Having a Holiday Break

Enjoying two weeks off for the holidays was a fabulous decision.

It isn't far into it, technically only one day if you don't count the weekend that would have been there even if I didn't take a holiday, but I can already feel my stress fading away as I look forward to Christmas, to time with my wife and son, to visiting my in-laws and to just enjoying my home, with movies and video games and relaxing afternoons on the couch with the dog at my feet.

I've taken two weeks off, partly because I realized how much time I had saved up. I'm really happy I can do so, but it also made me realize I need to take time off more often. I took three days off in November to coincide with a school break of my son's and it was just so great.

I am going to make an effort to relax better and more pre-emptively.

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Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer. One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

How To Test

This is an index of different articles I've written covering techniques for testing specific software components. The number is small, but will grow in time. Initially, expect a heavier lean towards Django topics. How To Test Django Template Tags Parts One and Two

Developing Upwards

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