I had a few days off, which was pretty amazing. Although I was sick much of it (great timing!). But I did get to leisurely do SitePoke which is an old monitoring script I rewrote and created a front end for in Django. While I've got a decent amount of Django experience under my belt, it was on a long term project, so doing something small in a couple days was actually pretty fulfilling -- and reminds me that yes, as a framework, Django does kick some ass. In fact, I think I spent longer trying to get xml structured for some pretty flash graphics than the rest of it. So, the site's open if you want to give it a try, given any more time I'll add some functionality to it, particularly the difflib data I'm doing on returned pages (how much has a page changed, and what has changed over the last few pokes, etc.). Oh, and I did the whole thing on my Eeepc ;)

So I'm tired of dinky $5-10 a month hosts, which might be fine for blogging, but not good for much else. They don't let you control the machine, obviously, install what you like, select what distro you want or let you have long running processes. Damn it, I want to do some real Django stuff outside-of-work. I want to play around with postgres, etc. And yet I'm still a cheap bastard, don't want to pay over 20-25 a month for something that's not serving much traffic. Fortunately, in the last couple years virtual machines, Xen in particular, to the rescue... But I'm suspicious of Slice Host, feels like there's some hype there (although I've never heard anything really bad). I'm just like that. So as an alternative I came across Linode -- pluses in my mind are: you can do it month by month, don't like it, just move on. You can upgrade VPS specs on the fly, memory, etc. Need to add machines in a couple spots across the country? Sure. The distro selection is good, Centos, Arch, Slackware, SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu (which I chose since setup is so crazy simple). There's a nice control panel to manage the machine, a monitor to reboot in case it goes down, stats, even a little ajax console if you can't get to a terminal for some reason. And setup of the VPS was instant. No shit, I had a webserver going in 1/2 an hour. Sweet.

Python 3.0 (a.k.a. "Python 3000" or "Py3k") is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places. Have I ever been excited about a backwards breaking release before? Just goes to show that as a language Python tends to get it right, I hope it continues -- here's what's changing.

Highly recommend s3cmd as a way to interface with your S3 service if you're always on the command line anyway -- feels as close as a single line away. I'm often syncing files up, and it does a nice combo of GPG and https for the transfers. I'm not using S3 for anything like media, just small files, knowing that if there were some kind of complete failure of both my backup drive, main HD at the same time, I've got S3 (for which I'm paying much less than a dollar a month -- yeah, again, no media files).

Highlighting the chipmusic phenomenon and its related disciplines, the festival aims to showcase emerging creative niches involving the use of legacy video game & home computer hardware as modern artistic instrumentation. Devices such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy and others are repurposed into the service of original, low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals - sidestepping game culture and instead exploring the technology's untapped potential and distinctive intrinsic character. In NYC this weekend, be there, or be square.
puss - 3step

nullsleep - says it's not the end

bit shifter - particle change

The idea was that you'd use MySQL for speed, PostgreSQL for features, although with PostgreSQL 8 that seems to have changed, and MySQL has caught up a little on features. But with day to day use, I gotta say, I prefer PostgreSQL. Not that I don't love unexpected MySQL table locks. Anyway, didn't your mother ever tell you not to walk into the middle of a database fight? The point is I'm converting part of an app to Django and the previous was stored in MySQL. I could of course write something that iterates over the data and puts it in place in a new postgres home. But that's time consuming. So, take the the MySQL dump, convert it to something postgres understands, once there use Django's inspectdb helper to generate the basics for the model, then work on whatever scrubbing and altering need to be done, cuz that's so much easier once you've got Django on hand to work on the data.

Back when I used to do tech support, I was trying hard to get people off of Internet Explorer, there were a couple options even then -- but I kept having this conversation:

- I don't want to use Netscape/Opera/Mozilla, Internet Explorer is perfect.
- And how many other browsers have you used before?
- Well, I haven't used any others, but IE is perfect.

I also had this conversation about word processors (remember them?), and OS's. It was extremely hard to get anyone to look at Linux as a server with MS and Sun around. The conversations always went like:

- I don't want to use another X, this X is perfect.
- And how many other kinds of X have you used?
- Well, I haven't used any others. But this one is perfect.

