Author Archives: matt

About matt

My name is Matt Wilson and I live in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I love random emails from strangers, so get in touch! [email protected].

My asparagus has returned

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I planted asparagus crowns last spring. Asparagus crowns look like dried out root clumps. At the end of last summer, I started finding little shoots around where I planted the crowns. Those shoots grew plants about three feet tall with lots of fine leaves. Very pretty.

I didn’t harvest anything last year. It takes several years for a planted crown to be ready. Here’s way more detail than most people want, from the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board:

Do not harvest your asparagus the year you plant it or the year following planting. The asparagus plant needs to grow and establish a healthy crown and it will need all of its energy to do that. The third-year after transplanting we generally harvest the field for about two weeks.

Then winter came and all the plants died. After a few weeks, the plants looked like straw. Then on Sunday I found this shoot:

My asparagus is coming up

I found a few more shoots in other places. This is really exciting. Only one more year to go before my harvest!

See the whole gallery here.

My ten most-frequently-used shell commands

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Here they are:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
80 cd
59 svn
49 bzr
40 sudo
35 vi
32 nosetests
26 l
15 rfcomm
14 screen
14 c

l is an alias for ls and c is an alias for clear. rfcomm is how I connect to my mobile phone over a virtual serial port via bluetooth.

I’m happy that vi and nosetests are right next to each other. It looks like I’m pretty good about rerunning my test cases after editing.

I got the idea for this post from this guy.

My article is finally online

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Introduction to Python Decorators is available for you to read after you fill out the annoying registration form.

I have a few ideas for the next article. Do any of these seem interesting?

  1. Demystify metaclasses: use metaclasses to add camel-cased aliases for underscored method names, show how to automatically make methods into properties, and build a crude ORM.
  2. Explore logging with python, ranging from writing out to local files to setting up a syslog-ng server. Show how to use logging config files and filters.
  3. Build a prototype inheritance system into python. I got really interested in prototype inheritance when I studied lua. Prototypes make it really easy to change class-based behaviors at run time.

Finally, the meaning behind the pirates-vs-ninjas debate became clear to me during a recent nitrous-oxide haze (no, not how you think; I was getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist). Anyhow, pirates and ninjas are symbols.

The ninja is a metaphor for the corporate employee. A ninja will get the job done or die trying. A ninja will kill everyone in his own family if he’s ordered to. A ninja has no sense of entitlement or dignity or flex time.

Meanwhile, the pirate is the entrepeneur, or maybe the upper-level executive. He has no sense of duty or honor. He seeks adventure and glory only. He’ll jump ship as soon as possible. He might even maroon his crew-mates on a desert island if it means he gets the treasure to himself.

Pirates love to hire ninjas because a ninja never disobeys. Ninjas love to kill pirates because they can pretend they’re killing their own pirate boss.

Flex Camp Cleveland was fun

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Yesterday I attended Flex Camp Cleveland.

Slides from the presentation “Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming” are available here. Thanks to Kristopher Schultz for the link.

A few random notes and opinions mixed together:

  • Flex is a topic that attracted a lot of people! We had more than a hundred attendees, and at least drove from places like Columbus, Michigan, and Pittsburgh.
  • There’s a lot of technical talent in Ohio. I don’t believe that we have a technical shortage. Instead, we have a shortage of managers and entrepeneurs that know how to build technology-based businesses.
  • Flex addresses a lot of my personal frustrations with HTML. In particular, I’m thrilled to be able to add tags to the language itself.
  • Flex 3.0 is not just zero-cost, but truly open-source.
  • Search engine spiders may have difficulty indexing flex apps, but typically, you don’t want search engines linking into your app. You want them linking into your documentation and marketing text.
  • People say that there’s a difference between being knowledgeable about a subject and being able to teach that subject well. The same thing is true about public speaking. Speaking well is really hard to do. You can easily tell a professional from an amateur.
  • Air is now available on linux, in an alpha state. Hurray!
  • Flex offers server-initiated pushes out to clients. Flex uses a family of protocols to make this happen. Depending on network configuration, it uses anything from a true server-initiated push to client-side polling.
  • We all got flexcamp t-shirts, but they were all sized extra-large. Any reader that wants mine is welcome to it.
  • I’m a command-line snob and don’t like using GUIs to build user interfaces, but I was impressed by how powerful the designer view was in flex builder. I wasn’t impressed enough to pay for it though.

Neat code complexity tool.

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David Stanek wrote a nice utility to measure code complexity. This post explains the details. Anyway, I downloaded his code and tried it out. I really like it:

$ cat matt.py
"""A few functions for use with pygenie."""
def f(x):
"Make an 8-way branch, 1 layer deep."
if x == 1: return 1
elif x == 2: return 2
elif x == 3: return 3
elif x == 4: return 4
elif x == 5: return 5
elif x == 6: return 6
elif x == 7: return 7
elif x == 8: return 8

def g(a, b, c):
"This function has 8 paths."
if a:
if b:
if c:
return 1 # a and b and c.
else:
return 2 # a and b and not c.
else:
if c:
return 3 # a and not b and c
else:
return 4 # a and not b and not c.
else:
if b:
if c:
return 5 # not a and b and c.
else:
return 6 # not a and not b and c.
else:
if c:
return 7 # not a and b and not c.
else:
return 8 # not a and not b and not c.

def h(x):
if x: return True
else: return False

And this is what happens when I run the code:

$ ./pygenie.py complexity matt.py
File: /home/matt/svn-checkouts/cyclic_complexity/matt.py
Type Name Complexity
--------------------
F f 9
F g 8

The functions f and g have a complexity exceeding 7, so they print out.

This might make a nice nose plugin.

Working with em-based widths can be baffling

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These four paragraphs have the same number of characters, but because the letter M is fat and the letter I is skinny, different amounts of characters appear in each line:

M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

This is the exact same text, but now I’m using a monospace font:

M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I