Present Perfect

Spent the last weekend hacking with the boys. We were incredibly productive. I rewrote the perspective broker client factory of Twisted using keycards after getting some very good ideas on the bike ride home on Friday. And after a long hacking session that again taught me the value of good regression tests, I'm happy to have finished my keycard-based system that handles challenge-response nicely to log in to the server. Then over the weekend we finished up a whole bunch of loose ends, and Johan made some nice changes to the wizard as well. Still needs some UI love, but it will always need more work.

Despair
is when you have decided to release your project to the public at large, and your final testing hinges on having shippable packages, and you get stuck packaging a bunch of dependencies, where some of them have a crappy build with hand-rolled python code sort-of-using distutils with nice little globals and wrongly indented code (Which I thought was not possible in Python, but what do I know ?), and you want to strangle the maintainer because really, all you want to do is package YOUR project.

Ecstasy
is when you take those packages when they are built, and install them on all the different machines in your support department, and you start a few commands, start the GUI wizard, click some buttons, and everything starts up nicely out of the box, and the media player you are also a part of somehow plays the stream nicely. On all the machines. Yes there will be bugs, but the foundations are laid down nicely and we're ready to go.

Music
My companion CD for the weekend was The Arcade Fire's debut album. Quixotic little record, highly recommended (that goes for you doubly Jeroen, it slightly tops out Bloc Party).

Spent the last weekend hacking with the boys. We were incredibly productive. I rewrote the perspective broker client factory of Twisted using keycards after getting some very good ideas on...