failing like never before

I stopped by Best Buy on my way to the grocery store to have a quick look at the much lauded Apple ipad. My opinion summed up in one word:

meh.

Pros:

• shiny
• long battery life
• more portable then a typical laptop

Cons:

• almost impossible to achieve a reasonably fast typing speed on it
• shiny (which results in fingerprints and glare)
• does nothing that my laptop can't do
• can't do a lot of things my laptop can do
• costs $150 more then the refurbished laptop I just bought
• closed platform
• wide-aspect movies look weird on a 4:3 screen
• back-lit screens are not ideal for reading books
• development work for the ipad must be done in Objective  C
• less portable then a Motorola Droid or Nexus One (or even an iphone)

In other fail news:

A week ago, I got a big batch of images that needed to be resized and displayed on one of the websites that I manage. This required that I crop and resize each photo so that it be exactly the correct size to be displayed on the site, a time consuming and quite laborious task. So I figured I could probably whip up a script with Python and ImageMagick to help automate the process, with idea being that my program would allow the user to simply highlight the "relevant" area of an image and then the program would crop and resize it to the correct size.

I ended up having to use wxPython to do all the GUI type stuff, which meant I had to spend some time learning the ins and outs of GUI programming seeing as how my experience with that kind of stuff is fairly limited. So for the past week, I've been spending about an hour a day learning wxPython and knocking together a sort of program to make my life easier. Today, I looked at my image resizer program and realized I had created some of the most god-awful code ever seen by mankind.  It was basically 100+ lines of uncommented and completely unintelligible spaghetti code.

I threw my monster out and did the cropping and resizing by hand, which ended up taking me less than an hour.