Jonas Beckman

Great overview of why static typing a la C and Pascal sucks. Also talks about how strong typing can be done right - but then we are off to esoteric languages again.

This was stressful but actually fun: a customer wanted us to rebuild a data warehouse, so they could show off some new searches at an international conference tomorrow.

So I sat down with our Python scripts and the COM interface to SQLXML bulkload and banged it out on my Thinkpad in an afternoon. Something about this feels very right.

I’m trying to to wind down for the weekend. My regular massage is at 16.00 every Friday, which is a very nice way to give the weekend a good start.

One of our customers has a deadline Monday, but I am almost done - so it looks like I’ll be almost off-duty this weekend.

I’m de-normalizing databases like crazy at the moment. Data warehousing is fun, that way: the usual rules of relational dabase design goes out the window when all that really matters is optimizing read-only stuff for searching.

Code Co-op is an interesting piece of software: peer-to-peer version-control. There is no central server, and everything can be done via e-mail.

Right now I need version control for a small group of independent Python developers - but don’t don’t want to be responsible for a server. Maybe Code Co-op can be a solution - the basic version control stuff is very straightforward. But right now I have two small but interesting problems:

1. Outlook Express screws up mail-integration with Eudora.
2. No automatic check-out of files inside PythonWin

Outlook Express… I don’t need it anyway. But MS doesn’t want anyone to uninstall it, so W2K doesn’t even show it in the Add/Remove programs Control Panel. A manual uninstall (as documented here) is possible but tedious and error prone. So I built a Python script to automate it.. I’ll upload it soon.

PythonWin has version-control integration - but it’s completely undocumented. This is the only description I know of. I hate the trial-and-error route, but what to do? Stay tuned…