I’m here in the great city of Portland, Oregon for the 2007 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, or OSCON. Looks like it’s going to be a fun week.

The first two days are for “tutorials”, half-day sessions on specific practical topics. Though you are officially required to sign up for your sessions in advance, sometimes you just need to float. There’s so much going on it can be hard to choose to stay put. Plus you want to make sure you cruise the upper lobby every hour or two in case they put out a fresh batch of cookies. Also, frankly, none of the sessions I sampled in the morning really grabbed me. Not everybody who has written a book is an engaging speaker, alas. My work as a teacher makes me both more understanding and more demanding of presenters.

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. On that day the Unicode branch, whose goal was to make it easier to work with non-ASCII character data in Django, was merged into the main development version (or “trunk” in svn-speak). There’s an application porting guide on the Django wiki.

The main reason I’m making this post, though, is because while Malcolm Tredinnick’s blog doesn’t allow comments (nudge) I wanted to make sure he was publicly thanked for all his hard work on this project. While he notes that the project “was in no way a solo effort”, there’s no question that Malcolm deserves a huge round of applause, or many pints of beer, or some other international sign of gratititude. The evidence is hard to refute.

I was only there for about half of the latest Western Mass. Developer Group meeting, but here are some of the things we rambled on about. Someone else will have to fill the earlier bits.

• Haskell: Should you bother?

Hacking the iPhone! Perfect reddit/slashdot/digg material. Except that the site’s owners have requested that the link be kept off of those services, for fear of being overrun with traffic.

Update: I misread their request – it covers puny blogs too. Which makes this post a lot less exciting. So all I can suggest at the moment is checking out the hackers’ IRC channel (#iphone on irc.osx86.hu) or doing some googling.

I love how this effort has taken off. It seems futile now for companies like Apple to release a microprocessor-based product with no developer kit. People will always want to get under the covers, and they’ll clearly do it with or without you.

Damned spammers. Looks like a big batch of drug-spam just went out with my personal email forged as the sender. The number of backscatter messages I’ve gotten today exceeds the number of spams that usually make it through to me in a week. Why? Because my anti-spam measures are mostly about blocking messages from “bad” mail servers, and backscatter comes from “good” mail servers.

I’m laying a lot of ironic emphasis on those quotes around “good” because I shouldn’t be getting those backscatter messages at all. They piss me off – at the spammers, of course, but also at the people who run the mail servers which are helpfully “returning” mail to me that I did not send. In a more idealistic time I might have suggested that they could have avoided this by using SPF (which is true), but this is an even more basic competence issue. To quote from the above linked page: