Category: Geek

I’d just installed Red Hat 9 on my work desktop box, fired up XMMS and pointed it at Groove Salad when I got a dialogue box saying something along the lines of:

In order to stay out of any trouble with Thomson, who charge royalties (75 cents per unit, or a one-time fee of US$50,000 – $60,000) to anyone who develops MP3 encoding or decoding software, we’ve removed MP3 playback capability. Sorry.

Finding out that XMMS no longer plays MP3s is like finding out that your set of flathead screwdrivers will no longer actually turn screws, but still can be used to open cans of paint.

Luckily, there’s a quick fix. This site has an RPM that restores MP3 playback capability to the versions of XMMS that come with Red Hat versions 8 and 9.

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to gather at the pub over beer and engage in debate! Programming languages, especially ones by Microsoft, are always good for raising ire and blood pressure. May I suggest, for your reading pleasure:

• 101 Reasons Java is Better than .NET, for earlier this year.
• A recent rebuttal, .NET Truth takes on the “101 Reasons Java is Better” list, which Robert Scoble points to in his blog
• The Old Guard fires back with A number of reasons C/C++ is better than Java
• The polemic Lots of reasons I want .NET to fail and fail badly

I personally have no religious tendencies when it comes to programming languages, other than an aversion to Perl. To close, allow me to quote Master Yoda and his opinion of Python vs. Perl…

EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH — DAY

With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his exercises — grepping, installing new packages, logging in as root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts in Python.

YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer’s strength flows from code maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax…more than one way to do it…default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?

YODA: No… no… no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?

YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.

(Taken from the Python Humor Page.)

As Tucows’ new resident developer schmoozer, one of my job responsibilities is “building community”. That’s a rather touchy-feely crunchy-granola primal-scream-session-is-over-let’s-have-a-group-hug-ish way of saying “talking to people who are doing interesting things in the geek world so you know what’s going on out there.” If these people gather in one place, the job of talking to them becomes much easier.

Lucky me, Joichi Ito, better known as “Joi” (you pronounce it like “Joey”, and for a while, he spelled it that way too) has his own IRC channel, #joiito, on FreeNode’s IRC servers. It’s become a hangout for lots of people, many of whom you might have heard of: Mark Pilgrim, Cory Doctorow, Halley Suitt, Marc Canter, AKMA, Aaron Swartz, Elizabeth Lane “mamamusings” Lawley, Kevin “Morbus Iff” Hemenway, Dave Sifry, my boss Ross Rader and many other characters. Maybe I can get Elliot on there — he and Joi have some kind of mutual admiration society going.

The atmosphere is friendly and the conversation flows like delicious pork gravy down Marlon Brando’s throat. Jeanniecool plays den mother to us all, while AKMA serves as the chaplain and I play part-time court jester. Once you’ve figured out the commands for jibot, a bot that heralds you entry into the channel, you can have it announce your presence with a quick summary of who you are! It’s like a 19th-century salon with intellectuals exchanging ideas and bons mots, except for the lack of absinthe. We’re working on that.

To join the channel, point your IRC client at irc.freenode.net and then /join #joiito.

artima.com has two more parts of an interview with Bruce “Thinking in C++/Thinking in Java” Eckel in which he talks about why his new favourite programming language is Python. They are:

• Part 3: Type Checking and Techie Control
  

  …the idea is that the programmer is able to say, “I would like a Bag of Cats.” The thing says, OK, as long as I can perform these various operations on Cats that I want to, I don’t care if it’s Cats or whatever. That’s what you get for free with Python without any of that [C++] template syntax. It turns out that’s incredibly powerful. It makes your programming a lot easier to write and, I think, to read.

• Part 4: Python and the Tipping Point
  

  A few years back I was having dinner with Guido van Rossum, and I said, “Life is better without braces.” That ended up being a conference slogan, along with a smiling character who looked like he had just gotten his braces off. The next year, I suggested to Guido a slogan that I think somebody else probably said first, “Python. It fits your brain.” That’s what I was talking about when I said, “My guesses are usually right.” Python allows you to get into this uninterrupted flow, and just go with that without having to think too hard, even if I have to look up the way a library works.

If you haven’t read them yet, there are also the first two parts of the interview:

• Part 1: Python and the Programmer
• Part 2: The Zen of Python

REALBasic, if you haven’t heard of it before, is a Visual Basic-like IDE and programming language that first gave the Mac a pretty easy to use drag-and-drop GUI builder and fairly easy-to-grasp programming language similar to VB. The earliest incarnations of RB could only deploy applications for Mac OS, and later ones were capable of cross-compiling to Windows. The current version of RB, version 5, is available for both Mac OS and Windows and and each version can cross-compile to the other OS.

In response to customer demands (and many long discussions on the REALBasic mailing list), REAL Software has announced that RB 5.5 will be capable of cross-compiling apps for Red Hat and SuSE distributions of Linux, with other distros being added according to demand. You’ll still need either a Mac or Windows box to create and cross-compile the app for Linux. You’ll have to wait for the Linux-based REALBasic IDE, but REAL Software says that they intend to make one available in a later version.

RB 5.5 is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2004.

Recommended Reading

REALBasic’s FAQ on their Linux support.

MacWorld recently gave REALBasic 4.5 mice out of 5 in a review.

I’m not sure how much traction REALBasic on Linux will get amongst geeks, as Basic is the least respectable of the “Ghetto Languages”, an LFM (Language For the Masses), not an LFSP (Language For Smart People). I don’t agree with this LFM/LFSP bunkum; it smacks of nothing more than programmer/muggle class snobbery, the same kind in which some Slashdotter refer to those who don’t program, play D&D and fansub anime as “sheeple”. The Masses may have dummies, but they have many smart people whose primary interest isn’t computer programming. These people might have domain knowledge that we programmers lack (“Never!” say some geeks, “We know everything!”).

Maybe we should call them Languages For Mom.

It’s more likely than not that your Mom is one of “the masses”. My mom is, and she’s not dumb: she’s the Chief of Cardiology at St. Joseph’s Heatlh Centre, a large hospital here in Toronto. If you called her stupid, she’d kill you and make it look like natural causes.

I know lots of people like my Mom who’ve crafted their own applications using things like HyperCard. They have the domain knowledge, they couldn’t afford to hire a programmer to write the app for them, and in many cases, some apps don’t get written because they’re not itches that programmers feel like scratching. Shouldn’t they be given the chance to whip up their own apps?

Go ahead, call your Mom stupid. I dare ya. (Eminem, for obvious reasons, is excluded from this challenge.)

artima.com has a six part interview with Guido van Rossum on his wonderful programming language, Python. In the series, they cover the language’s orgins, its design goals, productivity, contracts, strong vs. weak typing and the community. A worthwhile read.

The whuffie cycle is a quick on these days — within 12 hours of my post on Paul Baranowski’s Lessons Learned from Peekabooty (which appears on the main page of the Peekabooty site), Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing wrote a post, which in turn caught the attention of Slashdot. The end result: Paul got a deluge of email, all of it very supportive, and a lot of it asking: “Okay, if C++ and Java aren’t viable languages for development, what is?”

Paul’s answer: Python. He’s got a response to all those who asked, and it’s in this essay, What Language Do You Recommend?

(By the bye, I’m the one who got him hooked on it. Guido should get me to do publicity for him.)