Other than using Akismet, the anti-comment-spam measures I have in place here are pretty primitive. I block some common patterns and blacklist some IPs. (I don’t have plans to make it any more sophisticated since I’ve told myself any new blog engineering effort needs to go to the new Django-based version, not the old PHP5 one.)

I was looking at server logs this week and noticed an unusual number of POST requests, then realized that they were foiled comment-spam attempts. I counted them up:

For a long time I’ve wanted to try working with Bicycle Repair Man, the Python refactoring tool. Unfortunately, the fact that it had neither documentation nor integration with my favorite editor kept pushing it to the back burner.

About a month ago I was excited to come across a post from a guy named David Coffin who had created a BRM integration script for TextMate. I hooked it up per his instructions, and with a little fiddling I got it working. The first thing I tried was the Extract Method or Function command. I had code something like this (structurally, I mean):

This week is so busy that I don’t have time for a longer post, but I wanted to mention DjangoKit (attentive readers may have already spotted it in the sidebar), an OS X application wrapper for Django projects. Tom Insam went and did something that I’ve had on my “someday” list for a long time. It’s very much a 0.0.1 project right now, but I think it has great potential as an application testbed and as a platform for hybrid apps.

Perhaps ironically, one of the great technological advances of OS X over previous versions is the availability of a command line. Someday we won’t need this, but today it turns out that the pure point-n-click GUI was something of a premature optimization, and that in fact certain types of users find they work faster and better when typing commands.

While its simplicity is part of its charm, terminal applications invite tweaking. One of the earliest celebrated novelties of OS X was Terminal.app’s option for translucent windows. I initially thought this was useless, but have come to really appreciate it. With the right opacity setting, you hardly notice the background, yet when you refocus your attention you can see it easily. It’s like having on-demand X-ray vision!

As I said in my last post, I haven’t found many tech/software podcasts worth sticking with, but since people have asked, here are a few that I generally like.

• LugRadio. Loud men swearing in a small room. Plus Linux and whatnot. This show has some very funny moments, a rarity in tech podcasts. I hear they’re going to do an all-Haskell episode pretty soon.
• Audible Ajax – good, though relatively infrequent
• The Ruby on Rails Podcast is worth following. Even for a Django guy like me.
• For OS X development, CocoaRadio can be instructive.
• And finally, just recently I’ve been picking through the archives of a podcast with some interesting esoteric (for me) discussions: Industry Misinterpretations. Terrible name. It’s about Smalltalk. Remember Smalltalk?

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James Robertson commented on Tue Apr 3 16:07:35 2007: