I already mentioned what background music (or sounds) I like when I am coding. In that list, I included classical music. I know classical is not exactly a favorite. Not in my field, at least. I suspect the vast majority of people disregard it in advance, not really knowing what they’re missing out on, just because, well, you know, it’s dinosaurs stuff. If you are among them, you should reconsider and repent your sins....
Pattern Matching is coming to Python, and I am not sure I like it. Don’t get me wrong, I love pattern matching. I use it all the time in F#. I am sure that once it lands in the language, it will be wildly adopted. So what’s the problem with Python’s pattern matching? The community, some core developers included, has expressed several concerns. The Python Steering Council has acknowledged them and is willing to look into improvements should they be proposed....
In March 1970, Dr. John Conway sent the “fatal” (as he later referred to it) letter to Martin Gardner. He was submitting ideas for Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. The New York Times features a good article on the fifty-year parable of The Game of Life. What’s appreciable, they asked some of Life’s most steadfast friends to reflect upon its influence and lessons over half a century. Among them, Brian Eno, who, being Brian Eno, has some smart things to say:...
I’m a space junkie. So tonight, like all the other space junkies on the planet, I watched in awe as Perseverance seamlessly and beautifully landed on the surface of Mars. This is a phenomenal achievement. Of course, I will eagerly follow her1 progress. As I was following the live broadcast, I wondered: What kind of hardware and software runs all this incredible technology? It was launched in 2020, so it must be some cutting-edge stuff....
I came back to reading Shirley Jackson almost by coincidence. I had just finished watching The Haunting of Hill House, and, as I always do with stuff that tickles my curiosity, I was doing a little research on it. That’s how I learned that the TV Series is loosely based on a novel by the same name written by… Shirley Jackson. Still imbued by the TV Series’s atmospheres, now knowing about its connection with Jackson, I was ready for another dive into her literature of psychological suspense and terror....
About seven years ago, I presented the Eve Framework in a very crowded Python room at FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels. If you don’t know about FOSDEM, well, you should check it out. Every year thousands of developers who recognize themselves with the free and open-source movement gather in Brussels from all over the world. And I mean thousands of them. According to Wikipedia, since 2011, the meeting hosts about 4,000 visitors every year....
Today I learned the hard way: don’t you dare running a vanilla install of VirtualBox together with Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2). It won’t work. That’s because WSL2 uses Hyper-V under the hood, which is incompatible with VirtualBox. According to the official documentation for VirtualBox v6.0: Oracle VM VirtualBox can be used on a Windows host where Hyper-V is running. This is an experimental feature. No configuration is required. Oracle VM VirtualBox detects Hyper-V automatically and uses Hyper-V as the virtualization engine for the host system....
What music do you listen to while programming?1 For me, it’s usually jazz, classical, electronic, lots of it, or nothing. There are some specialized websites and podcasts I sometimes recur to, like [Music for Programming][1]. Several Spotify playlists I dig a lot, [Every Day I’m Nerdin’][2] being one of them. What can I say? I am musically omnivore. However, I recently discovered something different: the [Field Recordings podcast][3]. “A podcast where audio-makers stand silently in fields (or things that could be broadly interpreted as fields)....
Ever had your old, trusty Python virtual environment fail on you? I sure did. Sometimes, when I activate or switch between virtual environments, I get the following error: $ workon eve dyld: Library not loaded: @executable_path/../.Python I never really took the time to look into it. When this happens, because I am in a rush (and because I am a lazy old fart), I shrug it off, recreate the virtual environment on the spot, and get back to work....
The Water Dancer is the debut novel for Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author and journalist best known for his nonfiction works. Set in a slave plantation located in pre-civil war Virginia, this is a bold and ambitious story about slavery. From the editor website: Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life....