Google does some things really well, obviously. Which is probably why companies are switching over their mail, their ad serving, some of their web applications, their project management, their collaborative word processing, and their code repositories to Google. What worries me about this is that somewhere down the line, folks are going to forget anything else was possible, that "this one is perfect". It's not going to be now, but maybe years from now, when you realize that you've become Google's bitch. It will be the folks that come after the people who made the decision to switch off of Exchange Server, who have used little else but Google for their mail, search, projects. What frightens me honestly, is the return of old fashioned monoculture, while Google currently feels like little companies grouped together under a brand, there's an unprecedented level of trust in the word 'Google' that gives me shivers.

I once had a Steve-Jobs-Type classic A-personality boss toward the end of the dotcom era who would always tell our team that we were one day going to be the equivalent of plumbers and mechanics (he also had the unfortunate power to make women who worked for him cry almost on cue). I didn't disagree with him, but asked what he had against plumbers and mechanics? Why was this a thing we should, apparently, be frightened of? Who makes and or fixes your shit? Who makes your car run? Where would you be without these folks? I think of Douglas Adams B-Ark, which held a world's middle managers, TV producers, consultants (and phone sanitizers) tricked to be sent off alone to crash on a prehistoric earth. The fictional A-Ark held the world's leaders and thinkers, and C-Ark held the people who made things, the plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, computer programmers, farmers. I'm quite happy to be on the C-Ark.

"I am thinking about something much more important than bombs.
I am thinking about computers." -- John von Neuman, 1946,

So I wanted to install Ubuntu Eee, field test it more than the 'live cd', really use it on a daily basis. But I didn't want to blow away the default Xandros OS on my Eeepc. I didn't even want to partition it, just didn't want to touch it. Ubuntu Eee is Ubuntu optimized for the Eee with the Netbook Remix ui. Ubuntu is a vastly better branch of Debian than Xandros, particularly Xandros on the 901 which has very few packages. But Xandros works there, bug free, so a good fallback. The strength of Ubuntu is the vast number of packages, and the number of people and online support for them. Got a problem? Betcha Ubuntu boards there's someone else with the same. And someone who knows what to do. Ubuntu just continues to impress me with attention to user-friendly detail that previous distros lacked (sometimes it was not the prerogative of the distro to have those details).

In short here's what worked for me, to get Ubuntu Eee onto a card, and leave Xandros untouched:

1. Using an 8g kingston data traveler USB stick, I downloaded Ubuntu Eee and used unetbootin to create a bootable stick.

2. Power up the Eee, press esc a couple times, choose the usb stick.

3. "try ubuntu without any change to your computer" working? Poke around, things look good? Proceed by clicking the installer.

4. Forward through the setup options (mostly location stuff)

5. At the partitioner, choose 'use entire disk' and select your sd card, in this case SCIS4 "Single Flash Reader"

6. Setup your name and password (there was nothing to migrate)

7. On the final step of the Ubuntu install, click 'advanced' in the lower right corner, make sure "install boot loader" is checked, and select your removable sdd as the target rather than sd0 (which is your Xandros internal os). You're putting grub onto the card, and not the internal drive(s). I didn't do this first time through and while I could, using grub, boot to either the card or internal, I could do so only with the sd card in. That's not cool. To get out of that situation (if you do make that mistake), making the Xandros internal default again, you can from Xandros:

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,0)
(hd2,0)
grub>root (hd0,0)
grub>setup (hd0)
grub>quit

(hd0,0) being your internal drive. The point of this entire install is to have an OS on a card, I don't want to have to require to have the card, and I might want to have several.

8. Proceed with the install, prompts you to restart, do so. I had to force power down after the screen went blank, it didn't seem to be able to actually power down. This didn't worry me, and it didn't seem to effect anything.

9. Restart, make sure Xandros comes up without interruption. OK, now let's test the OS on a card:

10. Restart, pressing esc a couple times on boot, select the sd from the bios menu you're presented with. You'll have to do this on every machine boot if you want to use the card, not such a big deal IMHO.

