Of all the corpses of my pro­ject­s, there is one thatI feel worse about, which is rst2pdf. I feel bad about aband­non­ing sev­er­al, but rst2pdf was ac­tu­al­ly a use­ful tool, used by a bunch of peo­ple, and that it has nev­er gath­ered enough mo­men­tum with oth­er de­vel­op­ers is sad.

So, I will pick it up. I will spend about 4 hours a week on it. The plan is to:

1. Gath­­er some patch­es that are lin­ger­ing on the is­­sue track­­er

2. Fix some sim­­ple-ish bugs

3. Make an­oth­er re­lease with 1) and 2)

And of course:

4. Not let it fall in dis­­re­­pair again

In the meantime, here is a nice thing I just heard about. Dimitri Christodoulou has hacked rst2pdf so that it can handle the raw:: html directive.

This, dear friends is com­plete­ly nut­s, ab­so­lute­ly out of scope for any giv­en do­cu­tils tool, and just too cool :-)

I will try to hi­jack his code (prop­er cred­it and so on), and in­cor­po­rate it in­to rst2pdf.

And Dim­itri, or any­one else who wants to do cool stuff with rst2pdf: let me know! I will give you com­mit rights im­me­di­ate­ly!

This comes from this thread in the Python Ar­genti­na mail­ing list (which I strong­ly rec­om­mend if you read span­ish).

I was the oth­er day try­ing to do shel­l-scrip­t-­like-things on python (as part of a mon­ster set­up.py) and I was an­noyed that in shell it's easy to do this:

cd foo
bar -baz
cd -

Or this:

pushd foo
bar -baz
popd

Or this:

(cd foo && bar -baz)

And on Python I had to do this, which is ver­bose and ug­ly:

cwd = os.getcwd()
try:
    os.chdir('foo')
    os.system('bar -baz')
finally:
    os.chdir(cwd)

This is what I want­ed to have:

with os.chdir('foo'):
    os.system('bar -baz')

And of course, you can't do that. So, I asked, how do you im­ple­ment that con­text man­ager? I got sev­er­al an­swer­s.

1. That's avail­able in Fab­ric:

   with   cd("foo"):        run("bar")  

2. It's not hard to do:

   class   DirCon­textM(ob­ject):        def   __init__(self,   new_dir):            self.new_dir   =   new_dir            self.old_dir   =   None          def   __en­ter__(self):            self.old_dir   =   os.getcwd()            os.chdir(self.new_dir)          def   __ex­it__(self,   *_):            os.chdir(self.old_dir)  

3. It's even eas­i­er to do:

   from   con­textlib   im­port   con­textman­ag­er    @con­textman­ag­er  def   cd(path):        old_dir   =   os.getcwd()        os.chdir(path)        yield        os.chdir(old_dir)  

4. That's cool, so let's add it to path.py

5. Maybe check for ex­­cep­­tions

   @con­textman­ag­er  def   cd(path):        old_dir   =   os.getcwd()        os.chdir(path)        try:            yield        fi­nal­ly:            os.chdir(old_dir)  

All in al­l, I learned how to do con­text man­ager­s, about con­textlib, about fab­ric and about path.py. Which is not bad for 15 min­utes :-)

I start­ed this book with high hopes. Af­ter al­l, this was a book by a new-ish au­thor that had won Hugo Award for Best Nov­el (2010), Neb­u­la Award for Best Nov­el (2009), Lo­cus Award for Best First Nov­el (2010), John W. Camp­bell Memo­ri­al Award (2010), Comp­ton Crook Award (2010) Comp­ton Crook Award (2010), Goodreads Choice Award Nom­i­nee for Sci­ence Fic­tion (2009). Im­pres­sive, uh?

Well, I don't know what they saw in it. Shal­low char­ac­ter­s, per­va­sive fa­tal­ism dis­guised as depth, mprob­a­ble slang ust be­cause it sounds cool (windup girl? Re­al­ly? That's how they will call ge­net­i­cal­ly en­gi­neered hu­mans in the fu­ture? Windup­s? Yeah, right).

Oh, and it's full of ori­en­tal­is­m. And of things like im­plant­ing gene dogs in­to windups to make them loy­al and sub­servien­t. And ghost­s. Oh, crap, al­most noth­ing in this nov­el worked for me. Most pages had me slap­ping my­self on the fore­head.

I am­not against a sol­id dose of weird. I like weird. I read Miéville, for crap's sake. But this is not weird, it's con­trived.

And don't get me start­ed on the end. The end is such an ob­vi­ous anal­o­gy to Eden it al­most made me puke. It's like the end of Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca, but set on the fu­ture. And with la­dy­boys.

I had a bet­ter time read­ing H. Rid­er Hag­gard's "Al­lan Quater­main", which I saw men­tioned in the awe­some se­ries "The vic­to­ri­an Hugos". Old and dat­ed? Sure. But I would vote for it in­stead of "The Windup Girl" ev­ery day, and twice if they let me.

