Finally Bit the Bucket

It has been ages since I have posted here, but I am back. Since the last time I posted I have changed jobs, and am now working with Mercurial. I like it. My hg kung fu is weak, but getting better. Also I have actually bought a domain, now the proud owner of www.ggivler.com. And I have created a server on Rackspace, and will be putting my webapps up there. Finally I have signed up for bitbucket to keep my source code available wherever I am.

My first bitbucket project is a project I call churchscheduler. The idea behind churchscheduler is a place where my church secretary and pastor and choir directors can go to enter their music for each Sunday of the month, eventually this will go on a rackspace or possibly a GAE server.

If this works, I hope to open it to other churches who might have need for something like this. It is my first attempt a building something that has a real world use. We will see how it goes.

My first "sprint" will be coming up this next week or so, as I work on it during my downtime on vacation.

So here is to maybe just maybe having a real webapp to work on over the summer, and maybe my summer of code will actually produce something.

The app is currently written in web2py, so we shall see how it comes together.

Programming Quote Of The Day: Laziness Impatience Hubris

 Laziness Impatience Hubris

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." -- LarryWall, ProgrammingPerl (1st edition), OreillyAndAssociatesIn the second edition of the book (which sports not only LarryWall as author, but also TomChristiansen and RandalSchwartz as co-authors), there is a glossary which has pithy definitions for each of these terms:

Laziness

The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris. (p.609)

Impatience

The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris. (p.608)

Hubris

Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience. (p.607)

Programming Quote of the Day

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
Brian W. Kernighan

Programming Quote Of the Day

“Programming without an overall architecture or design in mind is like exploring a cave with only a flashlight: You don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t know quite where you are.”
– Danny Thorpe

Programming Quote Of The Day

“Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren’t doing anything.  One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them.  Very often they’re sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space.  What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.”
– Charles M. Strauss

web2py

It has been a long time since I have posted here, and I need to do this more often.

I am exploring Web Frameworks right now, or maybe I always am, Web development is something I have been doing off and on, mostly on for the past 10 years. I have tried a lot of different disciplines, a language called mthml, which I actually liked a lot, JSP in its infancy, ASP, ASP.NET, JSF (Java Server Faces), on BEA Weblogic, and now TurboGears, django, and web2py.

Here at work, I work in QA now as a Sr. Test Engineer, we are looking to build a webapp that will allow us to launch tests and review results. It is not a complex application but it is involved. We started it in PHP but to be honest, I just don't think I want to be a PHP Jockey right now, I don't think I want to learn yet another language, which is why I am concentrating on Python Web Frameworks, I am not sure that web2py is the answer, but I am investigating it as possibility. So we will see.

Writing Mult-Threaded Apps

This may not make me popular, but I think the only programmers who should be allowed to write multi-threaded programs, are programmers that have already written multi-threaded programs.

Which leaves me out, even though to accomplish the testing I need to accomplish, I really think it is a necessary evil. I will be posting how to log to your regular log file in SQLAlchemy tomorrow. Just not that ambitious tonight.

I must admit though there is an air of satisfaction in writing programs that spawn threads and do most of what they are supposed to do, and don't crash. But sometimes just thinking about it makes my brain hurt. Anyway tomorrow is day three of writing a testing script that I hope will give us the numbers we need to decide just exactly how much hardware we will need for the future of the project I am working on.