Well, I’ve managed to meet my self-imposed deadline of upgrading to WordPress 2 within a week. Go me! My only problem now is that all my previous posts are formatted using Markdown, which doesn’t work well with the new WYSIWYG editor. I guess I won’t go back and edit any of my old posts, then… like I ever did before!
I seem to have accrued a number of links to interesting posts on how exceptions aren’t the panacea many see them as. Firstly, an introduction to the concept of conditions and restarts, which help seperate the recovery mechanism from the recovery policy. Then, there are some blog posts, firstly by Joel Spolsky on how exceptions are harmful like GOTO and secondly in The Old New Thing on how exception-based code is harder to write than return-value-based code. And of course, that lot sent me to the Exception handling page on Wikipedia. There’s always more to read…
I’ve just found out that Andreas Katsulas died of lung cancer last week. This is a great loss, as Andreas was a truely excellent actor and brought so much to the character of G’Kar in Babylon 5. I for one will miss him, but in reading JMS’ announcement I can’t be entirely sad — clearly he had lived life well.
I’ve managed to develop a big ole backlog of interesting items to blog about, so expect a series of short-but-frequent posts to get them out of the way. (When I say “expect” you should probably think “don’t expect”.) For example, MPT was right on the money at the end of last year.
To make dealing with this backlog easier I should probably upgrade to version 2 of WordPress first. Okay, that’s a short-term goal for the week.
I’m getting really behind with the blogging, so here’s an attempt to catch up.
Exciting news! Well, for little old me anyway. A couple of weeks back I had my first ever patch to an open source project accepted and checked in! Go me! Okay, it’s only modifying a configuration file for the Linux hardware abstraction layer such that our Samsung YP-U1 music players are recognised as music players and not just generic USB storage devices, but it’s a first for me. My thanks go to Danny Kukawka for making the check-in on my behalf.
“What’s ‘dot com’ daddy?”
Jessica is starting to show signs of talking. Often when our cat Tilly walks into the room, Jessica will exclaim “Et!”.
Meanwhile, Ben will now recite whole songs (or things he’s heard on the television!) without prompting. Sometimes you can hear him doing it when he’s in a room on his own, so obviously he doesn’t need an audience… We’ve also discovered today that he can recite large chunks of his favourite bed-time books.