Lonely Lion

http://php.weblogs.com/adodb_python

I’m not a huge fan of the current MySQLdb way of Python Mysql interaction, so this may be a good thing.

If I haven’t said it before, I’m now a computer science Graduate student at Depaul University here in Chicago. I decided that I’ve played around with computers for long enough that I need to buckle down and get some credentials, as my BS degree in Political Science doesn’t really impress resume readers.

My first class is Java. So far, so good. I sometimes get frustrated when I think of how much quicker I could complete my homework in Python, but I just push those thoughts down and get my nose back on the grindstone.

Last night, we started in on Java Interfaces, I found this article on Google, http://www.artima.com/designtechniques/interfaces.html, although I haven’t read it, I figure it’s a good introduction to the concept of interfaces. So, links aside, interfaces confuse me.

I’m trying to map them to a Python-ish concept, and can’t really do it. For a while I was thinking they may be like “mix-ins”, a concept that I haven’t totally wrapped my head around. For an overview of Python mix-in’s: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4540.

Thinking it through a bit, I believe that the concept of interfaces is really just a Java construct, and is “doable” in Python without explicitly stating it. Are interfaces really just an outgrowth of strong typing? That’s what I’m leaning towards this morning. We’ll see.

Rich Salz is on my watch list, as in, this guy seems to be writing columns that are particularly interesting to me. So far, he’s covered creating an SSL enabled web server with Python, and an overview of two popular weblog API’s.

Using py2exe, I’ve created a wxWindows GUI, and a small app that reads from a sqlite database. This is pretty awesome. Both look and feel like plain old Windows apps, both ran on systems without Python, wxWindows, or sqlite installed. Very, very, very awesome.

Finally, it feels like I can program nice Windows apps that anyone can use, without having to learn a cumbersome M$ language. I’m still all for learning C#, or even Visual Basic, but at least now I don’t have to, and I can use my existing Python knowledge to build cool apps that I can send to people that have never heard of Linux.

Very great.

An old log entry from O’Reilly, about NetLogo, explains how easy it is to model behavior. There’s now a follow up article.

Gimli is in good shape, new hardware, updated OS. Now I’m going to migrate MySQL from Gloin to Gimli, and then rebuild Gloin and a spare laptop I have with fresh OS installations. After that, I plan on installing OpenMosix. It’ll be a small, weak little cluster, but it will be a cluster.

Spam has forced me to turn off comments on all entries. Sorry folks, I know you guys were chomping at the bit to add your two cents to my ever growing weblog empire.