While the best solution would be for these comments to be deleted, I suspect other people do not sympathize with me on this.

Another related problem is a photo associated with a large number of pools, often resulting from the “awards”. This requires a large amount of scrolling to see the tags and photo properties.

I propose a workaround using GreaseMonkey, and I shall call it “FlickrTidy”.

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First off is expressions and lambda

>>> def p(x): print(x)
...  
>>> f = lambda x:p(x) 
>>> f(5) 
5
>>> f = lambda x:print(x)
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    f = lambda x:print(x)
                     ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

You cannot put an expression in a lambda. What’s more there is no implicit return value in Python. There was a thread about this, for those of you with access to the MSCS forums. After that last post I wasn’t sure how to reply

Next up is scope

>>> def counter(x):
...     base = x
...     def inc():
...             oldbase = base
...             base = base + 1
...             return oldbase
...     return inc
... 
>>> c = counter(5)
>>> c()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "<stdin>", line 4, in inc
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'base' referenced before assignment

“Oh, but that should happen as base shouldn’t leak into inc!”

>>> def counter(x):
...     base = x
...     def inc():
...             oldbase = base
...             return base
...     return inc
... 
>>> c = counter(5)
>>> c()
5

Python is happy to read variables and mutate objects, but introducing assignment makes Python come up with a new variable for you. The obvious argument is that this counter should be a class. Perhaps true, but it still caught me out.

puts $_.chomp.gsub(/../) { |b| b.hex.to_s + "."}.chop

The algorithm takes an IP address compactly represented in hex and returns the dotted decimal form.

Parsec is wonderful! I’ve been using it for a tetrinet protocol decoder so that was the first thing on my mind.

main = do
  (h:_) <- getArgs
  case parse (count 4 hexbyte) "Arguments" h of
    Right r -> putStrLn $ tail $ concatMap (('.':) . show) r
    Left e -> fail $ "Invalid input\n" ++ (show e)

hexbyte :: Parser Int
hexbyte = count 2 hexDigit >>= return . read . ('0':) . ('x':)

Which seems fairly easy to follow and has some error reporting free from Parsec, but I figure a parser library might be overkill for this task.

Turning to more “raw” Haskell, mostly the useful functions in the Data.List library, gives

main = getArgs >>= putStrLn . concat . intersperse "." .
       map (show . readByte) .  unfoldr lf . head
       where
         readByte :: String -> Int
         readByte = read . ('0':) . ('x':)
         lf [] = Nothing
         lf t  = Just $ splitAt 2 t

They’re all following approximately the same algorithm of a mapping on every two characters. However the gsub(/../) { |b| … } appears to be a very compact notation which I have been unable to match.

I do have a “camera” in my phone but it really is hopeless. As far as I’m aware, the argument goes “I want a camera in my phone so it’s always with me”. I intend to keep my real camera for this purpose, however some people seem to take this a little too far.

Of course, take a look at my photos

It’s still in development and there are some obvious things that are missing, but definately something to keep an eye on.

And yes, this post was written with Flock.

I used the phrase “notify you” as this is what took the most time to do. There is a notification management daemon running which broadcasts the messages generated by the pros.and.cons script. To get this working nicely over HTTP, the background request is made to a script that returns either when there is something to report, or a period of time has elapsed. Notice the typical chain of events would cause a notification to be sent, an instance of the client script to return and the result to be displayed, such that there is no wasteful polling.

Here’s hoping for some more!