Found some great links recently; I don't especially want to be part of the blog'o'sphere's echo chamber, but these are too good to pass up!
* Via LtU, You & Your Research, a talk by Richard Hamming. This is a great discussion of how he thinks great research is accomplished by individuals. It rings true, at least to my ears.
* Tom Lord writes about what went wrong with subversion. An especially good section:
F) The API Fallacy
When you lack confidence about your intended way to implement something, a common pattern is to decide to hide the implementation under an API. That way you can always change the implementation later, right?
The problems are: (1) unless you have at least one fully worked design for how to implement your API, you shouldn't have any confidence that good implementations can exist; (2) unless you have at least two fully worked designs for how to implement your API, and they make usefully contrary trade-offs, you should really start to wonder whether doing extra work to make an abstraction here is the right way to proceed.
Yeah -- What he said! (The whole message is worth reading.)
* Continuations for Curmudgeons is a great introduction to closures and continuations. Again, via LtU.
* Charlie Stross write about why American SF sucks these days. It's not pleasant, but it sounds plausible to me.
On the programming front, someone's requested that I update my WSGI adapter for Quixote to Quixote 2.0, and I think Ian wants to drop it into Python Paste, too. (My SCGI-to-WSGI adapter has already been assimilated, tho to what end I dare not ask.) I'm also working on eeeeeeevil metaclass stuff for my object-relational mapping system; stay tuned.
Those of you who are into Glen Cook/Robert Jordan-style fantasy but haven't read Steven Erikson's Malazan Empire series should run (not walk) to their nearest bookstore and pick up the first two books. It took me a while to get into the series, but by the end of the 2nd book -- the most recent one to be published in the US -- I was thinking "wow". By the end of the 4th book I was so completely hooked that I'm planning to order all of the books from England as they come out. (Luckily it turns out that bagabooks on Amazon's resellers is importing them for me, so I can order without paying exorbitant shipping from England.)
While all this is going on, I'm slowly losing my sanity due to TOO MANY EXPERIMENTS. whee!
Peace out.
--titus
reIterated