Bear's Log

I was reading the source for a Python library that I’m thinking about using (reading the source is the best way IMO of learning new code tricks and tips) when I made the following AHA! moments in the span of 5 minutes! I think my brain is on fire!

First I learned about (well, possibly re-learned, but it must not have stuck the first time) python-gflags which the Project Home page describes:

This project is the python equivalent of google-gflags, a Google commandline flag implementation for C++. It is intended to be used in situations where a project wants to mimic the command-line flag handling of a C++ app that uses google-gflags, or for a Python app that, via swig or some other means, is linked with a C++ app that uses google-gflags.

The gflags package contains a library that implements commandline flags processing. As such it’s a replacement for getopt(). It has increased flexibility, including built-in support for Python types, and the ability to define flags in the source file in which they’re used. (This last is its major difference from OptParse.)

and while that’s still an AHA moment, the real one came as I was scanning the project members list and saw the name “mithro” in it.

Way back in the early days of the intarwebs I was active in a project named WorldForge (and they are still very active!) where I helped manage a lot of the infrastructure that was used for the project - heck I still run one of the IRC nodes and also their FTP server :) One of the people who worked on code back then was named mithro and my interest was piqued so I clicked on his link to see what google code projects he worked on and saw, among others, these projects: python-datetime-tz, thousandparsec, google-summer-of-code, soc.

So like wow, it was him - so cool to make that connection! And then I scanned and saw the description of the soc project

## Melange, the Spice of Creation

and thats when I made the link to the name of the tool that I use for the Google Summer of Code to manage information, Melange, is named after the name of Spice from Arrakis in one of my all time favourite book series evar Dune!

Yep, a very fast and awesome five minutes! Loving it!