Posts tagged: PROGRAMMING

Another successful session of non-stop technical chatter in the back of our favorite chain restaurant. Links and commentary:

• The Talk Like a Pirate Day site was a victim of its own success this year. After several hours of record-breaking traffic, Chris nobly disabled the site to protect paying customers on the server. I’m looking forward to the white paper, “How to serve one million unique visitors one day per year”. We also heard the origin story of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the site. I hadn’t realized what a pioneer and international pirate celebrity Chris was.

Lately I’ve been trying out the Mercurial distributed version control system on some real projects.

I currently use Subversion for production stuff at work. It’s reliable, has great Trac integration, and is most likely to be known by other developers. (In fact, we hired a new person at work this fall who will be helping me with web development, and it turned out that Subversion was what he was familiar with. So I feel vindicated on that last point especially.)

First alpha release of Python 3.0 (formerly Python3000) is out today. And it even works! Gotta do something about that executable name, though…

$ ./python.exe 
Python 3.0a1 (py3k, Aug 31 2007, 15:11:11) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5367)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

(Download, What’s New)

The biweekly Western Massachusetts Developers Meeting was small tonight, but still high-quality. Topics in our typically rambling discussion included:

• Are crawlers from some search engines following links embedded in Javascript (i.e. Ajax) code? And if so, what’s the use?
• What should Chas use for a CMS? (I don’t think any conclusion was reached; the two leading contenders seem be “build it in Django” or “just use Drupal”.) I do appreciate the argument that sometimes it’s good to think of yourself as a regular ol’ “business user” rather than someone who custom-develops everything just because he can.
• When does testing happen in your process? A range of answers here, from “before I write code” to, well, a bit later in the process.
• XPath and XQuery are worth knowing if you touch XML
• Various WTFs, including the company that replaced their SQL database with a single gigantic XML file because XML was, you know, magic.
• Google searches that find embarrassing mistakes. (It’s been a while since I updated that page)
• Another round of olde tyme computer reminiscences, prompted by my “Home Computer Handbook” from 1978. (Chris knows EBCDIC!) Have you ever heard of SLIP, GPSS, or SIMSCRIPT?
• Another round of version-control appreciation (Subversion and svnmerge, Darcs, Mercurial)
• Is there any OS X web design application somewhere between Coda and GoLive or Dreamweaver? I.e., not bloated, but still pleasant to use for people who need some WYSIWYG editing (my students)?
• BBEdit: What’s still good about it? (Palettes for nontechnical users.) What’s bad about it? (Kitchen-sink approach to multiple language features.) Make no mistake, though, BBEdit was definitely cool back in the day.
• The scriptaculous Ajax in-place editor
• Will inaccessible (in the Section 508 sense) web pages become more widespread now that the argument against them is being reduced from “What about all the crappy browsers out there, and what about accessibility?” to “What about accessibility?”

We also agreed to try doing some lightning talks or similar short presentations at a future meeting. I think this could be very cool. Chris said he would volunteer to run the gong.

OSCON ends with a half-day that goes by all too quickly. Below are some notes from those final few hours.

Keynotes

Nat Torkington

During the Keynote segment Nat Torkington cracked everyone up with an omnidirectional roast he called Open Source Therapy. He described imaginary family therapy scenarios in which Mom and Pop are working out their problems with their various open-source-project kids. The only one I wrote down was about Python: “Mom and Pop wish Python would get drunk, get laid, and lighten the fuck up!”

Keynote speakers

Ben Fry talked about Processing (I missed this part, but fellow attendees who hadn’t heard of the language before we very excited and impressed.)

Bill Hilf from Microsoft notes that they’re moving to some OSI-approved licenses.

Rickard Falkvinge from Sweden’s Pirate Party spoke about their attempt to reform intellectual property law. In their first election, they got only 0.63% of the vote, buy this placed them in the top 10 parties in their first election – a record for a first-year political party. I don’t think that intellectual property regulation is a broad enough base for a political party, but the fact that they’re getting so much interest is very telling. After Falkvinge noted that political contributions are not regulated in his country, one audience member ran up and handed him cash!

Today’s notes will be a bit more free-form. Now that the tutorial days are over and the main conference has begun, there are more sessions – and less time to write!

Keynotes

Tim O’Reilly raised the question of openness beyond source code. This felt a bit amorphous, but he did have a good point that when software is a service, availability of source code is not the whole story – if Google gave you their source, you couldn’t do anything with it. I can’t decide whether this is a real insight or a “duh”.