11. So, what we've done is install grub on the card, but there's a problem, when we did so on install the drive (the SD card) was assigned a different address -- it's now the first drive rather than the n drive. The first entry in the grub list is the entry you want, but if you select it and try and boot it will fail because it wont be able to find the disk. What you do is select the entry in grub, hit e, then select "root (hd3,0)" and hit e again to edit this, change it to (hd0,0). Then hit "b" to boot.

12. To make this change permanent to the card, go to 'accessories' open up terminal -- type 'sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst' (or whatever editor you've got) and change all the instances you see of "(hd3,0)" to "(hd0,0)" (no quotes, I'm just sayin). You could also change the timeout option to avoid seeing grub all together, since you're really not using it on the card.

This is great, SD cards are cheap. In fact, if you donate money to Ubuntu Eee, you get a card just like this. Imagine all computers having SD slots, essentially being OS readers, and you've got a pocketful of OS chips. Why not have a couple OS X's, Microsoft (if you insist), whatever distro you like, just pop in a card, the internal drive could serve as master storage. Love it.

footnote: as decently design as Netbook Remix is, it seems to hog resources, so I switched to XFCE with 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop', unchecking 'maximus' in the Netbook Remix sessions window, logging out, selecting an xfce session, then doing a 'sudo apt-get --purge remove ume-launcher' since the thing just didn't seem to want to go away, even in the xfce session. Anyhow, much faster.

Garrett Lisi first got some attention a couple years ago with an interesting idea about unified field theory and the mathematical entity known as E8. Recently I read a book called Symmetry And The Monster about Lie Groups the creation of the Atlas, and E8. Not that well written (always saying 'and later we'll get back to that' and never do), but incredibly interesting subject. And I will never be able to do the math. Ever. But the concepts, maybe... Although it might be more like the Bohr quote If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

In my effort to de-clutter over the last month I got rid of a few extraneous machines. Was I ever really going to get that Beowulf Cluster going? Probably not. Not unless I get laid off (and maybe I'm hoping since I haven't had any real serious time off in about a decade). Point is, I like to poke around. So one machine I couldn't bear to part with is my old A21 ThinkPad -- which, hands down, is the best piece of hardware I've ever owned, although the extremely square display is kinda funny in retrospect. Fact it still works perfectly, case in point. I wondered what Xfce is up to -- haven't seen it in a very long time and there's Ubuntu with a nice little xubuntu roll-up. One small CD later, and one completely painless install later, my ThinkPad is running Ubuntu/Xfce -- and damn fast. An 8 year old p3 laptop with 512 ram, and it's as usable and as fast as my mac. There's a minimal and simple quality to Xfce I just love, it's fantastic. Really, you want Compiz Fusion? How can you get any work done with things moving around like that? Just fluff, IMHO. Don't hide my tools, don't make them slide or bounce or skitter away, just put everything out there as simply as possible, now that's usable. But I'm also not really going to be carrying around my ThinkPad anymore, cuz it weighs, I dunno like 10 pounds or something? I want a VM of it, for work, and on my mac. I've been using Parallels, and I haven't had strong opinions about it. I'd tried to do an Ubuntu install on it a while ago and it wouldn't take, this time it did. But here's the thing, after I installed, I thought, well why not do a Parallels update? It's right there in the menu. There's updates to do, I do them. Should I have read more about them, perhaps. But who does? Turns out my key for the latest update (or 'version') doesn't work -- in other words, I've converted my VM image to something that won't work with the previous version (for which I've paid), my previous version (for which I've paid) is gone, and I can't get into my VM now. Ummm, Kay. If my activated copy of Parallels wouldn't work with whatever updates they're giving me I feel they're somewhat obliged to stop me from installing and converting my current VM's without first buying the upgrade. Assuming folks are reading the fine print on a update is not good. Enough of that, off to VMWare. The VMWare Fusion demo imports my parallels xubuntu VM flawlessly. All in all VMWare feels better, I don't have hard numbers to back this up (for instance I don't know if it utilizes memory better than Parallels or not, although these folks seem to have an opinion) -- but interface wise, better. Not giving the full-screen escape code in a tooltip above the full screen button, like Parallels doesn't, is a pain for noobs, or forgetful idiots like myself. Also, getting the vm-tools on for window resizing and 'Unity' was easy -- a menu mounted disk image, a 'sudo perl vmware-tools-install.pl' (Hey somebody's still using Perl!!).

