E-Scribe

Over at Rands in Repose there’s a nice, if short, interview with Allan Oddgaard, creator of my favorite text editor TextMate.

In the wonderful small city where I live, Northampton Massachusetts, there’s a fun annual music festival called Django in June.

I’m generally a big fan of Steve Yegge’s rants.

I did some more Haskell reading over the long weekend, mostly from Yet Another Haskell Tutorial*.

A recent discussion on the Well came around to the question of whether the classic Macintosh was “hacker’s” machine or not.

Each year I spend some time doing research on inexpensive web hosting options for my students.

In case you missed it, Apple has a new product.

Syntactically significant whitespace is one of those debating points frequently raised in unproductive language thrashes involving Python.

My friend Matt recently got a microcontroller kit as a present.

In my programming resolutions post last week, I mentioned a short list of languages I was considering learning (or attempting to learn, anyway) in 2007.

In the 1990s Nicholas Negroponte wrote a back-of-the-book column in Wired.

A small but common task in web interfaces, especially “admin” (back-end, content manager) interfaces, is sequencing items.

Kevin Barnes has an interesting post about software rewrites.

I’ve created an updated Plucker version of the Python Library Reference for Python 2.5.

$ sudo portupgrade php5 php5-curl php5-sqlite php5-bla bla bla... ---> Upgrading 'php5 bla bla bla...' ...

It’s that time of year.

My little pastebin site, dpaste.com, has been chugging along nicely since I announced it here about six weeks ago.

Update: Browsing through my Python Cookbook this evening I discovered entry 5.11, “Showing off quicksort in Three Lines”, which includes some code very much like mine below.

Bruce Schneier has an enjoyable article up on Wired News that describes what he learned analyzing some password data from a recent MySpace phishing attack.

Update: It’s out.

E-Scribe is not, strictly speaking, a standards organization.

I suggested to Carl over at Codegolf that the old reverse game would make an interesting challenge.

The OLPC wiki says: If you are able to program in Python then you can start building OLPC applications right now.

Here it comes: “Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered,” Ballmer said.

It took me about a year to get around to it, but I finally set up that nightly cronjob to fetch the Django documentation into a Plucker file.

I’ve re-launched my little Django-powered pastebin (formerly paste.e-scribe.com) under its own shiny new $8 domain name: dpaste.com.

It’s now official: right-minded people hate those little “Blog me, digg me, add me to your feed baby!”

Congratulations to Adrian and Jacob on the launch of their GFDL-licensed book on Django.

Today, ACCESS, a Japanese company that acquired PalmSource (not to be confused with Palm, which… oh, never mind) earlier this year, announced that they will be absorbing the PalmSource brand.

My personal record of using revision control for source code has been pretty spotty.

After seeing a similar offering from the Web 2.0 pastebin Attachr I couldn’t resist.

If you just bought a MacBook Pro (especially the 15"), this will hurt a little: the new ones out today (same prices) all have FW800 in addition to FW400, up to 200GB drives, up to 3GB RAM, and a 6x dual-layer SuperDrive.

This past spring I posted about a simple pastebin app I wrote using Django.

(There’s got to be a name for blog posts that you make just so you’ll be able to remember something later – or so somebody who is banging their head against a problem you just solved can find your solution via Google magic.

I posted about Songbird when it was released back in February, but to be honest I’d sort of forgotten about it since then.

My spam stats page was broken for a while, but I’ve fixed it.

Jason Kottke has a great list of unusual, funny and/or potentially embarrassing things that can be uncovered using the new Google Code search.

The venerable Eudora e-mail client is going open source, Mozilla style.

With English teachers for parents and a degree in literature, I’ve always felt a certain burden to uphold consistent, proper English usage.

The anti-spam operation Spamhaus, based in the UK, is being sued in an Illinois court by an individual named David Linhardt, who is listed in Spamhaus’ Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database.

LZW – that is, the formerly patented Lempel-Ziv Welch compression algorithm – is free today.

One of the great things about Django is its simple and flexible URL handling.

Somewhat belatedly I’ve started using Jason Orendorff’s path module for Python.

Like every other web site/service/app/community/thingy that allows individual user contributions, there’s spam on Delicious too.

Suzanne Stefanac’s new book, Dispatches from Blogistan, is out.

In an effort to shed time-sucking side projects in the past couple years I’ve let a number of sites go dark and domain names lapse.

A little-used new feature in the Displays preference pane in OS X 10.4 is rotation in 90-degree increments.

I was wondering today what ever happened to the town of Half.com when I discovered a recent post at designobserver.com that answers this very question.

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, but when is Talk Like a Pilot Day?

This is a lazyweb request – I’m looking for something but I don’t even know if it exists.