Boredom & Laziness

Status quo wins a stalemate

Another old post for reference. This one's a fair bit shorter than the last one and just articulates why "do nothing" needs to be the default option when considering language changes where there are no particularly strong arguments either for or against the proposed change.

Labels: python

Justifying Python language changes

Link to a mailing list post for my own benefit. Finding this again when I want to refer to it is usually a pain, so hopefully I'll remember it is linked here in the future. Either that or I'll tidy it up and turn it into a blog post in its own right.

Labels: python

Kubuntu dev packages to build Python

List of all the additional packages needed for a full build of the optional Python modules in the 2.x standard library on Kubuntu 9.10:

libssl-dev (OpenSSL integration)
libreadline-dev (readline module integration)
libgdbm-dev (a DBM backend)
tk-dev (also brings in TCL via dependencies)
tk-tile (extra bit of tk needed for some of the TTK GUI functionality)
libsqlite3-dev (SQLite3 integration)
libdb4.7-dev (BSDDB integration)

(at least one of those brings in the necessary zlib build dependencies as well - probably SSL dev)

Mostly for my own reference, but if it proves useful to somebody else via a search engine, cool :)

Labels: python

What he said

Occasionally you can come across an article which summarises your own thoughts so well, you don't really need to add anything. For me, the author's note on the linked webcomic is such an article.

Ego Surfing

So, one of Techdirt's latest stories led me back to this article about the perils of putting too much personal info on line. Possibly even things like having the words "boredom" and "laziness" as part of a domain name you own, and then not updating the associated website for months on end, so people googling your name can wonder about your follow-through when it comes to keeping up with projects you start*.

Anyway, as a result I did a bit of googling of my own. It used to be that Google gave me far more prominence than one might expect, with buckets of references to python-list and python-dev posts. When I noticed those posts weren't on the first list of results anymore, and links for both the actor and the surfer were now included, I thought Google might have done something to give the non-mailing list results more importance, and give a result that better reflected mainstream celebrity.

A closer look though and I find that while the list of sites has changed, my original opinion still holds: even with a lot more mainstream media moving online, your Google footprint still says far more about your online presence than your fame (or lack thereof) in the offline world. And I still manage to find that fact both obvious and intriguing at the same time :)

*(FWIW, most of the stuff I write online is Python related, and ends up on the Python mailing lists rather than here)