> Anybody see the Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets an intern? > > Art >
I'm needing to catch up on Seinfeld -- lots of fun when I've caught it. I catch up on stuff with Netflix a lot. Did several seasons of Buffy back to back, my first time to ever see this show. Kitty Kelly says the Bush family are more like the Sopranos than some other family (I forget which) -- but then, I've never seen a single episode of the Sopranos to date. Netflix. Relation to Python? Well, it's probably thanks to my being a programmer for well over 10 years now, that I've had so little time for television (true rumor: he loved Sesame Street). I got started programming on an HP65, which was close to assembler (and some like calculators today), then went through the end of the punch card era at Princeton, but attracted like a moth to the flame to the interactive command line, the terminal shell program. 360/370 VMS (virtural machine). You basically had a whole mainframe to drive, virtually. This was not an intuitive interface, and I ended up just sticking with APL. However, my major at Princeton, after a fast gallop through the Woodrow Wilson School, ended up being Philosophy, although to get all the Wittgenstein I wanted (still want -- always satisfying), I had to go to the other wing of 1879 Hall: the Religion Department, with Vic Preller. Dr. Rorty was my thesis adviser however, along with some British guy, a visiting prof I think he was. We had to compromise on my grade, as my take on LW has always been rather avant garde. And with Vic, I failed to turn in a final paper (just spaced it), so he had no choice but to give me an F. I still recall the chance meeting: "Kirby, why didn't you turn in your final paper and force me to fail you in my course?" He sort of bowed as he said it. I felt like we were two Japanese Sumarai. But I never let philosophy vanquish my love of computer engineering, and as it turns out, that was fortunate. First of all, Wittgenstein was an engineer at heart (and architect). Second of all, my next big philosophers were both engineer-designers as well. Erhard and Fuller. They definitely weren't clones of each other, by a long shot. So tuning in via both was an amazing experience in stereophonics. Sounded like trouble in Gotham City. Kirby here, on the bat phone (philosophers love bats, especially the English philosophers -- a favorite term of endearment of theirs: batty). So after awhile, I gravitated to Americans for Civic Participation, which was a galvanize-the-voters operation. Make 'em care about the issues. Heighten their level of concern. We achieved *nothing* like the levels achieved in this last election. Dang, this time Americans really registered -- like, *really*. Anyway, at Project Vote! (the popular front name), I used a Zorba on my desk top (a portable CP/M jobber), while trucking over to some DC high rise (to the extent DC has any) to deal with a COBOL DBA. We'd feed in our requests, and out would come gobs and gobs of mail labels, on fan-fold, straight from the mainframe line printer. The data had been entered earlier, at our request, directly from public records. Our goal: get the disenfranchised involved, because this is their country too. I still believe that. So, I now had college training in multiple languages from Princeton, and field experience with both a desktop and mainframe. That made me a valuable asset in PDX, when I took a job with CUE (Center for Urban Education). CUE was set up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but a coalition of religious organizations and the feds, to help with resettlement of refugees. However, by the time I joined in the mid 1980s, interest in the Southeast Asia chapter was waning, and the funds were being diverted to bigger and better wars ahead. So CUE devolved back into EMO (Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon), and I went into private practice, once again as a programmer. Even up until now, I code for pay. I help with the inner workings of a large hospital system, working on the kind of application Eric Raymond correctly identifies as very prevalent: proprietary not for commercial reasons, but because private organizations are highly vertical, meaning their applications simply make no sense in an outside context. What good would my QUIPP be (Quinton Prolog Parser), if you don't have Quintons (at this point so old as to not be vendor-supported -- upgrade in the works). How many people have Quintons? Usually, expensive cath lab apparatus is special to hospitals. So: no QUIPP on Sourceforge. It just wouldn't make sense. If other hospitals want the code, they're free to contact RHDS. Likewise, I join projects where the code was never conceived of as open source. To many private business rules are hard coded. Open source doesn't mean exposing your internal operations to busy bodies. It means writing code that's generic enough to accommodate a lot of personal settings and configuration decisions, once you've got it. Like, go ahead and customize, and don't feel like your Apache config file has to be on Sourceforge either (like, who does that?). Anyway, it's not my place to then turn around and take something others paid for and worked on, and just decide it's a public asset. It's not mine to give away, basically. So yes, I eyeball private and proprietary code a lot. But it's not stuff that'd make much sense outside where and how it's currently used. I use Python at RHDS, and for other jobs. I used it to support Stu Quimby with stellar graphics for StrangeAttractors, a dynamite toy that few know of, understand, or grok -- except the kids who get it. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
