Apologies to the Python community

Apparently planet python is pulling all content off this blog to its RSS feed. Which meant a rant I wrote this morning that was completely off topic went to the entire Python community. I'm contacting the staff behind planet.python.org and asking that they point at the correct feed so this doesn't happen again.

Apologies to Katie

Katie Cunningham is a good friend of mine. We met about nine years ago through a mutual acquaintance. We had a number of similar interests all tied to general geekery and kids. I've always appreciated her honesty, humor, and work ethic. In December 2006 I got her a job at NASA, which eventually got her involved in Python and various related communities.

One thing I like about Katie is that she likes to cook and she always does so from scratch. Her focus is on a mix of various savory dishes and baking. Since she takes care to find out her friend's allergies and preferences, it is a rare moment when people do not like what she cooks. One of my absolute favorites is a blackberry cobbler that she makes, which she does not destroy with loads of sugar. She knows that when taken in quantity sugar adversely affects me and that I also love blackberries.

I'm good at entrees and appetizers and sides, but baking is beyond me unless I use a pre-mix. So I really respect what Katie does.

So anyway, recently on twitter when she was discussing bagels with Jacob Kaplan-Moss I called her out publicly for putting icing on cheesecake. As an Ashkenazi Jew from family who spent generations in the New York area (although I was raised in Maryland) I'm picky about cheesecake. Legal toppings are berries, and going crazy with toppings is having those berries in a heavy glaze.

Well, it turns out that the illegal toppings cheesecake instance was not done by Katie, but rather her mother. Katie's mom is a wonderful lady who is also a cook whose work is worth tasting and all around wonderful person. But she puts a thin layer of sour cream icing on cheesecake. While I'm sure somewhere there is a Jewish law against illegal toppings on cheesecake, Katie's mom's defense is that she is not a Jew. And I certainly appreciate her Southern style fare.

So, for what it is worth, this is my public, formal apology to Katie. She rocks and if you are smart, you'll convince her to bake for you.

The end of my Feedfeeder story

Another post about Plone... but this time about me and not about Plone.

For about 18 months I have wrestled with consuming broken RSS feeds to pick up image of the day fields stipulated by customers. These are feeds so broken that no RSS parser, including the masterful Feedparser, can handle them (for example, one image of the day feed usually puts the image in the RSS header and changes that each day - no history is maintained). They aren't actually RSS, they just possess a file name that ends with '.rss'. Plus, periodically the way they are written changes so custom logic fails.

I have forked Reinout van Rees FeedFeeder project, and even proposed complicated logical revisions to handle broken these broken feeds and their shifting implementation. I called it Feedfeeder v2. Reinout always seemed hesitant, and I watched as other people extended on his work and despaired. I knew something was wrong but couldn't put my finger on it. I hesitated to work on it, even though funding for it was readily available.

Then between Spacebook, Pinax, and other efforts I shelved this effort for months, hiding my head in the virtual sand. And yet I knew it needs to be addressed. How could I handle something that broke the otherwise wonderful Feedparser?

During Pycon 2009 I came up with the answer. I took an excellent tutorial on html scraping and learned lots of little tricks to reinforce my skills with BeautifulSoup. You see, screen scraping is a secret pleasure I have. Scraping out a bit of data from a page is like a little puzzle. When I talked about this to someone, in the middle of my discussion with them the answer became clear as day.

The answer was to turn the problem from a RSS interpretation problem to a simple web page scraping puzzle.

1. Fetch via urllib the XML file that pretends to be RSS.
2. Parse it using BeautifulSoup or html5lib.
3. Get all the images listed.
4. Discard all but the largest image.
5. Guess out the meta-data from the XML file and store that for the image.

Problem solved.

Now I just need to make a Plone 3 package to do this for me and my angst is finished.

My apologies Reinout for the time spent on trying to cook a solution via Feedfeeder. Thank you for your insights and your extreme patience. I think you tried to tell me to take a different path.

Apologies to Chris

Who is Chris and why does he get an apology?

Chris is a co-worker of mine. He's more than a co-worker, he saved my soul. About three years ago he introduced me to Python, SVN, Trac, and Plone. He also first pointed me at Pylons and Django. He has pointed me at open source alternatives. He fended for me with certain NASA functionaries. He is honest, visionary, brilliant, opinionated, creative, funny, witty, well-spoken, principled, and has helped me in a thousand ways. If he was the boasting type I would probably still be calling him my python mentor.

That is Chris.

So why the apology?

This past Friday afternoon another coworker was asked to give a certain relatively important someone (aka a VIP) a short bulleted list (5-6 items) of innovations on our big project to go onto that VIP's periodic personal review which was due the next day. Not to NASA. Not to anyone important. It was just the normal sort of crud that goes into self-reviews. The other coworker turned to me and suggested I provide the list.

And then I turned to Chris and asked him for some input. Chris refused for several good reasons:

• A short list did not do justice to our project.
• A longer list would require effort that would require approval. Approval from our manager who had left for the weekend.
  

At this point what I should have done is said, 'Nevermind, I'll just do it myself.' If he got pissed then things would have rolled over eventually and we would grumble/laugh about it over drinks at some point. However, instead I tried to convince Chris that this was no big deal and that we ought to spend five minutes getting it done.

See, cause I really respect Chris, I'm always looking for his approval on things. And sometimes thats the wrong thing to do. I should have stopped listening to him, told him definitively that I was going to do this, and done it. Instead I waffled, fighting my desire to get his approval and my knowledge that a battle over a five minute task was not a battle worth fighting.

I did some stuff in retrospect that looks stupid. The worst was that I wrote an email to my boss, sent it, then got Outlook to recall it. When I found that Chris had written one of his masterful detailed lists I didn't tell him that his effort, while exemplary, really complicated things for me.

You see, some battles are worth fighting. Some are not. I agree that the list I was asked to provide did not do our project justice, but I also recognize that this was NOT intended for general distribution. Provoking this fight wouldn't score a victory of any value, just make a VIP's job a little harder, and incur their ire. I have no problem with fighting good fights, but in my opinion this fight just wasn't one of those good fights.

A better fight would have been for documented processes, requirements software, nixing the cubes, collaborative software, and for work on new and exciting projects.

So late that night after 5-10 minutes of effort I put together a list and sent it to the VIP. Then I started to think about sending a note of explanation to Chris. I note I never sent. Why? General stupidity on my part. I was trying to figure out how to write it in a way that kept his approval. I procrastinated over the weekend, which really was not the thing to do.

Chris found out on Monday what I had done. From his perspective I'm a/an @#$%-#$@ for not only providing the list and for not being straight with him. I can't really say I can blame him. I knew the former was going to happen, the latter could have been avoided if I had been forthright from the start.

I'm not sure anything I write can make a difference at this point. Apologies are just words, and words are easy to say. Which is why if I'm going to say anything its going to be public and in a place associated with me.

My apologies Chris.