETED as Universal Feed Parser is now supporting Atom 1.0 natively from version 4.0 onwards. I wrote about rakaz’s article on migrating from Atom 0.3 to 1.0, and requested the Atom 1.0 support for Python’s universal feedparser. I submitted the feature request on SourceForge, but then realised Mark [...]

Yahoo! Search Web Services. Somehow Yahoo! suddenly has became the “good guy” again, while the “do good” Google falls to the dark side. Jeremy Zawodny commented on how WordPress.org now uses Yahoo to back its site-wide search. It would be interesting to play around the API, or replace the default WP search engine with Yahoo’s [...]

OpenLaszlo 3.0 is now officially released. Lots of new features here, most notably the LPS-less deployment. It would be a nice welcome, as I don’t see how one should limit your backend platform when choosing a front-end environment. Laszlo has been one of many things that I would love to play with. Time. Oh need [...]

David Temkin talks about future Laszlo development towards optional presentational server. That’s actually something I am waiting for – it’s not that easy finding a consumer grade hosting that allows Java deployment, and not everyone is using Java on the Application server. It would be great if we can have Laszlo-based RIA with Python or [...]

Open Laszlo – a cool open source web application development platform that compiles the code into Flash to run on the client side. XML is everywhere, and client side can be coded in Javascript.

Via Forever Geek. A discussion on the best font for programming. I personally use 9pt Lucida Console for all my programming needs when I am on Windows at work, as it is small but still clear enough for me to put 2 ViM and 2 PuTTY windows in one screen. Another good link on programming [...]