The week in tweets

This year I've discovered myself with even less free time as I used to have. Also, I discovered twitter and started to using it. The astute reader will draw a connection between those two facts, but believe me, my loss on free time is order of magnitudes greater than the time I spend on twitter. University is to blame here, as they have heavily increased the workload for this semester. But I digress.

My point was that the lack of time means less posts on my blog. It's not like I don't have anything I'd like to share, but more like I don't have the time to materialize such thoughts on a coherent piece of written prose.

And here is my hacky solution to the problem: I'll post my tweets on my blog, on a weekly fashion. Interestingly, it will solve another problem I have: the fact that twitter don't archive your statuses for ever.

To do this, I've done a quick (and somewhat dirty) script to export the tweets to a draft on blogger. The idea is not to just dump the tweets here but also try to comment some of them and/or give some extra context. I'll also freely reorder them. So you have a chance to not be bored by this type of posts ;-)

OK, enough introductions. Here is the first issue of my week in tweets:


On Software development:

Designing a system by actually writing most of the method signatures. Feels much easier than drawing fancy diagrams to me. 2009-05-18 00:50:35

(I'm the kind of developer who likes to use diagrams and pictures to communicate designs, but not to actually create the designs)

Wow, C# also has implicit conversions. Feels like a very good competitor to Scala on the static languages realm. 2009-05-18 01:23:36

@flangy Yeah, I've played with them on Scala and they look like double edged swords. But I like to have them as another item on my toolbox. 2009-05-18 01:44:28 in reply to flangy

(I definitely like the direction C# is headed. I guess the hope that someday MS open sources it is confined to be fulfilled on dreams and hallucinations)

ASP.NET idea of shielding the programmer from HTTP/HTML/JavaScript/etc is a *very* bad one, IMHO (same for you JSF, by the way) 2009-05-21 16:24:11

On the other hand, ASP.NET Master Pages get it right: Template inheritance instead of includes soup. Just like Django :) 2009-05-21 16:30:06

@jorgerodsua Assignments for the university. Yeah, it's a time sucker. But I like to have a broad idea of what's going on with other techs. 2009-05-21 23:24:09 in reply to jorgerodsua

@jorgerodsua And, as you could expect, I discovered a handful of cool things on the .NET realm: http://is.gd/CeTW http://is.gd/CeTz 2009-05-21 23:27:08

@jorgerodsua It's not like everything MS does is shit. Some .NET languages are moving faster than, say, Ruby. 2009-05-21 23:32:04

@jorgerodsua The acknowledgment that complexity has no sense if it is not required by problem is one of my favorite things about "agile" 2009-05-18 15:53:26 in reply to jorgerodsua

@jorgerodsua And my other four favorite things about "agile" would be the four big points of http://agilemanifesto.org 2009-05-18 15:55:12

@mtrier Sadly, in my experience (after seeing lots of empty RoR tests) that only resonates on people who already follows such practices. 2009-05-18 20:40:43 in reply to mtrier

(The same thing over again: Good ideas and fundamentals are worth gold as long as people believe in them. Throwing soulless processes at people without caring about the principles in which they are based is a recipe for failure)

@dgou @jacobian @jessenoller also, Jeremy Siek's work on gradual typing for Python is interesting http://is.gd/BJgA http://is.gd/BJgS 2009-05-20 13:01:40 in reply to dgou

(Interesting how this is going in a similar direction as C# 4.0 with its new dynamic keyword, but from the opposite side)

RT @javajuneau: Now that mercurial repository is set up in my organization I'm not sure how we lived without it! 2009-05-21 16:41:35

RT @spyced: IronPython 2.0 and Jython 2.5 performance compared to Python 2.5. Jython looks pretty good: http://tr.im/m5GB 2009-05-22 11:26:42

Learning more about concurrency models on Scala 2009-05-22 11:47:01

@wmacgyver I'm not liking the way scala actors mix thread-based and event-based concurrency. Perhaps my fault. I'm trying to "get it". 2009-05-22 12:04:39 in reply to wmacgyver

@wmacgyver I guess the reason I feel that distinction awkard is that on Erlang you *know* that all your actors are lightweight. 2009-05-22 12:06:13

@wmacgyver Do you have any links? I'd be interested on both their motives and their solution, but my google-fu isn't working 2009-05-23 13:45:26 in reply to wmacgyver

@wmacgyver I was talking about lift's actors implementation. But thanks anyways :) 2009-05-24 21:59:26 in reply to wmacgyver

Bouncing problems/analysis/strategies-for-solutions with smart people who are (at least) as involved on a problem as you: Priceless. 2009-05-22 13:12:26

(Incidentally, I guess this is one of the attractions of working on open source software)

Crap, seems like Adobe AIR limits the amount of concurrent RPC requests to 2. Perhaps only to the same endpoint? Don't have the time to try. 2009-05-22 12:32:42

Worthy announcements/links:

RT @ctismer: psyco V2 (Python JIT) will be released by Friday this week 2009-05-19 16:48:00

RT @spyced: Distributing Jython apps in a single jar file: http://bit.ly/iu125 2009-05-20 19:45:02

RT @zdemo: PyAMF Blog: PyAMF server/client using Jython with Swing - http://tinyurl.com/pxwewh 2009-05-21 23:20:05

A corner for humor:

RT @cheeseinspector: what's the point of cycling with an unfastened helmet? protection from falling coconuts? 2009-05-18 12:47:20

@cheeseinspector LOL! Thanks for the best laugh I've had today 2009-05-18 12:46:09 in reply to cheeseinspector

(Yeah, I enjoy the nonsensical aspects of life)

General webby stuf:

How do you subscribe to a Yahoo Groups mailing list without a Yahoo id? 2009-05-19 13:02:55

Answering to myself: You send a mail to groupname-subscribe@yahoogroups.com 2009-05-19 13:12:12

@walderrama I embraced the "search, don't sort" mantra. Labels are mostly decorative and let me indentify broad topics, but all go to inbox 2009-05-19 19:31:43 in reply to walderrama

@walderrama MAC address are trivial to spoof 2009-05-21 16:34:48 in reply to walderrama

Misc:

@diablogris That's not true: http://is.gd/BwoT 2009-05-19 22:57:37 in reply to diablogris

Dear Adobe, your track record on disappointing developers is getting better: http://is.gd/CnMr 2009-05-22 13:25:36

"since" parameter was deprecated on @twitterapi. What should I do to get my tweeks of the week? Play with "count" until I get what I want? 2009-05-22 18:47:16

@twitterapi ok, thanks for answering back! 2009-05-24 21:57:40 in reply to twitterapi

On myself:

Another holiday. Another day to continue working on university homework. 2009-05-21 16:10:59

Tired, but happy. Also finished a presentation in which I'll experiment a couple of some tricks I haven't tested before. 2009-05-22 02:53:25

The tweek of the week:

I should archive my tweets weekly, perhaps as a blog post. Any tool to do that? (I'm using blogger) 2009-05-18 16:26:44

(Here is where this idea started! By the way, I'll share my export script as soon as I clean the embarrassing bits and remove my passwords from it)