- Zen Street Retreat Photos
Some photos from a four-day street retreat I did in September here in New York. Street retreat is an American Zen practice, I believe invented by Bernie Glassman, of spending a short time living and sleeping on the streets. It brings us into [ ... ]
- Review of "Introductory Graph Theory" by Gary Chartrand
If you are a software developer, then from time to time you will have to solve an Interesting Problem in optimization, such as finding the best matches on a dating site, or the right sharding key for a database cluster. As often as not, such [ ... ]
- We're All Gonna Die
Have I mentioned lately that Zen is my favorite religion? Among the best attributes of Zen is its forthright acknowledgement of death. You are going to die. There is some paperwork you should handle beforehand. My temple will offer a [ ... ]
- Patience
- Review of "The Little Book Of Semaphores" by Allen B. Downey
The Little Book of Semaphores is a free PDF. Whenever I write code to synchronize multiple threads, I always think, "There must be some method to this." I've been warned by the popular adage, "Any non-trivial multithreaded program has [ ... ]
- Against ResourceWarnings in Python 3
Update: Nick Coghlan has changed my mind, see our comment thread for the explanation. Allow me to grumble. Consider this function from Python 3.2.3's socketmodule.c: /* Deallocate a socket object in response to the last Py_DECREF(). [ ... ]
- Review of "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen
Patience, grasshopper—the book does not promise well, but rewards your effort in the end. We spend the first few chapters with Chip, a po-mo literature professor at some small college. Franzen wastes our time with tired tropes: [ ... ]
- Python's swap is not atomic
I rewrote PyMongo's connection pool over the last few months. Among the concurrency issues I had to nail down was, if a thread is resetting the connection pool as another thread is using the pool, how do I keep them from stepping on each [ ... ]
- Cetonia Aurata
I'd like to share with you this gorgeous photo from Wikipedia: source
- Review of "Version Control with Git" by Jon Loeliger
Git is the most powerful and conceptually elegant source code management system I've used. (Perhaps Mercurial rivals it? I haven't used Mercurial.) But it seems to be in a state of arrested development. Many commands commonly used in [ ... ]