Despite my periodic criticisms of eBay (1, 2, 3) I remain a devoted user. One thing it’s great for is selling things that require a lot of explanation – because, unlike with a tag sale or classified ad, you don’t have to repeat that explanation to every potential buyer. You write it up once and eBay does the rest.

I’m pretty tough on my hardware, so when I sell things the “explanation” is often a laundry list of defects.

On the heels of yesterday’s lovely site redesign, Allan Odgaard has released TextMate 1.5. If you’ve been downloading the “cutting edge” builds you’ve probably already got it. It has come a long way since the last official release (1.02). And on top of all the improvements to the program, there’s now a manual.

For more on why I think TextMate is so cool, see my earlier post/review.

A few days ago the first 1.0 beta of IronPython was released.

If you’ve been wondering about IronPython you should definitely check out Jim Hugunin’s screencast from November (use the direct link to the video if you are on a Mac). If I were a Windows developer, I’d be really excited by this. In particular being able to use the Avalon GUI framework from Python seems very slick and simple. The integration with Visual Studio for debugging is quite nice too.

Released today: web.py. (Source, documentation, backstory.)

Even though everybody (including Aaron) refers to this as a framework, it’s a lot more library-like than most of the frameworks it’s ostensibly competing with – by design, it seems. It’s very compact – only about 1000 lines of fairly dense Python. (About 275 of those are a template for pretty error pages adapted from Django though.)

Personally, I find the compact, all-in-one style very appealing. Less for a newbie to absorb and less for an experienced user to keep track of. Yes, it does require a template engine and a database wrapper to be useful, but the core is still extremely lean.

Looking at this ticket, endorsed by Subway creator Peter Hunt and this post by Turbogears creator Kevin Dangoor, there’s clearly a non-zero chance that these two frameworks – which are, as I noted in my initial post on Turbogears, very similar architecturally – will join forces.

I agree with Kevin that “saving Python from Ruby” or whatever is not a goal worth focusing on. But focusing developer momentum behind a demonstrably popular web framework model is.

Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, is now working at Google. Very cool, especially given Google’s longstanding love of Python.

When I came across this set of outage notices on the Google AdSense site tonight I couldn’t resist turning them into a general-purpose, public access tool that apologizes for broken websites in 23 languages.

For example, let’s say you’re the webmaster for Happy Fun Ball Corporation and you accidentally overwrite the web server’s document root while backing up your ASCII art collection, and it’s the day of a global product launch. No problem!