Gekitsuu's Geekery

I have had one busy Sunday night (which is the first day of my weekend). Last night I had to go into the office briefly to fix a problem with the backup server, I did 2 full loads of dishes, 1 full load of laundry, read 7 chapters in the Learning Python Second Edition from Oreilly Press, and worked on my current computer situation with my new file server. Because I skipped the gym last night I plan on leaving shortly to do what will be the first full body weight lifting session I've done since I was a teenager. I fully expect to fail to do everything I want to do at the gym tonight just because I'll run out of steam. I have been reading the Python book and salivating at some of the things Python lets you do. I really am starting to think that the main reason Perl people hold so tightly to the idea that Perl should be used for everything is because of CPAN. The fact that Perl can do nearly everything doesn't make it the best tool for the job. I can't wait to start doing some benchmarks on large file processing and see which is faster. Because of the way that Python works I was thinking I may use it to my my fractal generator instead of Perl. Python seems to handle math better which would make it better suited. I haven't decided what reading material I'm going to take with me to the gym but I find myself wishing I had the hard copy of the Python book so I could bring that. The RHCE book is very dry and something I need to concentrate on more than I can when I'm peddling like a madman on the bike. One of my co-workers let me try out his iSight camera on my iBook and I don't know if it was the lighting as I suspect but the video looked much clearer recording on his PowerBook than it did on my iBook. There was an article on NewsForge about RSS vs ATOM for news feeds and I haven't read the article yet but I wanted to record my view on it before I did. After working on a program to parse RSS feeds and put them into emails (a similar idea to RSS2email by Aaron Swartz) and I started to realize that RSS and its many versions make for some really ugly hacks to parse them correctly. ATOM seems to have a better initial design so it hasn't had to grow and mutate like RSS did. I feel so strongly that ATOM has done things right that I've considered pulling the RSS feed off my website and just allowing ATOM. I haven't done that and may never because i believe in supporting as many different interfaces to my weblog as possible but it is a debate that should be happening.