It seems somewhat isolating in the Python culture to say you still like anything about PHP. PHP is the table at the wedding where everyone the family doesn't like has to sit, quietly ignored, perhaps scoffed at behind closed doors. I do think Python is a vastly better designed and usable language -- I'm not arguing about that. I'd probably say PHP isn't so much a language as a series of tools and procedures. In technology there are waves of hip that seem to take hold, and folks often forget about the day-to-day, utilitarian, I-have-to-work-with-legacy reality -- code archaeology. Far as I'm concerned, technology is about getting things done and to work with what you have at hand, I don't care if it's a bag of chopsticks and a hot glue gun, of course I have preferences. It's the end result that really matters. I know that aesthetic is an important engineering criteria, but I also feel like sometimes engineers act like modernist architects, striving to build theoretically perfect buildings no one wants to live in (except for social cred). Originally this post was called 'Why I Don't Hate PHP Yet', but today's decision by PHP to use backslashes for seperating namespaces, is, well, deeply terrible. Could you just change concatentation to "+" and then use "."? How hard? Probably hard since this concatentation is loose and overused in PHP. Make a clean break in PHP 6? Fix it? Buck up a little? Why not "::"? I can't bring myself to type an example in the new backslash manner even as an example to see how awful it will appear. Smells like MS. It will only end in tears.

I'm always in favor of security research, and I have enjoyed following the developments in quantum cryptography. But as a product, it has no future. It's not that quantum cryptography might be insecure; it's that cryptography is already sufficiently secure.

The Schneier is awesome. Never afraid to put some smack down on quantum cryptography. Or the TSA. Other things too, I'm waiting for Schneier smack down updates.

Recently I'd started using Coda, which is a nice web editor, which smartly combines tabs, nav, and a good layout (I can't stand tons of little windows hanging around while I work on my mac, yes you Adobe). But the problem was, as good as Coda is, I could only use it on my mac and I'm on other machines. A lot. So what could I use that lives on all my machines, by default, and probably any other that I have to jump on, and not necessarily need a windowing environ? At that point, facepalm: Emacs. I've been using that program for years. Decades? Not quite decades yet. It's Emacs for Christs' sake. I'm on Emacs every day, so why did I get distracted by some new editor? You harlot, you slut. Procrastination, I think is the proper answer. Like my previous post about the box of wires, sometimes the same thing happens with software -- you just collect software you use a couple times, enjoy poking around with, but which in the long run you don't use. It's just clutter. Instead, if I'd taken the same amount of time to improve my emacs-fu: how often do I use etags, bookmarks, macros? I've poked around these, but I don't really use them. nxml mode? Ediff? Emacs and subversion? Jesus, pwsafe and emacs? There are oodles of possibly helpful things I don't regularly use in Emacs. It's old, it's solid, it's everywhere, it has the skills to pay the bills. You take your fancy new things with shiny buttons and go away now.

...sometimes sharp, tangled, mostly useless old wires. It was not my intention to spend hours digging through an ancient box of wires, but after a decade or two, and stubbing my toe on it, suddenly that became my intention. Maybe it's half a life of reading brutal Zen koans, but I just wanted to purge all the tangled wires and get to some kind of pure wire minimal existence.

It could have been worse, early in the 00's I untangled most of it, and twist-tied some of it, although I don't recall actually throwing anything out. You never know when you'll need a serial-to-alien-device adapter. I couldn't take that final step, getting rid of a hundred audio connectors I'll never use.

