My life must be getting too complicated. I've been talking about "fixing blugs" all day today, and I don't even know why.

Jason Orendorff has given us the path Python module, which is a true Pythonic joy. It simplifies os.path, and makes it much easier to use.

I had the same experience as Jason: os.path.walk is just not great. My solution was to write my own module to do the same thing, but it ended up also not great. Jason's solution is intelligent enough to be simple, rather than clever enough to be difficult. My hat is off to him.

A husband and wife team at Purdue University has found the protein that measures time for the biological clock. This is fascinating and exciting on many levels, but here's the part that floored me: The fundamental unit is 24 minutes, or 1/60th of a day.

When you consider the metric system, everything is based on multiples of 10, except for time: the second is used, 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours in a day. If you look into why 60, you get back to the Babylonians who cared more about 60 than they did 10 and 100. The reason given why they liked 60 was that there were roughly 360 days in a year, so they divided the circle into 360 degrees (another thing we still do), and the 60 followed naturally from that.

Now along comes this biochemistry research that shows that somehow 60 is hard-wired into our bodies. I know that doesn't explain 60 seconds in a minute, but at the very least, it's an amazing coincidence. Maybe the Babylonians were tuned into something we're only just now re-discovering.

Matt Blaze has written a fascinating paper about "cracking" traditional physical locks with master keys. Not only is it a good tutorial on locksmithing technology (I find the terminology especially interesting), but it is an interesting cross-domain consideration of security, looking at physical security through the eyes of a computer security thinker (who else would describe breaking and entering as "rights amplification"?).

Then, to take the mixing of worlds further, Matt writes about the reactions he's received to the paper, with the classic debate of secrecy vs. publicity in the field of security vulnerabilities, but this time among traditional locksmiths.

Two programming languages, interesting for different reasons:

• The ABC programming language, designed for teaching programming (just as BASIC and Pascal were). It served as inspiration for Python (the colons and whitespace indentation are familiar). It feels sort of halfway between Logo and Python, and is interesting as another datapoint, and as historical background for Pythonistas.
• The D programming language, which seems to have been designed by taking C++, throwing out the worst cruft, adding in some from Java, and letting it simmer a little. It's interesting because it could lead the way to a compromise in the C++/C#/Java wars.

Are you like me? Do you work with a guy from Sri Lanka, and he tells you his native language is Sinhalese, and you want to find out what the Sinhala writing system looks like? Well, Omniglot has the answer, as well as descriptions and samples of hundreds of other writing systems.

"Making many flower garlands from a bunch of flowers":

The Assertive Introvert is dedicated to helping introverts be themselves. Motto: "We're here, we're quiet - now quit hassling us!". The lexicon is a succinct exploration of the introvert's view of the world. I'd be a card-carrying member, if they had cards.

You ever read one of those lifestyle or technology stories in your local paper, where they find three or four people to quote about some topic like credit card fraud? You ever wonder how the reporter found those people to quote? (This is the sort of thing The Onion would call, "Area Man Has Credit Card Hassles").

Through the miracle of blogging technology, I am now one of those Area Men. The Poughkeepsie Journal ran the story Personal identity theft on sharp increase, which includes a few quotes from yours truly (even though I live about 150 miles from Poughkeepsie, so I'm not really an Area Man).

So how did it happen? Here's how:

» read more of: Area man... (7 paragraphs)

My employer, Kubi Software, issued a press release today explaining who we are.

We've been working hard on our product, and I think it's a keeper. We're going to be showing it at DEMO 2003, and I'll be attending. Should be fun.

A couple interesting pieces of software I noticed recently:

• SQLite, an embeddable SQL database engine. It implements a nearly-complete subset of SQL 92, in 25K lines of public-domain source. Also has a impressive set of language bindings.
• Structorian is a binary file viewer that accepts C-like struct definitions to instruct it how to interpret data. It is at an early stage of its life (it needs polishing to make it feel second-nature), but looks very promising.

I took a little trip with the whole family to the Bahamas. We went to the Atlantis resort, which is over the top, but fun. When Iris shipped Domino R5 back in 1999, they sent the entire company, with spouses, to the Atlantis for three nights. Yes, it was a big expenditure. Yes, it was worth it.

So just the five of us went this time to escape the January cold. Yes, it was a big expenditure. Yes, it was worth it.

» read more of: Back from the Bahamas... (7 paragraphs)

The first batch of Python Success Stories is online, including mine, about a game for my autistic son that I wrote using pygame.

In case you need to authoritatively name a 29-sided figure, here's the rules for naming polygons and polyhedra.

(If you're in a hurry and can't read the whole thing, the answer is icosikaienneagon).

I'm always interested in cogent and pithy boilings-down of complex stuff into simple stuff. Mathemagenic (which is not about math) summarizes Diane Dormant's stages of acceptance of innovation.

