Diary Things Proper

I haven't written one of these (i.e. "proper" diaries) in a while, so I thought it was about time. I've not been up to much: work, play etc.

Breathless

I carried a thirty-five kilogram pack up over a vertical kilometre the other day. Christ, I'm unfit. I nearly vomited twice and nearly passed-out the second time on the way up; and have never before felt my solar plexus as a supernova of contorted tension and hatred. 'Must be getting old.

Fortunately, I was mostly unaccompanied during the ascent, so was able to suffer abjectly in private, taking inordinately long breaks. I was also dumping the vast majority of the load at the top and coming down about thirty-two kilos lighter. I honestly don't think I could have made it down again otherwise. Joe Simpson was one tough motherfucker; I was fully "fit" and only a couple of miles from shops and habitation.

Restless

I've also started doing something I've been putting off doing for a long time, which is building a CMS engine using mod_python. It's not something I really want to do (although I've thought about it a fair bit over the years) so much as something I can't really put off doing any longer. Every time it comes to setting up a CMS (for myself), I feel like Sisyphus, and am sick of going on the same round-the-houses investigation every fifteen-or-so months only to find that nothing has really changed. Most of the CMS's out there are great; they just don't do things the way I want them to do them. It's kind of reached the point where building another one is actually the lesser hassle.

For example: as soon as you say, "It should be lightweight by design", you get rid of half the contenders; if you say, "I want something that uses python, or at least understands it", you've summarily excused 95% of the good systems which are left (which mostly use PHP or perl). If you say, "I don't want it to require Zope, or TurboGears, or Django", you've got rid of ninety percent of all the python systems.

When you're trying to develop a minimal kernel, and build-in the facility for modularity and extensibility on top of that, but not force a development paradigm and structure on any usage more than is absolutely necessary, the last thing you want is to try and implement it on top of a gargantuan kitchen-sink system. It wouldn't be so bad but, with python, there's a ton of kitchen sink built into the core system to begin with (much more than with Perl, much less than with Java). There's an intrinsic link between the way a system is designed and the ways in which it allows you to work. I have the same problem with Zope and Django as I have when I develop for Windows systems, which is that I constantly feel that I'm having to go out of my way to facilitate support for other people's decisions which themselves don't confer any inherent benefit upon me, the user. With Windows particularly, I feel like I'm required to develop in a certain way in order to support someone else's business model.

Anyway, it's a medium-term thing and won't be ready for a long while yet. I've already got some running code, but it's a minimal feature set and is still at the stage where it's expanding and altering with each session I spend on it. I'm quite pleased in that I've worked out a structure which seems to allow a very high degree of decoupling between what could be considered 'core' engine components and 'userland' subsystems.

"Core" could be defined as those things the engine itself needs to know how to do in order to be able to function; "userland" can be those things that the core has no inherent knowledge of, but can support via its modularity mechanisms. In the current structure, most of the 'core' is implemented in python modules (with a couple of small database tables to help out), whereas all the 'userland' stuff exists in "non-specific storage" (at present, it's mostly in temporary files, but is slowly being moved to the database). The beauty of these systems is that it's only the userland loader modules which had to be rewritten to facilitate the database and, even though the loader modules are part of the core interface to userland, python's dynamic binding allows you to switch the loader mechanisms in a manner almost polymorphic, so the core doesn't really need to know very much about the storage at all.

It all gets quite interesting in a theoretic sense when you try and work out which systems absolutely need to be in the core and which don't. The intriguing discovery of the week is that, by and large, almost all systems don't, yet certain counter-intuitve ones do. I'll say more at a later date, but the idea that Operating System principles can be applied, with some small success, to something as high-level and seemingly trivial as a web CMS was a pretty satisying discovery. The key was the design of the loader, as mentioned previously, which is the bit I'm most proud of, as it facilitates almost everything else.

