Vienna flak tower

I'm quite impressed. Standing in a former flak-tower ( scroll down a bit ), that has been converted to a big vivarium/aquarium. I can blog from here, it has a free internet access. I could watch one of my favorite animals, pythons of various kinds. And they closely bring together humans and a ton of birds and small apes. Quite interesting, I recommend "Haus des Meeres" in the old flak tower in Vienna.

The Holy Grail

The holy Grail, or so I guess. If you look at the list of developers, it's quite prominent.

Guido van Rossum
Barry Warsaw
Fred Drake
Jeremy Hylton
Roger Masse
Ken Manheimer
Ted Strollo

Grail, what a great and promising name. Quite some time seems to have been put into it. I admire the bold endeavour, and I would so wish it to be succesful. I tried running it on 2.4, and was pleased that much of it works with only minor and easy code changes.

However, the projects is for all practical intent dead and burried. Or perhaps just sleeping until it gets picked up by somebody else. It sure is an intriguing perspective to have an all python browser.

Perhaps such a thing today would get started differently. I think it is unlikely any of the original authors will pick it up ever again, prominent or not.

Dead projects have a sort of magical aura have they not? ;)

Nice things are better then ugly and long ones

Yesterday I was at a very delightful task. I rewrote a Java program to python. I'm rather pleased with the outcome. I replaced 977 lines of Java with 116 of Python. The Python version is more Robust and it runs about twenty times as fast.

On a sidenote, I wrote the python programm faster then the guys at software-installation-department could install a JDK on my machine.

Update:
Trough the new programm, I noticed a few data errors, that went by unnoticed before because of inherent flaws of the previous implementation.

.Net, Grimes and VB.

There was a host of interesting posts today about the topic. Mr. Grimes is ranting about .Net and VB. Usually I enjoy M$ bashing, specially if it comes with some weight.
I read through it, and I also read the reaction and another reaction.

About the whole quarreling I have nothing to say really, save one thing. I'm sadened by the fact that people bang their heads over things so broken from the start I do not even consider them worth investigating further. So broken I would not advise anybody of concerning himself with them any more then to learn they're broken.

I am glad that Mr. Grimes could realize the brokness. Faithfully I believe he will not have to dwelve into a topic for years of his lifetime in the future, before realizing the a thing he's touching is broken beyond repair.

It's all about choices really.

Java sucks because...

I base the resoning on the observation that in a Corporate world you mostly work on foobared windoze machines. Based on that I Observe the following.

The download size:
Why does it matter? Simply because sometimes you have to work on machines that are locked down, and only connected to extremely slow proxies to the internet.
Python d/l: ~10mb
J2SE ( not the fancy J2EE stuff ): ~50mb

Installation without Admin rights:
Why does it matter? In some places you have to work on machines for which you can't get an admin account ( even as developer ).
Python: Not a problem
J2SE: Impossible to install

Compiling Sources "out of the box":
Why does it matter? Sometimes you get preinstallations for software, java would be such a case. In face that you can't do admin installs, you still could write programms if it only was capable of compiling stuff.
Python ( batteries included ): interpreter/compiler/runtime.
JRE ( tough on most machines preinstalled ): runtime only ( can't develop )