The new streetcar line that runs from Pioneer Square to First Hill and Capitol Hill opened on Saturday. I rode it this evening to get from First & Jackson to Broadway & Pine, a three-mile ride that took a full half-hour in the early evening. The streetcar is clean and pleasant and tem­porar­i­ly free to ride, but it has no dedicated lane. Car drivers are still un­ac­cus­tomed to it and the streetcar driver had to blow his horn several times at cars that were blocking our progress.

The new light rail extension line will open in March, connecting Capitol Hill and Husky Stadium. It’s several months early and more than $100 million …continue.

I came across Spoon Theory today:

The basic idea is that [the chron­i­cal­ly ill] have a limited number of spoons available for the day and each action will cost a given number of them – the more demanding the task, the more spoons would be required. The phrase "running low on spoons" can be a useful way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing the need for rest

—Emily Band

I see this sometime with Emma: her various illnesses and sen­si­tiv­i­ties catch up with her and she has little capacity to get things done for a few days. At other times, such as today, she has quite a reasonable amount of energy or “spoons”.

I enjoy good health, as confirmed at my …continue.

Bob Howard is a com­pu­ta­tion­al de­mo­nolo­gist working for the secretive British agency known as the “Laundry”. Some very nasty people are trying to hasten the end of the world, there’s a mole in the Laundry, and Bob’s superior, the mys­te­ri­ous­ly ageless Angleton, is missing. Bob moves back and forth between vicious office politics and es­cha­to­log­i­cal terrors. The Fuller Memorandum is fast-paced and darkly humorous. Rec­om­mend­ed.

Sequel to The Jennifer Morgue. More at Charlie Stross’s Crib Sheet and the Laundry Files Wiki.

I figured out why I saw the following error every time I ran Nose:

======================================================================
ERROR: Failure: TypeError (type() takes 1 or 3 arguments)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ".../lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose-1.3.7-py2.7.egg/nose/loader.py", line 523, in makeTest
    return self._makeTest(obj, parent)
  File ".../lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose-1.3.7-py2.7.egg/nose/loader.py", line 582, in _makeTest
    return MethodTestCase(obj)
  File ".../lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose-1.3.7-py2.7.egg/nose/case.py", line 345, in __init__
    self.inst = self.cls()
TypeError: type() takes 1 or 3 arguments

It turns out that one module was importing a class called TestApi which had a class­method called run_in­te­gra­tion_tests. The module itself had no tests; it just declared a class called TestO­b­fus­cat­ed­Mix­in, which used some …continue.

We attended the Sherlock Seattle Mini-Convention at the Broadway Per­for­mance Hall. It was much more lightly attended than previous previous Sherlock Seattle con­ven­tions.

The final event of the evening was a Mystery Science Theater–style treatment of Sherlock Holmes (2010 film) given by some of the con’s organizers. We had seen Young Sherlock Holmes get the MST3K treatment at last year’s con and the show was quite funny. This show was also funny, but I was appalled at just how bad Sherlock Holmes was. (I suppose that’s the point of getting the MST3K treat­men­t—the movie stinks and deserves to be heckled.) It was totally incoherent and anachro­nis­tic and ineptly made.

Generators decouple iteration from the code that uses the results of the iteration.

—David Beazley, Generators

[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

Python generators have a variety of uses. One such is to lazily evaluate sequences. Another is for coroutines. Yet another is to re­cur­sive­ly traverse a tree or a graph, yielding an iterable sequence.

Consider this simple tree of nodes:

node_tree = Node(
    'a', [
        Node('b', [
            Node('e', [
                Node('g')
    

Benjamin Black (the mystery-writing pseudonym of Irish novelist, John Banville) channels Raymond Chandler as he writes a Philip Marlowe novel. Robert Parker wrote a couple of books about a quarter-century ago with the approval of the Chandler estate. Black’s book is also authorized.

The book has all the familiar elements of a Marlowe novel: the femme fatale of the title, the idle rich, ungrateful offspring and murderous staff, cynical cops, the baking heat of California, beatings and booze, Marlowe cracking wise, and the trademark Chan­dleresque similes.

If you like Chandler, you’ll probably like Black’s con­tri­bu­tion to the canon.

Apparently, there’s no standard for writing dates in Canada. I assumed that Canada used the annoying US-style convention of MM/DD/YYYY. I didn’t realize that the British-style DD/MM/YYYY is also widespread. How ex­as­per­at­ing!

Personally, I always write YYYY-MM-DD whenever I can get away with it, as God and ISO 8601 intended. A bill is before the Canadian parliament aiming at stan­dard­iz­ing on year-month-day formats.

I wanted to clean out my local PostgreSQL database today so that I could restore a database dump taken on another system, but every time I ran the psql utility, I got:

psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
    Is the server running locally and accepting
    connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

I tried various things, including restarting Postgres several times, but nothing helped. Eventually, I thought to look in /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log, where I saw several error messages indicating that Postgres 9.5 couldn’t read data files created with 9.4. At that point, I realized that during my most recent brew update; …continue.

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a day that honors the legacy of a great American. It’s a Federal Holiday, but only 37% of employers give off Martin Luther King Day. Apparently, 37% is an all-time high for MLK Day and it’s also higher than the other three holidays that most Americans don’t get, Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day [sic], and Veterans’ Day.

I’ve worked in America for a quarter century, but it was only at the first job, when I was a Brown University employee, that I got those secondary Federal holidays off.

Not only is America one of the least-generous countries for vacation days, it’s also one of the least generous for holidays. American …continue.