The ti­tle is a quote from Juras­sic Park, if you were won­der­ing. A girl, chased by di­nosaurs, runs in­to a com­put­er, no­tices it's Unix, says "That's Unix! I know Unix!", and pro­ceeds to hack some­thing or oth­er that lets her es­cape the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned di­nosaurs.

Well, that's how life of­ten feels for me, ex­cept with Math. And with­out di­nosaurs. I am sur­round­ed by trou­ble, some­thing is com­plete­ly bro­ken in a way I can't quite get, things feel just slight­ly weird... and sud­den­ly... that's math! I know math! (of course I don't know math, noone knows math. We all just know some math­).

I may see an ad and no­tice the huge dis­count is just a clev­er­ly dis­guised tiny dis­coun­t. A snip­pet of news may re­veal it­self as com­plete non­sense af­ter a cur­so­ry anal­y­sis. A for­ward­ed mail may be­come slight­ly more an­noy­ing be­cause of its ob­vi­ous stu­pid­i­ty. Be­cause of math.

Math is the tool I have to make sense of things. When the world gets con­fus­ing and scary, if it can be ex­pressed in num­ber­s, it calms me down. Afraid of the fu­ture? Let's con­sid­er the won­ders of com­pound in­ter­est. Scared of death? Well, look at prob­a­bil­i­ties. Need­ing a lit­tle ad­ven­ture? Well, there is game the­o­ry! Need a con­ver­sa­tion starter? You can men­tion you once spent time in class fig­ur­ing out the ho­meo­mor­phism that ex­plains the scene in Flash­dance where the welder re­moves her bra through her sleeve.

Math tells me the world is not per­fec­t. Math tells me the num­bers I see on my com­put­er are not re­al­ly re­al num­ber­s, and can't be trust­ed. Math tells me I can't cross all the bridges in Könis­gerg on­ly once. Math tells me the num­ber one is the most fre­quent num­ber in to­day's pa­per. Math tells me Pla­to was right and there is a uni­verse of pure ideas, and this is but a re­flec­tion.

On the oth­er hand, Math tells me I can cut an or­ange in­to a few pieces, which re­assem­ble in­to two, iden­ti­cal, or­anges. So take what she says with a grain of salt.

One of the most vivid mem­o­ries of my late child­hood was when my fa­ther fi­nal­ly let me to stay at his ta­ble in the Gran Do­ria café, when it was still lo­cat­ed in the dark bow­els of a galería in San­ta Fe's San Martín street.

I was maybe 12, and I had seen him sit there with a cor­ta­do while my moth­er went shop­ping with us, or while I went to one of those things kids go to (artis­tic ex­pres­sion class­es? Pup­petry work­shop?) and it was such a mis­tery. It was like a three hour hole in my dad's life of which I had no in­for­ma­tion.

What would he do there? Who did he talk to? Did he read some­thing? And al­ways there, at the ta­ble when I came back was an emp­ty small cor­ta­do cup.

I sus­pect that's when I start­ed lik­ing the idea of cof­fee. I was, of course, an in­vet­er­ate hot choco­late drinker (El Quil­lá brand, un­known be­yond that city, yet su­pe­ri­or in my mind to any oth­er­s), af­ter a long, long time of drink­ing warm sweet­ened milk. And I know I had tried cof­fee be­fore and hat­ed it, but of course, sit­ting there, I said "un cor­ta­do, por fa­vor". And boy was that thing aw­ful. I did not drink cof­fee again for twen­ty years.

I did learn to like tea, or at least tea with milk, and learned, in col­lege, to drink mate like a sponge. Bit­ter and strong as hel­l, the clos­est caf­feine de­liv­ery mech­a­nism to an IV drip, slow, weak and con­stant over hours. You have not re­al­ly been awake un­til it's 5 AM, you are on your third ther­mos, and it feels like 2P­M. It's like the wrong kind of pill in the Ma­trix.

But then I moved to Buenos Aires and I was alone. And drink­ing mate alone is like drink­ing Vod­ka alone, de­press­ing and dirty, so I start­ed go­ing to cafés and or­der­ing lá­gri­mas. A lá­gri­ma es like a back­wards cor­ta­do. If you get a big cup and put a lá­gri­ma and a cor­ta­do in it you will get a de­cent café con leche. It's a pa­thet­ic bev­er­age, on­ly fit for the emo­tion­al wreck I was at the time.

But it's a gate­way drink. And by 2002 I was drink­ing cor­ta­dos. And by 2006 I had my own espres­so ma­chine and was some sort of caf­feine Kei­th Richard­s, do­ing maybe 10 strong cups a day, buy­ing ex­pen­sive blend­s... and then I had to stop.

On Jan­u­ary 1st 2008 I woke up at 4AM with in­tense chest pain. I thought I was hav­ing a heart at­tack. I walked to the hos­pi­tal and it turned out to be gas­tri­tis. This hap­pened again. And again. Not of­ten, but once ev­ery year, then ev­ery six month­s, then ev­ery mon­th, then four days in a row. And I had to give up cof­fee.

It was hel­l. I was asleep all day and awake all night, not hav­ing my crutch to mod­u­late my sleep. I was grouchy, and an­noy­ing. I cheat­ed. But then I stopped.

Sor­ry dad.