In the interest of perpetuating (or reviving) pointless flame wars, I offer this simple badge (now featured near the bottom of this page as well):

If you decide to have it tattooed on your bicep, send me a photo.

Verbatim headers from a spam I recently received:

Subject: STR_RNDLEN(2-4)}{EXTRA_TIME_4} {WORD}
Date: {DATE}

That’s not going to sell much {PRODUCT}…

Sam Newman has posted a useful high-level comparison of Django and Rails on his site. In it, I think he hits on one little-discussed reason why these two projects are grabbing so much mindshare right now:

[Rails and Django] … historically would have ended up being written in Perl or PHP - but ended up being written in Ruby and Python respectively.

When I heard DHH speak at OSCON, he mentioned switching to Ruby after giving up on trying to make PHP do the kind of stuff he wanted to do. Back in July I asked Simon Willison (of the Django team) about PHP; he said that both he and Adrian Holovaty had worked in PHP for years, but it was Python that “gave us the flexibility we needed to pull everything off.”

You can be FPS-illiterate like I am and still be fascinated by This Spartan Life, a talk show staged inside the Halo multiplayer game world. Guest and host (and “camerapeople”) attempt to have a cogent conversation while running around trying not to get shot by interlopers. Right now there’s one episode posted, divided into six segments, including interviews with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh and multimedia innovator Bob Stein. The Stein segment is my favorite for its combination of substance, humor, and visual antics.

At OSCON I learned that just up the Willamette River from Portland, in sleepy Corvallis, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab hosts www.mozilla.org. Maybe you’ve heard of it. They also provide hosting and/or mirror services to Apache, KDE, Xiph.org, Debian, Gentoo, and others. In the early ’90s I briefly lived in Corvallis and this just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Public universities have a long history with open source – my server would not be what it is without Berkeley in particular – but I don’t come across a lot of explicit advocacy from schools beyond the level of individual employees or researchers who work on projects of their own volition. Public universities should be big backers of open source, I think, so I hope that OSU’s example is inspirational.

The Well, venerable “virtual community” (that’s what we had before blogs, you whippersnappers), is for sale. I’ve had an account on the Well for eleven years this month, so this is of some interest to me. Salon has been a great corporate parent (many Salon staffers are longtime Well members), but the ups and downs of their pennystock life make everyone uncomfortable.

Who knows what will happen – perhaps members will chip in and form a co-op. I’ve got, like, $432 in my Paypal account… At least we’re past the bubble years, when some flash-in-the-pan internet company would have bought it, with a wave of press releases followed by an attempt to “monetize the userbase” or something.

The Apple Developer Connection recently posted what looks like a nice introduction to PyObjC. It’s even got QuickTime movies showing how to work with Interface Builder. Cool. The enthusiasm on the page is palpable:

PyObjC’s maturity is unmatched - it’s been around longer than even Apple’s Java bridge (it originated on NeXTstep).

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, the Cocoa-Java bindings are deprecated:

Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface. Therefore, you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features.