E-Scribe

OSCON ends with a half-day that goes by all too quickly.

Keynote speakers Ben Fry talked about Processing (I missed this part, but fellow attendees who hadn’t heard of the language before we very excited and impressed.)

Today’s notes will be a bit more free-form.

I was able to stop by Holocene this evening for the first half of FOSCON III: Really Radical Ruby.

Python and WSGI This morning I took Mark Ramm’s “Modern Web Development with Python and WSGI” tutorial.

I’m here in the great city of Portland, Oregon for the 2007 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, or OSCON.

On July 4th, which in America is a holiday involving even less attention paid to international events than usual, a wonderful thing happened to Django.

I was only there for about half of the latest Western Mass.

Hacking the iPhone!

Damned spammers.

Often after one of our Western Mass.

Back in February I mentioned Scott Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code.

I just wanted to make a quick post to say thank-you to the 20+ people who showed up for Django.June yesterday.

My employer has generously agreed to send me off to OSCON this year and I’m very excited.

As of yestderay, an early version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac is available for download.

That nifty feature Python stole from Haskell (or was it Erlang?)

Palm has announced the Foleo laptop-ish-device, which they are pitching as a smartphone enhancer.

This is exciting – three notable personalities from the Haskell world (Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen) have teamed up to write a new book on Haskell for O’Reilly.

My primary email client for my e-scribe mail is mutt.

Back in January I posted about the idea of having a get-together of Django programmers here in Northampton in June, playing on the Django (Reinhardt) in June music festival happening at the same time.

First we had Shockwave, which begat Flash which begat Flex and Apollo, while meanwhile people have been busy doing Ajax.

I’m an inveterate side-project starter.

You know, I have yet to actually try Twitter, but if this is the kind of thing people say on Twitter then it’s OK with me!

As I hinted in my report several days ago about this server suffering a DOS attack, I’ve taken some measures to prevent a repeat occurrence.

If you tried to reach this blog or anything else on this server this afternoon, you may not have had much luck.

Other than using Akismet, the anti-comment-spam measures I have in place here are pretty primitive.

For a long time I’ve wanted to try working with Bicycle Repair Man, the Python refactoring tool.

This week is so busy that I don’t have time for a longer post, but I wanted to mention DjangoKit (attentive readers may have already spotted it in the sidebar), an OS X application wrapper for Django projects.

Perhaps ironically, one of the great technological advances of OS X over previous versions is the availability of a command line.

As I said in my last post, I haven’t found many tech/software podcasts worth sticking with, but since people have asked, here are a few that I generally like.

I periodically go searching for new tech-related podcasts to make my commute-time more edifying, interesting, or amusing.

Python 3, formerly known as “Python 3000”, is coming.

Thanks to the helpful folks on the #svn IRC channel I learned that it is possible to turn a directory into a svn checkout in-place, i.e. without having to replace the directory itself with a fresh checkout after you svn import.

An opinionated minority of advanced computer users are rebelling against the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) model of HCI.

Preamble This article is two things: A description of one way to use version control with a Django project An introduction to using the darcs distributed version control system in particular First, though, a mini-sermon which someday will be a post in the…

One of my neglected side projects, purportal.com, features a “Scammy spam library” where I share the text of scam emails I’ve been collecting.

Just got back from my second meeting with the Western Mass.

I couldn’t stop myself.

W3C Relaunches HTML Activity The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group Notices W3C Relaunching HTML Activity, Seems Pleased

An energy conservation law from 2005 makes Daylight Savings Time (quaint US custom) begin earlier this year – this coming Sunday, to be exact.

With everybody and their brother trying for the past couple years to bust into the the online calendar market, how is it that calendar.com is sitting there with one of those stupid fake-search-engine advertising pages?

I’m not trying to cop out of learning actual Javascript, honest.

One of the neat things about PyCon, even for those of us who aren’t attending, is that people save up goodies to announce and release during the conference.

I came across this neat Python hack on reddit today, a technique for defining arbitrary infix operators.

Apple and Cisco have reached an agreement on the disputed “iPhone” trademark, and – surprise – Apple gets to keep using it.

Over on the Well we’re having a discussion with Salon.com co-founder (and longtime Well member) Scott Rosenberg about his new book, Dreaming in Code.

When I’m doing Django development work I sometimes find my way to the #django channel on freenode.net to exchange advice.

I was working on a sharp little post about the bewildering array of available Javascript libraries and how I had almost become resigned to collecting lists-of-lists-of-libraries for future analysis.

It a rather astounding open letter entitled “Thoughts on Music” posted to the Apple website today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple “would embrace… wholeheartedly” a music marketplace free of of Digital Rights Management schemes.

I posted one simple example of this a while back, but this one’s much better.