Vacation

leisure :: nature

So, even though it's been a week, I still haven't blogged about my
mini-vacation. I didn't go anywhere and I still had to do a little
work, but I did get to relax and hang out with a really good friend who
was visiting from out of town. She had her Spring break from
acupuncture school, and for the second half she came out to Colorado to
chill in the Rockies. We had the absolute best time; a much needed
vacation for both of us.

I swear, I will never get tired of the Rocky Mountains. The most
amazing vistas, trails, weather, etc. Just incredible. We went
horseback riding through a place in Estes Park, CO that does rides 365
days a year. It was such a blast. We were out in the afternoon sun on a
gorgeous day for over two hours. The best views I have seen since I've
been here (with the possible exception of a couple amazing sights inside
Rocky Mountain National Park).

For most of the trip, we vegged, watched movies, went window shopping
in Boulder, listened to music and talked. A genuine vacation. Not one
of those "run around and do all you can do till you pass out and need
another vacation" vacations. Rather, a time to really relax and
breathe. Also, her last night here, I introduced her to my Tibetan
friends at the weekly momo-making party. She had the absolute best
time. All of us laughed, ate, drank, and laughed some more. In fact, we
laughed so hard we were actually in pain. She got to listen to lots of
Tibetan and build up her ear for it. I taught her a little and
translated a little, but my understanding is so limited that it's not
much use. On the ride back to Loveland, we chatted away like a couple
prairie dogs about the Tibetan culture, their deep understanding of and
commitment to community, about how this impacts our own experiences,
understanding, and limitations, etc. It was an awesome time :-)

Accounting

accounting :: software :: society

So, I'm preparing for taxes (after my extension, of course). I've been
using this open source software called SQL-Ledger (written in perl,
unfortunately) to do my books this year; it's a double entry accounting
package. It's ugly as hell (I've made improvements -- css and python),
but I love it. I emailed my accountant with some double entry questions
(checking to see if the lights really are dawning), and I decided to do
some checking on the internet, where I found this gem I thought I'd
share ;-)

This is the first thing I've ever read that has made me not only feel
good about accounting, but want to participate in the process :-)
We'll, the second thing, actually. The first thing was starting to use
SQL-Ledger to it's capacity.

It's kinda fun:

3.1 The history of double entry accounting

People had been tracking money (to pay bills, collect taxes) for
thousands of years, but it wasn't till the 1400's that the Italians
invented double entry accounting. This made banking reliable, enhanced
trade and commerce and very quickly Italy became the banking capital
and wealthiest country in Europe. It was the 1400's equivalent of the
invention of the internet and the dotcom boom. They had buckets of
money to spend. They spent it on paintings of Adam talking to God done
on black velvet. Well they would have but velvet hadn't been invented
yet. They made do with what they had, which was plaster ceilings. They
spent money on painters, sculptors and people like Leonardo da Vinci.

In grade school this period is called the Renaissance, a flowering of
art and intellect, that appeared in Italy for no obvious reason and
then spread to the rest of Europe.

Quite why all these geniuses suddenly appear without any warning is not
explained by your history teachers (who spend their life pondering deep
questions like this), but Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel, Pub:
Norton 1997) is happy to tell you. He says that geniuses like
Michealangelo and Einstein are rather commonplace. Most of them are
oppressed and are living in abject poverty, and are busy surviving if
they even do that. Give them a good feed, treat them well, put them in
the company of peers and pretty soon they'll be coming up with all
sorts of things you hadn't dreamed of.

The Renaissance then was a result of the invention of double entry
accounting, not (as we've been told) a flowering of intellect and art
that happened for no reason at all.

Reference:
http://www.austintek.com/gnucash/ncsa-
gnucash-talk-3.html

pymon

python :: programming :: software

As so often happens, when working/playing on one thing, the miraculous
inner lights of the frail but mysterious human mind shed their
brilliance on another. Okay, so perhaps in this instance the areas are
not so far separated, nor the lumens so brilliant as those in a dying
plastic camping flashlight. Nonetheless, the fancy is tickled, and
besides actual development, that's what matters!

So what the hell am I talking about? APIs. I was working on the PyKon
Nevow code the other day, and some things I had written and prototyped
fermented in a corner of my brain, and popped into a completely new
perspective today, one that I could use with
pymon. I am addicted to good APIs. I
study twisted's internals as well as that of Phillip Eby's PEAK
framework(s). I hunger for elegant, efficient, and clever design
strategies. It's very Newtonian of me, but I love well-ordered systems.
The discussions that have been underway on the pymon maillist boiled
down (very quickly) to the following:

* The need for several mini-APIs to be used internally by pymon


* The need to define user- and/or enternal-APIs


* The need to get rid of a little cruft that had accumulated while in
branch (both old an new)


* The need to utilize twisted component-based approach (adaptors) to
accomplish these goals

We're really excited about this, because we're trying to be true to the
art of programming. QualityRUs, not time-contraint, budget-driven,
happenstancery. I wrote some more about it on the 2005.04.06 news item
at http://pymon.sf.net. It's going to
be fun writing all the adaptors we will need :-)

PyKon

I got some more work done on PyKon last night after finishing a deadline for a client. I'm excited about having a modern, functional, python-based image gallery application. The first version will allow both:

• manual image uploads (ftp/scp, i.e., changes you would make on the file system with a shell account) and the daemon that runs the web user interface will also regularly check for gallery/album/image changes and process added/changed files), as well as
• through-the-web uploads.

For the second release, I want to enable some work we've been doing on an object registry. This would essentially make PyKon like iPhoto for Mac OS X: a global repository for images, and the capability to create albums with multiple overlapping images (duplicates) with no extra space taken up by the images (as they would only be references/links to the image tagged in repository).

We're hoping to make this better than IDS (written in perl), Gallery (in PHP), and JAlbum (in java). We really want this thing to kick ass and be very easy to use. We're a ways off, but progress so far is exciting.

Oh, and Nevow (for Twisted) rocks.