Entry tags:

code, food

We're home...
As the subject line says, Annie and I are home. Super-ultra-mega props go out to tillerman, who dropped us off and picked us up from the airport on the California end.

We had a good time seeing everyone, eating food, especially the PIE. MMM, Pumpkin pie. Picked up some Christmas presents, relaxed a bunch, and am looking forward to this last week of classes, and a week of finals.


Two unrelated notes...

I had borrowed a book from David Eppstein that had some information about a structure I've been working on for the last couple months. Unfortunately, it didn't offer more information than I already had, but this morning I woke up at 6:30AM Phoenix time with a bit of insight on the problem that may end up doing a lot of good.


Annie received an email from a random fellow who happens to read I'm Blue and asked about my dynamic mud. After a few emails back and forth, his belief was that in order to make it dynamic in any way, one needed a database (like *SQL, DB, Oracle or Access). I expressed to him (in a none-to-polite manner) that databases were merely a data store. Certainly they can offer things like transactions, fallover, redundancy, etc., that would make some things easy to do (multiple automatically mirrored databases for multiple servers in gigantic muds), but it doesn't allow any additional amount of dynamicism. It also happens to ease some on-disk representation issues, which is completely worthless for Python systems with the wonder that is the Shelve module and little pieces of code like this:

class example:
    def __init__(self, dct={}):
        def_dict = {
        #insert default definitions here
        }
        self.__dict__.update(def_dict)
        self.__dict__.update(dct)
    def __repr__(self):
        return "example(%s)"%repr(self.__dict__)

With proper support code ( eval(repr(obj)) ), one can even translate objects from one version of the object to another.

Anyways. I ended up pissing the guy off. He says:

    I find your email very disrespectful.  I apologize for bothering you, as 
I so clearly have, and will not write you again. Please do not send me any 
more email.

I apologized in an email, but who knows if he even gives a fuck. *shrug*



Anyways, I hope everyone's Turkey-day went well. I better go catch up on your livejournals.