E-Scribe

Greetings from Boston – specifically, BarCampBoston.

A significant difference between developing Django sites versus static-HTML-based approaches (among which I count PHP and the like) is that static files, aka “media”, live in a dedicated spot.

If you use Django’s admin application, you’re familiar with its “Recent Actions” sidebar.

In the shell, emacs is my editor of choice.

I run my own mail server.

When I created dpaste, I tried to make it both a simple browser-based tool and a simple RESTful API.

“I’m a PHP programmer and I want to check out this Django thing.

There are connections between programming and my favorite ice cream.

This post is not about any of my usual software or hardware topics, but it still is nerdy.

It will surprise few that I have not yet given Apple $10 for the privilege of upgrading my iPod touch (“iPt”) firmware from 1.1.5 to 2.x.

During the 40 months or so of this blog’s life I’ve worked to keep it focused on my technical and professional interests, not personal stories.

I just filed a ticket with the Google AppEngine project requesting the source to GoogleAppEngineLauncher, with the idea that this would make a very cool Django developer’s aid on OS X – much like Locomotive for Rails.

At the Western Mass.

This began as a quick reply to a discussion on the Well about a recent posting from John Gruber which links to a hit list from Crackberry.com about the iPhone.

This is a function that takes an integer and returns its ordinal representation, e.g. “1st” for 1 and so on.

This has been going around – give people a peek at what commands you run most often.

People sure are excited about the Google App Engine.

There is a classic set of programming exercises called “Ninety-Nine Prolog Problems”.

I attempted to make a Super-8 animated-Lego version of Star Wars when I was 14 – in 1982 or so.

I’m doing a small experiment in open source distribution.

Very cool news – Mercurial 1.0 has been released.

Tonight we had a special edition of the Western Mass.

Update: As of 2012, the primary Django repo is on GitHub.

A former colleague from my days in print design (and a wonderfully loyal reader of my blog to boot) writes to ask whether he should learn Python.

Just in time for Pycon, material from our new book is now available on the Safari “Rough Cuts” service.

From a post at Rogue Amoeba: Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s Allow applications to run in background on iPhone Allow access to root user on iPhone A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed Add…

I just wanted to post a quick note for anyone who is in my region and interested in functional programming that the Western Mass.

I just came across this list in an old “should blog about this someday” file.

My first week with the iPt has been a thorough validation of my decision to jump ship from the Palm platform.

I bought a new Netgear wifi router for the house today, to replace a crappy old D-Link that didn’t really work with either my MacBook Pro or my new iPod touch.

I bought my Palm TX in December 2005, a few months after it came out.

Most readers are probably familiar with the fact that companies or organizations sometimes post “bounties” for open source products, or features, that they would like to see developed.

For several years I maintained a hodge-podge of little web-based utilities at toolbot.com.

In 2007, I took a whack at learning Haskell as my Language of the Year.

Update: As of 2012, the primary Django repo is on GitHub.

Python has two seemingly similar sequence types, tuples and lists.

Since January 12th: Valid comments accepted by Akismet: 36 Spam comments accepted by Akismet: 17 Spam comments rejected by Akismet: 814 I don’t have a number for false positives, but given that I’ve received zero email complaints I’ll assume the number is…

OK, this is an ugly hack.

The latest This Week in Django podcast, out today, has an interview with me.

During a quest for things that might make using my spare laptop – an old 800MHz, 256MB thing running Ubuntu – a more zippy experience, I came across “wmii”.

At work I manage projects with Trac.

I just learned that TIOBE (who maintain a popular but controversial listing of programming language popularity statistics) declared Python the “language of 2007”.

I launched this blog in July of 2005.

Another successful session of non-stop technical chatter in the back of our favorite chain restaurant.

Lately I’ve been trying out the Mercurial distributed version control system on some real projects.

First alpha release of Python 3.0 (formerly Python3000) is out today.

The biweekly Western Massachusetts Developers Meeting was small tonight, but still high-quality.

From Apple’s release notes on the latest QuickTime update (emphasis mine): QuickTime 7.2 addresses critical security issues and delivers: Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player Updates to the H.264 codec Numerous bug fixes Finally!

At the end of this old post by John Nack at Adobe I found corroboration of my feeling that putting “RAW” (as in, raw image files from digital cameras) in all caps is silly.

Shared hosting is starting to feel pretty quaint in the face of cheap and easy virtualization, but I still have some clients who use it.