Pythoneering

I’ve had a Flickr account for a couple of years, but haven’t done much with it until now. all that time, I’ve been accumulating more and more digital photos, initially from a small compact camera and, more recently, from a digital SLR (a Canon EOS 400D).

Over the bank holiday weekend, I finally got around to uploading a few pictures - among them the shot that you see here. I also took the opportunity to hook up this blog to my Flickr account; in fact, I’ve posted this blog entry from Flickr!

In the past, I’ve used Subversion for the one-person software development projects with which I’m often involved. Just recently, however, I thought I’d give Mercurial a spin, having heard good things about it and seen a lot of people start using it.

So far, I’m impressed - particularly by the ease with which you can clone a repository to create a new branch for development, and then merge changes made there back into the original. Another nice feature is the ability to view repository changelogs with a web browser, courtesy of Mercurial’s built-in web server. And then there’s the fact that large parts of it are written in Python…

I gave my last Secure Computing lecture today - the last ever Secure Computing lecture, as it happens - and my students prepared a little ’surprise’ for me. Halfway into the lecture, “Never Gonna Give You Up” began blaring out from beneath the lectern!

On investigating further, I discovered a notebook computer and miniature speakers, carefully concealed behind a poster. Kudos to Chris Worfolk for making it happen. Now if only he’d hacked my laptop and made that Rick Astley video appear in place of the slides…