Benjamin finally got back to our discussion about exceptions.  The summary there is a pretty accurate picture of my viewpoint and the history of the debate.

It seems Benjamin doesn’t like the fact that python throws exceptions when stuff goes wrong:

Fine. An exception is thrown. I don’t catch it. I get a stack trace on the command-line, and everyone’s happy right?

No. The pygtk main loop catches it, reports it, and keeps running.

I got hit with some comment spam today which used some rather amusing text to try to hide the links to fraudulent sites.  I’ve removed the comment but the text is well worth saving:

To help determine if you are qualified to be a programmer, take a moment to

try this simple test:

(1) Write down the numbers from zero to nine and the first six letters

of the alphabet (Hint: 0123456789ABCDEF).

Yak points out that the Wayback Machine has a cached copy of Technote 31, complete with the picture of the Dogcow.  Another animal saved from extinction!

It was extremely hot today in Brisbane and my house doesn’t have air conditioning or ceiling fans and I didn’t own a pedestal fan, though the house is very open and picks up breeze well.  Even so, it was definitely time to invest in a cooling device and it was hot enough to convince me to splurge on an air conditioner for my room.  That is of course until I wondered around the beautifully air conditioned store for an hour or two looking at price tags around $1000 for air conditioners that didn’t really suit my needs anyway.  Eventually I saw a pedestal fan for $15 and feeling nice and cool now anyway figured that would do.

I’ve defended Sun a fair bit in the past and I still think that there’s a huge number of people making mountains out of molehills and just looking for any chance to knock them down a peg, but even I can’t believe the bone-headedness required to release source code under a "look but don’t compile" license (Graham Hamilton was the initial source of the news for me and the official site is over at jck.dev.java.net).

You know, I often ignore click-through licenses because I’m lazy, however I’m always suspicious of software that feels it would be beneficial for me to change my browser’s homepage to some cluttered, ad-filled portal with no useful content – it’s just a pet hate of mine, even if you can easily turn off the option.  Since the MSN toolbar asks to set your homepage before it shows you the click-through license, I thought I’d flick through it quickly.  Section 2 is enough for me to not agree to it:

I’ve brought home one of the SunBlade 100s from work with the intent of installing Solaris 10 on it and trying to get a grip on the idiosyncrasies of Solaris.  Eventually I hope to be able to put the e250 we have at work to better use and learn enough to actually admin it properly instead of just doing the very minimum possible to get things to work.

Being a programmer by trade, picking up sysadmin skills isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world so it will be a bit of a journey.  Fortunately I have a basic working knowledge of UNIX and only a few fairly straight forward things to get up and running on the machine.

Tomorrow night the band will be playing at the Crossroads Christmas Party.  Crossroads is a support group for people with mental and physical disabilities.  The Christmas party is always a heap of fun and the crossroads folk are simply the best audience anyone could ask for.  They dance to every song, sing along anytime they know the words and really show how much they appreciate the music.  It’s definitely very uplifting.to see such joy on people’s faces.   I can’t wait.

A while back I complained that Mozilla didn’t support align on colgroups.  Byron suggested that I should log a bug and his comment suggests that he’d actually searched and found that one hadn’t yet been logged.

I too searched, specifically for the term "colgroup" and out of the 3 or 4 bugs that were returned, none were what I was complaining about.  So I spent the 20 minutes or so that it takes to jump through all the hoops that the Mozilla team want you to jump through to log a bug and gather all the required information, including creating a simple test case etc.  Finally I submit my bug and within five minutes it’s marked as a duplicate of a bug that has been going on and on and on and on forever.  Seriously, it shouldn’t take over two years and hundreds of comments to sort this out.

I’ve commented a few times before about how difficult it is to test text manipulation code and most of that is caused by the fact that it’s so hard to comprehensively define all the possible states, user actions and resultant behaviors that are expected.  There’s just way too many different cases that can occur (infinite in fact).  The two hardest areas for most rich text editors are lists and tables (not surprisingly since their really the only complex structure used in text markup).  In order to improve behavior in those areas and avoid any regressions we’ve started specing out the expected behavior.

XML databases and the standards to work with them (primarily XUpdate and XQuery) are just plain crap.  Why is it that I need to learn two completely different languages which utilize two completely different programming styles to work with a database?  Why is it that I can’t seem to convert between a String and XML nodes in either of those languages?  I mean, wouldn’t seem obvious that when working with an XML database someone might have some XML coming in as a parameter and want to deal with it as XML instead of as a String – say to put it into the database?  Isn’t it obvious that someone might want to get a part of the XML file they’re processing using XSLT as a string instead of a node-set?  I don’t mean get the text nodes within the XML fragment, I mean all the element declarations and namespaces etc, etc.  Sure they’re more than just random text but if you wanted to output it so it could be edited it would be nice to be able to without jumping through hoops.

It would be really nice to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for a limited time.  There’s two reasons for this. Firstly so that you can subscribe to the comments RSS feed for a particular article you won’t to track the discussion for but then have it drop out of your feeds once the conversation dies down (this might be best implemented as auto-unsubscribe after x days of inactivity).