mxODBC for Python2.1 was just released! I was looking for it last week – but it didn’t exist then. Thank you, André Lemburg!
RFC 1149 (protocol for IP over avian carriers, CPIP (carrier
pigeon internet protocol) has finally been implemented! Some of my friends will laugh, some won’t understand – which kind are you?
Not that one.
Me and Aila will drive down and take a look at one tomorrow.
Someone recently called me a “demo kind of guy”. He meant it as a compliment and he was right.
But today I went to a meeting and planned for the future instead of doing a demo. It was all very succesful – and yet I felt a little frustrated afterwards. Then I realized why.
Software developers live with the idea that software is always changing. Building software that can deal with change is hard but possible – and as soon as it’s working we want to show off.
But most people see software only as the means to something – and wonder why they never seem to get there. Unfinished software rarely brings any sense of accomplishment: it’s too far from what they want.
Enter the skilled storyteller! He will say what everyone (developers and their customers) want to hear: you are all somewhere in the middle of a good story with a happy ending.
And a good storyteller knows when a demo is a necessary part of the story. But I’ll demo next time, anyway – we all have our favorite stories. 
Docbook is a very large DTD that defines most of the stuff you expect to find in complex documents: tables, footnotes, TOC, chapters and sub-chapters, lists… and if it wasn’t so big and complicated, even more people would use it. Norman Walsh said:
Over the years, the notion of a “simple” DocBook subset has come up, uh, more than once
.
Then he went ahead and created the Simplified Docbook. Excellent stuff, which we merrily started using at the Parliament today – it didn’t take long before our XMetal prototype worked even better than before.
But that was today’s daytime gig – and after one of Aila’s excellent dinners I’m now at home, pondering my next move in another project.
We are already using Python to convert proprietary data to XML and automatically build an SQL Server 2000 database. But what’s the best way to query that kind of SQL-XML hybrid? Maybe script-based mapping of parameters into XPath templates? Or should we be conservative and go for stored procedures and plain old SQL? BTW – Jon Udell is asking some of these questions in his latest article.
We’ll see… tomorrow we’ll discuss query requirements in more detail with the customer. And my business partner is recovering from a bad case of flu, so I won’t have to cover for him much longer. Maybe I’ll sleep more soon 
Long, mostly sleepless night: hard work all weekend, hard to come down from very high stress levels. Surfing, I felt connected, but non-verbal. Not a healthy feeling, but sometimes this is what happens just before breakthoughs… speaking with your own voice doesn’t just happen.
Woke up and had a very intense day elsewhere: we decided to use Docbook for producing some of the Parliament’s most complex documents. Switching over was easy – here is a good link about customizing Docbook. And the O’reilly book is excellent, as usual.
Hal pointed out that I was going where Billy Pilgrim had gone before. Or perhaps where he is going…
Just how personal are the decisions to play sexual games? David Chess is ambivalent about his attraction to some Sex Toys of the Patriarchy.Via Medley.
It is said that laid-off geeks entering the porn industry in large numbers. Personally, I feel very sad about this: porn is just the most obvious boom industry of our times. We are all finding it harder and harder to value anything that cannot be bought.
And so little time.
Very manic Python-hacking for several days – I’m really getting into it.
Aila will have a party at her place tomorrow – lots of our friends. Check this space for pictures.