Briefly:

I've blogged about this before, but it keeps coming up in various guises, so I expanded my previous writing: Erroneously Empty Code Paths

I'm glad to see that Python is getting a package metadata repository. It seems like a good idea — especially since the success of a programming environment depends largely on how successfully developers can get things working without becoming devotees. Quick access to bits and pieces they can build on is essential. That's what Python's batteries included philosophy was all about in the first place. Look at the repository as the second tier of batteries.

Unfortunately, I still don't know enough about packaging and distributing Python code. I have code that I would like to share, but I just don't know how to do it. If anyone has a good quick tutorial about distributing packages, I'd appreciate it.

OK, I can't claim to really understand what this thing is doing, but the Hyperspace Star Polytope Slicer is an awesome thing to watch. It's a Java applet that does 4-dimensional animation of slices of polytopes (whatever that is!). Luckily, you don't have to grok the math to enjoy the show: fiddle with the controls, and watch the pretty shapes.

Here's a cross-eyed stereoscopic pair sample:

As promised yesterday, I've got more to say about Ted Nelson. Yesterday's point was that Nelson's talents are wasted on telling us that the web is wrong. Today I want to talk about the amazing book that Nelson wrote, Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines was originally written in 1974, and is really two books attached together back-to-back. Computer Lib is about how computers should become more of a mainstream technology, understood and used by everyone. It attempts to explain computers for the layman. Dream Machines is about the potential of computers to become engines of creativity, with graphics, multimedia, animation, hypertext, the whole works. It aims to inspire people to have a reason for learning about computers.

Now (in 2003) all this is very ho-hum, since everyone has a computer, and graphics and multimedia are commonplace. Kids these days have difficulty understanding that computers used to not have color graphics and sound. But Computer Lib/Dream Machines was written in 1974, when computers often didn't even have video monitors (just paper printer consoles, or worse, line printers).

» read more of: Computer Lib/Dream Machines... (6 paragraphs)

Computer Lib/Dream Machines was a manifesto, a primer, a catalog, a hymnal, and a comic book, all rolled into one. Ted Nelson is the only guy who could have written it.

Here's a quote by Hubert H. Humphrey that is apropos of recent state political events:

The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.

My recent entry about the semantic web caught the eye of Tristan Nitot over at StandBlog, a French blog about web standards (I think: I don't speak French). Here are my words translated to French. I can't read them, but they look great!

My recent posting about the Semantic Web got me thinking about Ted Nelson. He's the guy who actually coined the term "hypertext", way back in the sixties. So what's the connection? Both Xanadu (Nelson's yet-to-be-built hypertext system) and the Semantic Web are presented as better than the Web we have, and ideals to strive toward. Both tell us to closely examine the web we have and understand its faults.

But there's something about Ted Nelson's insistence that the web has missed the mark that I find really sad. How can anything as wildly successful as the web be completely dismissed as having gotten it wrong? (And how ironic that Nelson's short writings now are awkward .txt files: not only are they not hyper, they are barely even readable text).

» read more of: Ted Nelson and Xanadu... (6 paragraphs)

Ted Nelson is one of the great computer visionaries (tomorrow I'll say more about that). I just wish he could find a way to bring some of his ideas to fruition, or recognize that others already have. Just sitting on the sidelines and pointing out "mistakes" is a waste of his talents.

Amazon continues to do clever things. Since they know stuff what I've bought, and they know the asking price for used stuff, they can add it all up and tell me how much I could make by selling my stuff.

I continue to believe that one of Amazon's greatest strengths is its creative use of one its irreplacable assets: customer history. They have a seemingly endless array of ways to slice and dice all of that information in ways designed to get you to buy more (and now sell more!). Purchases, page views, recommendations, wish lists — they all go into the giant blender, and out come dozens of attention-getting ways to point you back into Amazon to do more business. Genius.

In the tag soup of a new generation, Mark Pilgrim cogently expresses his skepticism about the Semantic Web. I happen to semi-agree.

The semantic web is one of those technologies that will never live up to its full hype, but will provide us with real benefits nonetheless. I think it will be like AI: lots of intereting things were accomplished, but somehow each little piece that actually worked was officially categorized as "not AI", leaving AI always a distant dream. If researchers in the '70s had seen Microsoft Word running with speech recognition, correcting grammar, they would have hailed it as breakthrough AI. Today, it's just what a computer does, and AI remains somewhere in the future.

The Semantic Web is going to be like that. The ivory tower thinkers (have you ever tried to read the RDF spec?) will continue to imagine a gleaming city on the horizon, while the pragmatic hackers (like Mark Pilgrim himself) build cool stuff that uses newly-available meta-data to accomplish interesting things. And the whole time, the two camps will quarrel over whether the Semantic Web is ever achievable.

My mother-in-law sent us this link, and my first reaction, was, "Wow, what an ugly page!" How many smiley images can you fit on one page? (429!).

But the fact is, this page made my son smile, then it made my wife smile, then it made me smile. The sheer giddiness of it overwhelms any "sophisticated" judgement of its other qualities.

Here's to a happy new year, free from stuffy judgment!