What amazed me were how many items (dozens and dozens?) were telephony. Phone cables, modem cables, modems -- all screaming out how desperately difficult it seemed to be to stay connected before the era of the dedicated home connection. I had a modem card for a Zaurus 5500 -- was I planning on dialing in somewhere behind the Iron Curtain? And before the ubiquity of USB, marveled at how many insane cables you needed. I had several 20 foot parallel cables. Why? Was I setting up an office of printers for some kind of subversive Zine resurgence movement? And why did I have a CF to PC card adapter? What was I adapting? I don't even recall why or how I bought it at this point. It's like a relic of momentary gadget insanity.

The rest of the box seemed to be filters and converters. I had more European power plugs than times I'd been to Europe. They clustered together, strangely, aside from the tired wires, like they were frightened or conspiring. They just didn't seem to want to be thrown out, and I kept dropping them as I tried to shovel them into a C-Town plastic bag. And power converters -- have you noticed that power converters have gotten much smaller? I had converters there which must've weighed several pounds. I didn't even think about alternate uses in this box-o-wire purge, I'm not gonna use the converter as a paper weight, I'm not gonna build robots out of the old cd player, I'm not going to use the modems (I in fact don't even have a phone line) time for it all to go.

Claire Miller at the NYTimes reminds us: "How many more new social networking or micro-blogging or video-sharing site can one person use?". I've wondered when, like the lending bubble, the social networking bubble is going to burst -- seemingly every tech department on the planet over the last few years seem to be focusing on building community, social, and micro-status type web applications. The thought of logging on to facebook, myspace, twitter, pownce, etc., etc., (multiply this by N attendees at the web 2.0 conference) every single day is daunting. There just aren't enough hours to follow and post that much. So does this become like magazines did in the 90's? Magazines became focused on catering to smaller specific groups, magazines almost all became trade magazines, stabilizing circulation for a while but killing growth or innovation. Twitter, whom I respect but don't use, even has a blurb on their homepage "When I first started doing it, I thought, 'geez, not another website to worry about updating and checking', but now I'm glad I did it." So in answer to the question "Wanna Be A Member" I say, yes, sure, but crap, sorry, no time left in the day. So will the desire to 'micro-blog' your every thought and movement be so overwhelming that an industry grows up around automatically monitoring and posting everytime you buy a bran muffin? Will humans begin evolving to a super-caffeinated non-sleep creature 100% in self-promotion content-creation mode for an audience of 500 followers? In a decentralized community each member is at liberty, or encouraged, to believe they are the center, and that certainly is a strange kind of new Me generation.

Come round the fire children and listen to a tale of yore. Long ago, before the internet was an 'application' the only way to do something that behaved like an 'application' was to embed some other kind of technology as a plugin into an html page. Many people used Java, but then, there were some who began using Flash, believing that there could be a platform for designing and programming applications to be delivered over the 'web'. But these people were fooled, because over time it became clear that first of all, it was a 'goddamned pain in the ass' to attempt to get information in/out of Flash to the web around it, and secondly, every jackass with a couple hundred dollars were making 1/2 hour long animated intros to websites with the now universally despised phrase 'SKIP INTRO'. And, lo, Flash was a tool discarded and left for brochures and marketing departments run by creative directors named 'Brad', until Youtube came along.

Now, being alive and working in the year 2000, I actually did quite a bit of Flash. Was it Flash 3? 4? Not sure. They're not even doing numbers anymore, "Fl CS3" or something that Adobe thought of in the hour it takes for Acrobat to load and read a PDF. Everybody had some exposure to Flash then, just as you did to say, Perl and Cold Fusion. I'm in therapy now, it's ok (just as I'm sure younger technorati may encounter future sessions over what might become a traumatic django pony). But the point is, I'm now building a media player in Flash because we need one at work, and coming back to it after nearly a decade it's interesting to see what happened.

Primarily, it's geared to letting you make a media player easier. No longer the idea that it will become the defacto web application platform. Actionscript feels enough like Javascript that it's familiar ground. There's a sort of DOM, although the Adobe style layout and layers of tools to build it is mostly frustrating (which is why everyone seems to make minimal objects then manipulate them via action script files). With ExternalInterface you can actually interact via javascript with objects on the page. That's huge. Not huge enough for me to ever actually want to use it again day-to-day, but for a media player with no SKIP INTRO, an improvement.

