Microsoft responds to App Engine with PHP

Awesome:

Now, say what you will about Java developers, but when App Engine first launched with support for Python, they immediately made it clear that you must be at least this awesome to ride.

In response, it appears as though Microsoft is taking what I like to call the Little League strategy: Everybody is a winner, even the kid who got smacked in the face with a line drive hit and waited out the rest of the season listening to adults struggle to tell him that it doesn't look that bad.

Yes, let me introduce you to the professional PHP programmer.

Do not add

I had an insidious idea at work yesterday. Sometimes you generate two different statistics, but due to the way you calculated the numbers, it makes absolutely no sense at all to, say, add the two numbers together. It might be tempting to add them because the sum looks like the right answer, but it's not in the general case. Comments highlighting this truth are easily ignored, so I briefly considered implementing something like this:

class Value(int):
    def __add__(self, other):
        raise TypeError('unsupported operation +')

Python will even let you shadow the int type (i.e. replace Value above with int) and then you can really confuse anyone reading your code.

My conscience got the better of me and I didn't do this.

Not Getting It

No really, the sales folk at Cogent Communications do not get it.

One of their sales minions has been hounding us at StimulusWatch, claiming that he will stop this hounding if we respond and he is unable to save our firm 60% or more. On what, exactly? Bandwidth I guess? It stands to reason that he didn't read about the falling cost of starting sites like ours. We don't collocate, we are in the cloud. We just push code out into some vague cluster of machines and it's all handled for us. Cost of moving to Cogent is almost definitely an increase.

Attractive Aversions

Mark Liberman of Language Log posted about Word Attraction today, which caused me to think about any word attractions I might have. First, to keep this geek on topic, I figured I should analyze my sent mail (which only goes back to 2003) for commonly used words. Right off the bat I expect to see very uninteresting words (conjunctions, articles, etc), so I'll need to cull some. I think just eyeballing this list should be good enough to find any words that I routinely come back in my electronic speech.

I found libgmail, which is a python module that claims to access your gmail account. It also claims support for Apps For Your Domain. So far, it's unable to retrieve any of my messages, so I may have to fall back to regular old IMAP. Or maybe I'll try to fix libgmail.

Mark also linked to some of their earlier articles about Word Aversion, and especially the interesting note that there is a tendency for Avoiders to be teased by their so-called friends. This struck me because I happen to know which words will make Ms. X's skin crawl - her word aversions. Just in case her students come across this post, I won't let them out of the bag. But, I definitely had some fun with that in High School.