My employer has generously agreed to send me off to OSCON this year and I’m very excited. I’m doing the whole shebang, tutorial days and all. (Current tutorial picks: Learning Ruby, Django Master Class, Modern Web Development with Python and WSGI, and Time Management for System Administrators.)

I had a blast and learned a ton attending OSCON in 2005 and I expect this round to be even better. For one thing, my involvement in open source projects, notably Django, means I know more people. And the whole open source world – dare I say movement? – has only gotten more powerful and impressive. I get to become better at my job while learning cool stuff and meeting smart people. I’m a lucky guy.

As of yestderay, an early version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac is available for download. Not the X-Windows port, but a step toward a full-fledged native application. Until this point, you only had NeoOffice if you wanted Aqua widgetry and a semblance of native OS X experience. NeoOffice is quite good, but it launches terribly slowly. Whereas this new build of OOo launches in under ten seconds on my slowish Powerbook.

Don’t get too excited just yet; this is for tweakers only. Here are some of the problems and gaps they warn you about:

That nifty feature Python stole from Haskell (or was it Erlang?), “list comprehensions”, is found in the latest version of Javascript (available in Firefox 2.0) under the name “array comprehensions”. Cool!

via John Resig.

Palm has announced the Foleo laptop-ish-device, which they are pitching as a smartphone enhancer. Interesting turnabout from the days of the original Pilot, which was pitched as a “Connected Organizer” that was dependent on your computer. The Foleo is a computer designed to be dependent on your phone.

I’m adding a reminder alarm (into my Palm TX, naturally) for 3 years from today, to go buy one of these on eBay for $75 and put Linux on it!

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. Even better, it will be published under a Creative Commons license and released chapter-by-chapter on their website.

For now all that’s on their new site is a blog, but that’s sure to change over the coming days and weeks.

http://www.realworldhaskell.org/

I suspect this will become the standard intro to Haskell for working programmers like myself. If only it had been available at the beginning of my year-of-trying-to-learn-Haskell!

My primary email client for my e-scribe mail is mutt. This came about in an almost accidental way.

Last summer I moved all my websites and mail to a new server. As I was setting it up I realized that I had an opportunity to decide that no passwords for this box would ever be sent in the clear. No telnet and no FTP, that was easy. But given the hassle of setting up encrypted mail authentication, I had in the past let that one slide. So I decided that until I set it up properly, I’d use a terminal-based mail reader over SSH. No unencrypted POP3 or IMAP for me. I looked around and decided mutt looked good.

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.

I finally found time to put a page together, and people are beginning to sign up. So if you’re a Django person and you’re within range of Northampton, check it out!