Josh vs. the Snake

13 Feb 2007

I’ve been battling a Python for the better part of a week now. Mostly just in terms of creating a nice habitat for it to inhabit, so that we can gather all manner of useful information about the habits of pythons and interactions of humans with things that the python does. I’d been winning most fights and attributing the fact they arose at all to my slowly becoming familiar with the way it worked at all.

I’d been doing some research on this particular kind of snake for a couple of months before I decided it looked like a GoodThingâ„¢ to be wrestling with, so I knew a bit about it relative to something else that I knew a bit about (enough to be dangerous, as is apparently the case with 95% of the world’s PHP developers). I knew that it was slightly more strongly typed than PHP, but didn’t really think that was something I’d have to know about.

Ba-baauummm.

Error in formatting:__str__ returned non-string (type int)

Oh, come on, just play with the pretty little number. Grumble grumble.

I am in the strangest place right now. It’s 1.30 in the morning on a weeknight and I’m writing code, but I’ve spent most of the day going between Photoshop and a cocktail of a couple of shell sessions mixed with phpMyAdmin and a bit of Django documentation. It’s cool being able to write useful code again (and, better still, I am working on code to solve problems I’d be itching to solve for our own ministry context at TACKLES/Matthias but am being paid to do it under the auspices of the CYIADA project, which means I can afford to spend more time and do it properly!), but it’s possibly even cooler to have ready access to great design tools at home since last week — quality tools are an awesome blessing!