Djangocon was a lot of fun. Held at building 40 in the Googleplex this past weekend, they limited the con to 200 people. And I think the majority of those 200 people each made the following joke at some point:

* a PHP scaling joke
* a Zope usability joke
* how long it took Django to get to 1.0

The few who did not make these obligatory jokes were forced to rewrite Lawrence Journal World in Extreme Programming Perl and are no longer allowed to wear t-shirts with the Pownce logo.

There were a couple fantastic talks (Flickr's Cal Henderson for instance), a few decent ones, some really well done lightning talks, and what felt like several (one explicit) "I want a pony" sessions where everyone asked for what they'd like in Django. Team Onion's requests were for a real object cache with proper validation/invalidation, singleton, a killer set of debug tools. Most of which we and others are already working on. Perhaps the most popular overall request was for multi-database support.

Everyone was blown away by GeoDjango, which does a fairly amazing and complex set of geo-calculation, utils, and packaging of disparate geo libraries into a really usable system.

I got to meet all the folks I'd seen committing, and arguing about code, and a few more who were all really nice and excited about Python and Django. The level of intelligence in the room was overwhelming.

I don't know if Django is still flying under the radar, I mean Google is using it, but it still feels like it's flying under the radar -- and that is a good thing I think. It's a relatively small group of folks, and there wasn't much of the kind of discussion you would've seen at a Linuxcon in the late 90's when suddenly it was 'discovered' and hence, 'monetized' by companies and labeled 'enterprise'. While we would like a high performance Django group, it's not what you'd associate with business 'enterprise' software. I'm all for keeping the enthusiast element as long as possible before business concerns move in. And I wonder if part of that security about being community driven rather than business driven is actually due to Google, at least this last year, sheltering Django from the less desirable elements or circling sharks. But, also, Django made itself into a foundation in June, and the core is under a simple BSD license, so once again they're being super smart.

As an aside, I also realized quite demonstrably -- and I really need to put pretty radius graphics up on Google maps around my continually updated geolocation to visualize this -- that I am the only person who has visited Mountain View or San Francisco who does not own an iPhone. Do you know what it's like being surrounded by a couple hundred people all on iPhones? It's like watching kids gorge themselves on candy at Halloween. How did they let me in? Did I sneak by the iPhone checkpoint somehow? Shrug. "Think Different".

I played games all weekend. Not video games. Old fashioned board games. Maybe not old fashioned, the board game biz is better than ever with some fantastic games for (mostly) grown ups, like the Klaus Teuber games, Rio Grande games, Munchkin, or even some of the older Steve Jackson games. And when I play these, especially new games I haven't played before, sometimes I feel like the lone programmer stuck in an editorial meeting. I dislike lots of disparate rules that go together in a seemingly arbitrary manner: "You mean everything works like X until you have the little plastic guy with the bag of gold in his hand on the blue spot on turn 6 and there's a ship in the market spot? And someone happens to have card Y? But not for you because you have the Pope hat?". It's like having an editor design the database model for a CMS: everything becomes special, hence there are no longer large generally applicable laws. I can't just sit there without becoming preoccupied about how to make it less complex, and get annoyed when those special cases come up. I really like games with few very simple rules that can chain together, allowing possibility without special case restraints. X does Y, without exception, now see the permutations that happen with real people and actual cases. What also drives me nuts a bit are games that become about collection -- whether that's a collectable game like Magic (aka Hassle The Dorkening) or a resource hoarding game about who can make the most money. General rules games don't devolve into small patterns, since they're general, there are larger possible outcomes, and more interesting I think. Chess does this, Risk does this, Poker does, and Settlers Of Catan does this to some extent -- although there are a ton of knockoffs that fail to reproduce what that game got right it seems. When it comes down to it, I like the final Munchkin rule the best: "When the cards disagree with the rules, follow the cards. Any other disputes should be settled by loud arguments among the players, with the owner of the game having the last word."

