Miscellany
It's not my style to blog a link; you can go to my 
<a href="http://del.icio.us/llimllib">del.icio.us</a> page if you want to see
my links. Regardless, I liked 
<a href="http://jaynes.colorado.edu/PythonIdioms.html">this</a> link so much that I thought I would share it.<p>
Basically, the page consists of a list of Python idioms that every person who
wants to be functional with the language should know by heart. Although I
disagree with some of his suggestions (sometimes he overemphasizes generality -
see his "ideal" for the last suggestion), I found myself looking at my
favorite language in a slightly new way after reading them.<p>
<h2>The Job</h2>
After presenting that link, I'll say that my Python stuff is on hold for now.
My web host still has not installed PIL, so I can't put any images on there, and
more importantly, I just started my 
<a href="http://llimllib.f2o.org/blog/serve/keyword/job">new job</a> on Monday.
I still have free time, but not as much, and I'm too stressed out to program
when I come home. Once I get settled down, I'm sure I'll be able to get back
to it.<p>
For now, I have to go to work and use VB (shudder) and PL/SQL, which is slowly
coming back to me. One VB script in particular that I saw this afternoon
contains 140 global variables and nearly 10,000 lines of code. All of this
was hidden behind an interface for one function in those 10,000 lines of code.
I'm not looking forward to digging into that.<p>
<h2>Anecdote</h2>
Today, at work, I was looking through some PL/SQL code by the guy I'm supposed 
to learn to assist. I noticed offhand from his code that there was an lstrip()
oracle function. "Neat", I thought, and went on reading.<p>
Later on, I imported
some data with an extra space into the database, and it had an extra space
appended to it. "No problem", I thought, remembering earlier, and wrote up a
query to remove it. When it didn't work, I spent about a half hour looking for
docs on the rstrip function, only to find that it is called rtrim.<p>
I'm so addicted to python that I mentally convert other code into it.
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