Testless

I had a mild pregnancy scare this week, if such a thing be possible. Not me; I'm male, as the previous section possibly makes clear, but someone I ... err ... knew and hadn't seen for ages. It was worse in that it was retrospective; i.e. had what I'd been told turned out to be true, it would have been a fait accompli, complete with extant spawn. Fortunately, after a minor coronary and a couple of days of abject terror, it turned out to be chinese whispers layered on a misunderstanding layered on mischief. Oh, how we fucking laughed ...

Guessless

Talking of spawn, it's birthday season in this neck of the woods and, as usual, I am tasked with acquiring all manner of cool stuff for various tiny folk. I've already taken care of a few of them, but am stuck on my niece / god-daughter. Last year she got a (proper) snare drum and, before that, a water cannon. Her mum is fairly well-off and a bit of a girly trend-lover. As a consequence, I try to get things which are a bit non-typically-girl-ish but that she would like anyway, as she probably won't get them from her folks. I'm stuck this year. I was kind of leaning towards "rockets" (as in black-powder-motor-charged Estes-style proper rockets) but can't help feeling that's more of a "what I'd have wanted at that age" type of gift. We'll see.

Psi Ontology

In case anyone had forgotten or missed the story, the BBC Panorama programme about L. Ron Hubbard's Crack Quack Attack Squadron is on this evening.

The story has been belching away in certain parts of the media for the past few days as the Panorama journalist making the programme, John Sweeney, was caught on camera exploding with fury in the face of being upbraided by Tommy Davis, one of the Scientology PR men. The Scientologists put their clip up on Youtube, and the BBC has been fighting slightly on the back foot to deal with the PR fallout [BBC's camera angle (Real Media) of the incident, Scientologists' camera angle (Youtube)]. The BBC say, however, that they stand by their reporter and the story, and are sure most people will understand the context and Sweeney's reaction better after seeing the programme.

Both actors in this drama have been spinning like mad; the scientologists are seeking to portray the investigation as irrational and biased (although I thought their clip was utterly inconclusive the first time I saw it; it's an out-of-context tirade and impossible to judge without more information); the BBC, on the other hand, seem to have taken the line that no publicity is bad publicity and have been hyping the issue, predominantly through their own channels, presumably as much to hype-up the programme as to to deal with the minor furore itself.

The last few "controversial" Panoramas have been pretty disappointing, so I hold no hope of an increased threshold of thoroughness (in a half-hour programme?), but will probably watch it anyway, as anything which probes the affairs of these wackos is a good thing.

From the clips I've seen, one of the focal points of the programme seems to based on investigating whether the Scientology organisation is a religion or a "cult". Scientology has been refused charitable status in the UK and is not recognised as a religion, partly on the basis that the organisation receives quid pro quo payments from its members as part of its service provision and this contravenes the British definitions for these things.

While I'm largely against Scientology (based on its practices, teachings and history, and the fact that most of its adherents seem to be genuinely brain-addled [Hello, Mr. Cruise ...]), I'm not sure there's a genuinely valid distinction (and thus a valid argument) here. It seems to me to be an attempt to move the argument into an area in which most people would ostracise the unworthy. Religions = Fine; Cults = Bad. "Well; what's the difference?", "Errr ... uhmmm ... size?". I think the truth is more nuanced, which is that Scientology probably is a religion (in all terms in which that definition is meaningful), but that some religions are more societally harmful and dangerous than others (and which are which depends on the society in question). We can't be trusted with a debate in a moral framework based on those terms, though, as it might naturally lead to the questioning of other religions, and the recent actions of government with regard to the passing of religious-protection legislation.

Footing Ball

I'd like to congratulate and extend my admiration towards Tottenham Hotspur F.C. and their supporters for winning the Premiership (that's the English Premier League to foreign-types) title. I thought the mighty Everton F.C. might hold on to take the title for the second time in three years but, alas, the quality of the chasing Spurs team was just too great, even if they would be a fairly mediocre outfit in the absence of one Bulgarian wizard, and Everton will just have to make do with second place. Commiserations to Sheffield United.

I'd also like to congratulate Blackburn Rovers for winning the F.A. Cup.

Oh yeah; congrats also to Manchester United for winning the Country Club Invitational Open.