SimPy 2.0 has been released! I haven't played with it much yet, but it looks like a substantial improvement over 1.9. The object oriented API requires about 10% more code for small models, but should pay off for larger ones.

PylonsHQ has been remodeled using CouchDB as the database. The most interesting Python web framework meets the most interesting non-relational database. It'll be interesting to see how this works out.

Iron Mind: Stronger Minds, Stronger Bodies by Randall Strossen covers psychological aspects of weight training in considerable detail. While it contains some useful insights, many of the points are presented as stories which seemed contrived to me.

Not enough snow near by, so my wife and I went to Frisco Sunday and Monday to try out our new snowshoes at the Nordic Center there. Since it was our first time out, I booked a private tour. If you can walk, you can snowshoe, but there is some technique involved, and having someone experienced to guide us was helpful. Snowshoeing is easy on bum knees, and we had a great time.

Volkswagen showed it's BlueSport concept roadster at Detroit. It looks like a great combination of fun and fuel economy.

Good news from the SimPy mailing list:

The Palm Pre looks like a worthy successor to my trusty Treo. Not ready to make the plunge yet, but this is tempting. If only it were world wide capable.

The small size, speed, and ease of embedding promised by Lua caught my attention, so I downloaded it and began playing. I bought a copy of Programming in Lua, 2nd. ed. to facilitate my explorations. The book is an excellent introduction to the language.

Lua is, for the most part, fairly concise, but requires explicit declaration of local variables which adds some annoying verboseness. I prefer variables to be implicitly local and explicitly declared global. Lua's origin as an interactive data description language probably drove this choice. It is lexically scoped like Scheme, but without all the parentheses and without Python's syntactically significant indentation, so variable scope is determined by code chunks. A chunk may be file, a function, control structure, or a single line. Single line chunks are quite common when using the interactive shell and declaring all your variables global to do much of anything would be a bigger annoyance. I prefer the Python solution, but will keep Lua in the quiver if I need it for resource constrained situations.

John Ringo's The Last Centurion tells the tale of an American soldier dealing with apocalypse. The premise of the story is to suppose that things generally continue along the path of the early 2000's until 2019, when our planet is hit with both a significant cooling event and a global bird flu epidemic that decimates the population.

With the Four Horsemen on the loose, Bandit Six finds himself responsible for a huge cache of arms and supplies in Iran after most U.S. military forces have been pulled back to the States to deal with the emergencies at home. He has only an augmented company to provide security and eventually has to destroy the weapons and try to get his command across the chaotic Middle East to friendlier territory. They have to fight their way home, rearranging the map in the process.

In this fast paced novel, Ringo explores a possible future that turns a lot of today's presumptions inside out. Current trends are not a reliable indicator of future performance. It's a good read that I found hard to put down.