My wife Susan has a piece in Sunday's New York Times: Home Alone, about teaching our son to be independent.

BTW: I took the photograph that accompanies the article. It is Nat receiving a medal at his Special Olympics swim meet, and it is probably the happiest he has ever looked in a photograph. In fact, it is unusual for him to be looking directly at one so unabashedly in any circumstances. I smile every time I see that picture, so I'm glad they ran it.

Paul Graham's latest essay is Great Hackers. It's very opinionated and very anti-Microsoft, but nevertheless makes a number of very good points, and resonated with me quite a bit.

This paragraph hit home particularly:

Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on Betamax. The thing about languages, though, is that they're not just standards. If you have to move bits over a network, by all means use TCP/IP. But a programming language isn't just a format. A programming language is a medium of expression.

I certainly don't agree with everything Paul says, but to anyone interested in the sociology and psychology of software engineering, it is a must-read.

I heard this story on NPR, and found it again at Nature: Bone-devouring worms discovered. It is truly amazing that novel forms of creatures are right at our doorstep and have never been seen before (if you can call the carcass of a dead whale thousands of meters below the ocean "right at our doorsteps"). These worms are not only a new species, but have completely new ways of getting food and reproducing. And to top it off, they are distant relatives of giant tube worms living around hydro-thermal vents on the deep ocean floor.

The appearance of pMock got me reading about mock objects again. pMock is a mock object library for Python inspired by jMock. Mock objects are a testing methodology whereby an object under test is surrounded by fake implementations of its supporting objects so that the behavior of the tested object can be isolated and minutely observed.

Martin Fowler's article Mocks Aren't Stubs gets into some of the essence of mock objects, and how they differ from stub implementations. As I understand Martin's point, stubs are passive implementations of an interface, while mock objects are active participants in the recording and checking of behavior across the interface.

I've never used mock objects, and they seem quite complicated at first glance. But I'm interested in them because as I write more and more code, I get more and more interested in verifying its correctness automatically, pinning down the corners to control the complexity of all of the change inherent in a large development process.

A new study proposes a new theory of autism: Scientists Discover Biological Basis for Autism. In brief, they believe that autism is actually a breakdown of connections between different parts of the brain. This helps explain why autism can present so differently in different people, and why autistics can have splinter skills, being really good at some things and really bad at others.

It's all fascinating, but doesn't change anything right away. Eventually, it may someday lead to better treatments, or, we can only hope, a prevention or cure.

Head's up: this is a way geeky question. It's about C++ calling conventions and exception handling. (Is it bad form for me to use this blog as my own personal help forum?)

» read more of: __stdcall and exceptions?... (5 paragraphs)

I don't know about you, but I have a hard time reading assert expressions like this:

assert( id->locktype != NO_LOCK || locktype == SHARED_LOCK );
assert( locktype != RESERVED_LOCK || id->locktype == SHARED_LOCK );

The combination of the not-equal and the logical or is difficult to parse out into an understandable condition which is being asserted as true.

I encountered these today, and put my boolean algebra to use.

» read more of: Asserts and implication... (9 paragraphs)

Since writing Cog and deploying it at work, I've had to tell a few developers that they need to learn a little Python in order to generate new code with Cog. They have been receptive to the idea, but I can see it would go over better if I had a really painless way for them to learn just enough Python for the task.

I've toyed with writing a piece called "Python in a Hurry for Experienced Programmers Who Don't Want to Learn Yet Another Programming Language" (or PIAHFEPWDWTLYAPL for short, natch). But who's kidding who? It won't get done.

Dave Kuhlman's Python 101 is a good approximation of what I had in mind: quick, accurate, to the point. If someone in your life (perhaps you) wants to learn Python without a bunch of propaganda or theoretical noise, point them there.

I've been pretty quiet here. This is due to a number of factors: summer means more time away from the house; my computers have been shifting beneath me; I've been devoting energies to non-web projects; and work has been intense, in both good and bad ways. I hope to do more here soon, I can feel it welling up inside...

Today I've been hacking AppleScript to make it easier for my wife to back up her work from her Mac to our Windows box. Despite all the English-like syntax, I managed to make a new folder on the Windows drive with the date in the name, and copy her important folder into it. But I'm stumped on how to get the Windows drive connected in the first place.

When I use the Record command in Script Editor, and then manually connect the drive, I get code like this:

set target of Finder window 1 to item "Network"
set target of Finder window 1 to folder "MyStreet" of item "Network" of startup disk
set target of Finder window 1 to disk "C"
set target of Finder window 1 to folder "sue" of disk "C"

I'm willing to leave aside the odd repetitive nature of these lines (why does line 2 redo what was done on line 1?) When I run this code while the network drive is already connected, it works fine. But if I run it when the drive is disconnected (which is when I need it), it fails at the third line, which is just where the UI pops up a box title "SMB Mount".

Does anyone know how to do this? Searching Google is proving fruitless. Help!

With all of the new laptops in my life recently, one thing I've gotten good at is changing the Display properties to get the Windows desktop to look the way I want it. The key change is to set every font (window title, message box, icon, everything) to Verdana 10.

» read more of: Windows themes... (10 paragraphs)

Isn't America great? It gives us both the Hummer, and the reaction site FUH2, which consists entirely of pictures of people giving the finger to Hummers. Let democracy bloom!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently switched to a new laptop. Well, the new one was really the same old one with a new installation of all the software, including the OS. The problem must have been in the hardware, because it still sucked. Sucked as in, after rebooting following a complete repair of Dev Studio so that the debugger would work, it bluescreened claiming there was no SOFTWARE hive in the registry.

So now I'm onto another new laptop, this time it really is a new laptop (well, an old laptop, but a different one at least). And I'm re-installing all the software again. What a pain in the ass. For a few days here I've felt electronically homeless. Hopefully order will be restored shortly.

In yet more news of an internet giant snapping up a cool startup that I mentioned over two years ago on this blog, Google acquires Picasa. It's a little less clear what this acquisition means. Is it just to provide better photo service to Blogger users, or to go after Yahoo's photo business?

Yahoo is buying Oddpost. This is clearly a response to Gmail. Yahoo's web mail interface pales next to Google's, so they bought the best web mail provider out there.

I first mentioned Oddpost over two years ago, but at the time they and Yahoo were competitors:

I know that Yahoo has a much better chance of being around a year from now than Oddpost does. But still...

Congratulations, guys. Nice exit strategy.

I've been away, but now I'm back. I swam in the ocean ten days in a row, where the water temperature was an invigorating 60°F (a wet suit helps). I also tried windsurfing, which went very well, thanks to hiring a professional instructor. I didn't use the computer for the whole time, except to look at pictures we'd taken on the beach.

A recent addition to our Dr. Seuss collection is The Sneetches and Other Stories.

It's not one of Dr. Seuss's best — the stories are too uneven. "The Sneetches" is a tale with a moral (don't separate yourself from others by stupid status symbols). The other stories are middling, but "Too Many Daves" held an unexpected surprise. It a two-pager about a woman with 23 children named Dave, and how she wishes she had given them more distinctive names. If your child is amused by mild toilet talk, this one's for you. Listen to this audio recording of me and my six-year-old at the key point in the story (sorry for the poor quality).

If you work in the software industry, there are two movies that are absolutely de rigeur: Star Wars and Office Space. Now a talented group of amateurs has produced a 3½-minute film combining the two: Office Space Wars. It's basically the movie Office Space, but populated with characters from Star Wars. Somehow it all makes sense. Jar Jar as Milton the stapler geek is pure genius.

(If you have trouble with the download link, the original Boing Boing entry will probably have updated mirrors.)