Photo Meme

Instructions: Take a picture of yourself right now. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair - just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.

Via: Betz, Kang, Egnor. Also: Haahr.

An Album for Each Year

The exercise has been going on for a few weeks in the blogosphere. See Albums Going Steady or My Favorite Album. I was born in 1972, so it wasn't until sometime in the mid 1980s that I had favorite albums that were actually released that year.

• 2007 Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
• 2006 Ben Kweller Ben Kweller
• 2005 Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine
• 2004 Modest Mouse Good News for People who Love Bad News
• 2003 Joe Strummer Streetcore
• 2002 The Flaming Lips Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
• 2001 Björk, Vespertine
• 2000 The Delgados Great Eastern
• 1999 Fiona Apple When the Pawn
• 1998 Billy Bragg & Wilco Mermaid Avenue
• 1997 Sleater-Kinney Dig Me Out
• 1996 Tommy Flanagan Sea Changes
• 1995 Bjork Post
  
• 1994 Hole Live Through This
• 1993 Liz Phair Exile in Guyville
• 1992 k.d. lang Ingenue
• 1991 U2 Achtung Baby
• 1990 Replacements (Paul Westerberg) All Shook Down
• 1989 Pixies Doolittle
• 1988 Sonic Youth Daydream Nation
• 1987 U2 Joshua Tree
• 1986 R.E.M. Life's Rich Pageant
• 1985 The Smiths Meat is Murder
  
• 1984 Replacements Let It Be
• 1983 R.E.M. Murmur
• 1982 Violent Femmes Violent Femmes
• 1981 Bauhaus Mask
• 1980 Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
• 1979 The Clash London Calling
• 1978 Elvis Costello This Year's Model
• 1977 Talking Heads Talking Heads 77
  
• 1976 Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
• 1975
  
• 1974
• 1973
• 1972 Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street

There's a bit of skew caused by which albums I own. And I don't have a great sense for what I listen to from the early 1970s. If I had to pick some runners up, they would be Hüsker Dü Zen Arcade (1984) , Cowboy Junkies Trinity Session (1988), the Minutemen Double Nickels on the Dime (also 1984), and Matthew Sweet Girlfriend (1991).

Python 3000 urllib package

I made an svn commit on the py3k branch today--my first commit in a long while.

Make a new urllib package .

It consists of code from urllib, urllib2, urlparse, and robotparser.
The old modules have all been removed. The new package has five
submodules: urllib.parse, urllib.request, urllib.response,
urllib.error, and urllib.robotparser. The urllib.request.urlopen()
function uses the url opener from urllib2.

Note that the unittests have not been renamed for the
beta, but they will be renamed in the future.

Joint work with Senthil Kumaran.

I started urllib2 at CNRI sometime around 1999, based on some experience working Grail (a Python+Tk web browser). I had intended to polish it much more and replace urllib, but I ran out of time. When the PythonLabs team moved from CNRI to BeOpen, we needed to put that code in a Python release or negotiate with CNRI to take the code anyway. So it went into Python 1.6 in its rough form, and I moved on to other projects.

A mere ten years later, we've made some progress. urllib and urllib2 have merged together into a urllib package. The urllib2 code has become the default implementation in the new package. If you call urllib.request.urlopen(), you get urllib2 code.

Senthil is working on a urllib summer of code project to improve the code and documentation further. I'm looking forward to it.

Election Certificate

I won a local election a few years ago by a single vote--my own. It was fun to receive the official certification, which has a form to fill out with name and vote total. The form includes the word "votes" rather than "vote(s)," which would have been more appropriate in my case.

Lightning Talks

I missed PyCon this year. It was the first time I skipped a Python conference since I started going in 1997. I've been reading reports from bloggers eagerly. One of the larger discussions is about the sponsor lightning talks, which weren't well received. Ted Leung commented that we should thank the Perl folks for the lightning talks, but I think they have a long history at Python conferences.

I ran the first session of short talks at the Python conference in 1997: "Content-wise, anything goes, as long as it is deemed interesting for a room full of Python users and developers, and as long as the content is technical, not marketing material."

I have a distinct recollection of seeing a short talk by Christopher Small at a Usenix conference that inspired our short talks session. He had just a few minutes for the talk and something like 17 slides. He had someone turn the slides for him at regular intervals and he tried to keep up. It was really entertaining. (I would have guessed it was at the 1996 OSDI WIP session, but he's not on the list of speakers.)

The first speaker at our short talks session with Scott Deerwester, and he agreed to use the same presentation style as Small. I turned his slides for him, whether he was ready or not. He was a good sport and I think it set a light tone for the rest of the session.

We didn't have short talks the following year and didn't have a Python conference at all in 1999. David Beazley ran the short talks session in 2000. (Andrew Kuchling noted the short talks in his conference summary.) The Python folks started calling them lightning talks in 2001 at the 9th Python conference. David Ascher ran a session called lightning talks at OSCON in 2003, too.

I think the name lightning talk is due to Mark-Jason Dominus. We exchanged some email about the Python short talks long ago, when he was planning the first lightning talks session at a Perl conference. I've never seen a Perl lightning talk session, so I don't know how they compare to the Python short talks / lightning talks. I think they deserve a lot of credit for popularizing the idea.

We've always tried to have fun with the lightning talks. It's a good place for outrageous opinions or quick demos. We've gotten less and less formal about it, too. The first few session required you to sign up in advance and had a full schedule. Later, we let people sign up on the spot and made up the schedule as we went along.

The lightning talks have become one of the most popular sessions at the recent PyCons. They've been scheduled with nothing opposite them (like keynotes, unlike regular talks), and there have been several sessions of them.

Dave Weissman needs a haircut

He may argue the point, but I think he is wrong.

Update: mreid agrees. kang agrees.

Beautiful libraries

I found this love letter to libraries via ResearchBuzz. I've only been to a few of these libraries myself:

• The Peabody Library in Baltimore. I lived a few blocks away.
• The Long Room at Trinity College Dublin. I lived more than a few blocks away, but not too far.
• The public libraries in Boston and New York
• Not on the list, but others I've enjoyed: The Widener Library. The Hayden science library at MIT is not pretty; it looks like a cheap motel. It does have a wonderful view of Boston and the Charles River.