Yesterday I lamented the issues with namespaces in Python. It's not really the namespaces, it's the marketing of namespaces. Newbies to the community (something I still consider myself for most purposes) are drawn to modules thinking that there's a one-to-one relationship between file hierarchy and namespaces. And there is. Well, sort of. You have to read the entire manual or happen to have someone to point out the difference between namespaces and modules to even realize there is a difference.

Keith Casey's recent post on a book recommendations got me thinking. I get asked what books I recommend. I whole-heartedly agree with his first recommendation. The Pragmatic Programmer sits on my desk and is often in my laptop bag. I reach for it if I have five minutes and want to flip through something technical without having to load up my Google Reader. Not on his list is the Passionate Programmer.

Wow! Has it already been nearly a week since ZendCon wrapped up?! Time is flying right now, and with IPC and the holidays right around the corner, I don't see it getting any less hectic. ZendCon was fun. This was my first time attending/presenting this particular conference. It had a distinctly different feel too it than the conferences put on by Marco and company. ZC felt more corporate than tek does, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

On Twitter the other day, I said: I think I might be the first person in history to use John Deer and the iPhone together in the same sentence to illustrate a point. Yeah, I know, there's a typo there; but I fixed it in the title, that counts for something, right? Anyhow, I thought it would do to explain what I meant. I read How you know a phone is rubbish the other day talking about the difference between iPhone ads and everything else.

So I've been kicking around the idea of starting a hacking night/weekend type thing. I think it'd be a blast to take one evening or afternoon a month or maybe even ever week, commit to a particular project and get a bunch of people in the same room and hack on it. We do a lot of yacking at LPDN, this would be an opportunity to do a lot of coding.

Productivity has been one of my biggest challenges. Well, let me rephrase. Consistently producing extremely productive days has been one of my biggest challenges. I'm an overachiever and since that came naturally, I've never had to be scientific about getting things done. Until lately, at least. Photo by rintakumpu The last few years, I've noticed its become harder and harder stay on track. Twitter, IRC, Digg, Email, IM, Facebook, etc.

Me: "I see why he left. Go inside the next time you check in." So much for friendly skies. #americanairlines Jeffery Carouth: What did you do? Started to respond on Facebook, but ran into their limit, so I'm responding on my blog... Went to take my boarding pass that he was handing to me, then snapped that back at me. Let me back up with the context.

Twitter has been taken over this morning by #wtc, #sept11, and a host of other related hash tags. Everyone, understandably, wants to share where they were and what they were doing when America's outlook changed forever. Even "God Bless America" has made it onto the trending topics of the day. We all know the numbers. 3,017 dead, over 6,000 physically injured and many millions more left with scares of a different type, but let's look at some other numbers.

To bring my blog readers up to speed. I posted this status update earlier in the evening: Random question: How have I made it this far and not read The Timeless Way of Building yet? I got this response from Bill Karwin: I just heard about Christopher Alexander within the last year too. Dunno why I had not heard about him previously, given how much he influenced the OO paradigm.

I just finished reading Chad Fowler's Passionate Programmer book. It quickly earned a spot as one of my favorite books on the topic of programming and careers. I highly recommend it, and have been tweaking a book review that I'll post up soon, but I wanted to talk about want chapter that stuck out at me. Making the Hang. The chapter talks about one of Chad's high school jazz buddies, Chris.