I didn't follow Rocketboom daily, but I did watch it frequently. I watched it today with Joanne. I liked Amanda better. First thing that crossed my mind is that they picked up another pretty face to replace Amanda. Why does it have to be a pretty face? Is Rocketboom just another "pretty face vocalizing quip-ridden news"?
I just discovered the Python Sidebar and I'm not sure how I got along without it.
I upgraded my Nokia 770 to Internet Tablet OS 2006 and it's fantastic. It's faster, more responsive, and more stable. Additionally, there's an application manager that downloads from a repository just like Debian which is _hugely_ awesome. The browser is faster, too.
My only issue so far is that I haven't quite got the knack of launching the thumbboard. At some point, I'll look into that.
Two weekends ago (June 23rd, 24th and 25th), S and I and S's parents went up to Schenectady, NY to the Old Songs Festival. It was fantastic! Contra dancing, Shetland fiddling, flat-picking, blues, bluegrass, Celtic harp, ... I had a great time and the experience was educational, inspirational, and in various ways eye-opening.
Last year at Old Songs, S's parents won a guitar. I've been playing it on and off for a year or so now and it's got a great sound to it. It's very different from my Guild American--I think the best way to describe it is that it's less muddy and it's brighter. Though part of that could be due to a need to change the strings on my Guild American.
I attended a few workshops of Beppe Gambetta, a flatpicker from Genoa, Italy. He taught one workshop on stretching and gymnastics for better flatpicking, most of it focusing on making the left hand more agile. Great stuff.
Jay Mankita had a song called "They Lied" which I've been humming since I heard it--it's catchy.
Great experience. I'm looking forward to next year, though S said that the festival coincides with GA, so I think we'll wait a couple years before going again.
On a side note, I brought my Nokia 770 with several ebooks and Mahjong on it. It was super useful.
I finally released the contributed plugins pack for PyBlosxom 1.3. To be honest, I really wanted to get around to testing everything more, but it's a big project and I never made the time to do it. Rather than sitting on it forever, I decided to release it now. It's vaguely possible that someone out there will download it, discover that the plugins they're interested in are terribly tested, and help fixing the real problem which is that the only testing we do on the PyBlosxom project is anecdotal testing ("well, it works for me...") by setting up some kind of magical testing framework.
More details on the PyBlosxom site.
I found this article amusing.
Signs you're a crappy programmer (and don't know it) (Damien Katz)
On a slightly similar but different note, I'm working on upgrading a massive codebase from Java 1.3 to Java 1.5. Painful. Very painful.
I applied a few patches that I've received over the last month or so. I'll hopefully release the contributed plugins pack--there have been a lot of updates since I last released it (ages and ages ago).
Next step is to fold some more documentation into the manual and figure out to handle contributed plugins better. Need to figure out how to fix the problem that the ones I don't use on my blog are of unknown quality and different versions of the different plugins work with different version of PyBlosxom. I'd also like to re-organize the plugins into categories that make more sense.
At one point I was planning on building a page on the web-site tracking things that need to be done for PyBlosxom. Now I think I'll just put the list in a TODO.txt file in Subversion along with everything else. It occurs to me we probably had one at one point, but I probably deleted it.
Mark Edgar's PuTTYcyg patch is awesome. I've always had difficulties with the Cygwin console and using PuTTYcyg makes me happier. Definitely worth looking at if the Cygwin console issues (resize issues, fonts, copy/paste issues, ...) make life irritating.
I'm building a wedding site that contains mostly static material but has some material that's reminsicent of CMS and some material that's database-driven, too.
I surveyed the scene of Python web-frameworks and settled on Pylons for various reasons but mostly because:
I liked their website. It was easy to figure out what it does, how it's architected, and I can find what I'm looking for.
It's built on Paste. Paste is great infrastructure.
It supports WSGI. Makes it easier to interoperate with other applications.
The project is healthy.
I've spent 40 minutes or so fiddling with the site so far with only a
few minor issues which required me to go poking through documentation.
One of the issues is that I have a series of templates in my templates/
dir and I uncommented out the commented out code in the
template.py controller so it's like this:
from weddingwww.lib.base import * class TemplateController(BaseController): def view(self, url): from pkg_resources import resource_exists if resource_exists('weddingwww', url+'.myt'): m.subexec(url+'.myt') else: m.abort(404, "File not found '%s'" % url)
That doesn't seem to work as I'd expect. For example, if I go to
http://localhost:5000/meeting, the url parameter ends up as meeting
but the resources_exist returns a false even though there's a meeting.myt
file in my templates directory.
After fiddling with this and trying to figure out where pkg_resources is defined, I just commented the code out and changed it to this:
from weddingwww.lib.base import * class TemplateController(BaseController): def view(self, url): m.subexec(url+'.myt')
which obviously does the wrong thing if the file doesn't exist.
There's a new Google Talk version; they added pictures and some other stuff. But in doing that they changed it so that it whacks all indentation. So copy and pasting code snippets to people doesn't work as well becase all the preceeding white space in each line is removed. That makes it infinitely less useful for me and pretty irksome.