Update: It’s out. Download here. Also see PhotoshopUser.com’s review of new features.

In case you haven’t heard, Adobe’s releasing the beta of Photoshop CS3 in a few hours. It will be interesting to see how much of the Lightroom-style interface experimentation, if any, has made it in there.

This is especially big news for Intel Mac users, who have been stuck with Rosetta emulation for Photoshop.

Note that the other Creative Suite apps – remember them? – are not covered in this release, except for a “major upgrade” to Bridge. Also note that without a CS2 serial number, your download will only work for two days.

E-Scribe is not, strictly speaking, a standards organization. However, I think the time is right to release this draft document on an important Internet standard. The document is presented inline here for convenience; however, the preferred permanent reference is: http://e-scribe.com/stfu

Recent trends in internet-based application development have
fostered the rapid spread of asynchronous, Javascript-based techniques
known by the umbrella term "Ajax" and by related terms such as "AHAH",
"POX", and so on.

This brief paper argues for a plaintext, synchronous alternative style
with some compelling advantages, one of which is (naturally) a catchy
name.

Synchronous Text/plain For User-agents -- STFU -- is a content-
delivery standard offering simple, reliable, high-performance routing
of content to Internet end-users. Implementation is orders of
magnitude faster than for typical Ajax applications, with a
corresponding drop in defect rates.

It's that simple. STFU.

  * well-tested
  * cross-platform
  * highly scalable
  * enterprise-ready
  * supports Unicode!
  * compliant with Section 508 Accessibility Requirements

One prominent adopter of STFU technology is the Internet Engineering
Task Force, which uses it for the dissemination of their most
important documents:

  ietf.org/rfc/rfc-index-latest

STFU also sidesteps technical quandaries related to markup formats,
such as those summarized here:

  hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

It's no accident that the author of the above (widely cited) document
chose to deliver his important message via STFU. 

Sometimes the debates over emerging standards and technologies become
wearisome, and pragmatic individuals find themselves wishing for a
magic phrase that might quiet the true believers and allow all
involved to move on to more productive activities. May we recommend:

STFU!

If you are already using STFU, you are welcome to display this PNG badge:

I suggested to Carl over at Codegolf that the old reverse game would make an interesting challenge. He agreed, and after making some changes to his site’s back-end (to accommodate multiple correct solutions) he unveiled the challenge today: http://codegolf.com/reverse

I can’t wait to give it a try!

The OLPC wiki says:

If you are able to program in Python then you can start building OLPC applications right now. The core tools, Python and GTK, are available on Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. It is not necessary to get Sugar up and running right away unless you want to do something complex using dbus. For most educational applications, you only need to have Sugar for the final testing phases.

That first sentence seems a bit ambitious, but it all does look pretty simple, and I like the list of guidelines:

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. This “is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”

I’ve been working on slogans for this new campaign. For a reasonable licensing fee I will allow Microsoft to use this one:

“Don’t get sued – get SUSE!”

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. (Note that if you don’t have a handheld with a Plucker reader, or aren’t closely following Django, this is of no use to you. Sorry. The intersection of those two sets is not very large.)

In addition to the current documentation pages, it includes the Trac Timeline, posts from the Community page, and the latest Django Book chapters. (Django team, let me know if I’m spidering anything I shouldn’t be.)

I’ve re-launched my little Django-powered pastebin (formerly paste.e-scribe.com) under its own shiny new $8 domain name: dpaste.com. Not that the world really needs another pastebin, but people have been using it daily and it’s a fun side project. From the about page:

Philosophy: Simplicity and usability. The grayscale look makes the colorized source code stand out. Cookie-based personal defaults eliminate lots of extra form widgetry. Automatic expiry means the database never fills up. Auto-focus on the Code field means mouse-free operation. No required fields means you can paste, tab, return, and go. No running list of recent items means the spammers remain invisible. And Django makes nice clean URLs the path of least resistance.