Jquery's recent redesign started a shit storm on their boards -- the main criticism being against the top hompage graphic which read (before it was promptly removed) "Be a javascript ROCKSTAR". The central complaint was that this portrayed a large degree of unprofessionalism, and that people trying to get their bosses or work places to adopt jquery would be put off. Which I agree with 100%. The design is pretty canned, and the illustration pretty cheezy -- but it brings up a good question, when does your open source community supported project become something that's expected to be professional. I can't believe Resig would not understand how really widespread and well used jquery is at this point, is his project no longer his really, is it directed more by the users? I remember a time when these branding, marketing and design expectations didn't exist for free/open software. Start with Tux, the linux logo -- or the Python site just a couple years ago, which was redesigned successfully. There are still plenty of older well used projects that have very bad sites, but there is a difference, these were very clearly not trying to look good, they were often merely utilitarian, whereas the jquery redesign seems trying to be clever or savvy (it's neither). And while I agree the redesign didn't look great, and the graphic unprofessional, it is notable this is now an era where free/open software are expected by its users to be shown professionally to non-technical people, and that presentation is now as important as the code itself.

This new album is the first colab between Byrne and Eno in several decades, Byrne says this is not My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts 2 -- which might initially seem disappointing since that was a truly brilliant work. But this is it's own excellent beast: I don't think I loved it on the first listen, and that's been the case with Byrne's solo work too. But, a couple listens in, however, and those albums, and this one, it hooks you -- especially the last two songs "Poor Boy" and "The Lighthouse". Eno had, in 2005, put out an album Another Day On Earth which I like to describe as exactly like his work ten or twenty years earlier (and that's good IMHO). Byrne has recently done a fantastic installation piece here in NYC called Playing The Building

Techworld talks to Guido in their "The A-Z of Programming Languages" series. He's always good in an interview I think, but every single interviewer apparently asks whether he uses tabs or spaces, or at least questions the Python indentation style. Without a doubt, when you say you work with Python to other developers it's one of the first things they mention: either with a confused slightly derogatory shake of the head, or, with a sigh of relief. I fall in the sigh of relief camp, since I haven't had a bracing style argument in about a year. That using Python requires a certain visual structure seems to me a pro rather than a con, since it removes a particular distraction potential. Ever have a two day conference just about coding style? Yeah, not fun. I wasn't building anything those two days, needless to say. Now, you can still get your geek on and argue tabs or spaces (I'm back to spaces after a brief sojourn to the dark side of tabs), but you've got to indent properly for Python to work, end of story, and hence sigh of relief.

Continuing with all things Eeepc, I got a Tekkeon MP3450 external battery. So far, seriously rocks. Along with the Eeepc battery I figure I can get something like 8 full hours. The Tekkeon is relatively small, weighs about a pound. See side pic, no one seems to show it in comparison with an eeepc, and for Eeepc to MacBook photo, see previous post.

Damn I've wanted one of these for a long time. I keep an eye out on e-Bay every now and then, but my e-Bay-fu is weak. Before the days of Texas Instruments calculators, how would you do a relatively complex calculation? In your head or on paper, sure, but do you really trust your head that well? It might be wrong. The calculation might be important, we need to check it here and now and quickly. Before portable electronic calculators. You could, of course, probably use your slide rule. I still occasionally break out my POST 1446 and try and do something useful with it. But there's something so, well, 17th century about the slide rule despite it going along with men to the moon. The Curta has that particular retro-gadget whizz-bang, like a handheld difference engine. It's from the past, it's from the future. Curta demo, Curta deconstructed, Curta Algorithms, Curta brochure, Curta simulator.

Pigeonholing mental activity is like a back-slapping slot machine -- 'You're this way' or 'I'm part of this group' etc. There are few terms I dislike more than 'polymath' or its more derogatory partner 'ADD'. Just a guess, but people's interests have varied greatly over a great deal of time, and these sort of terms get overused for standard behavior. I imagine Grog the cave man losing interest in cave painting and moving on to weaving, thus answering age old questions from historians "who painted this and why?" from Grog as "(shrug) I dunno I was totally into cave painting for like, a couple years maybe". It seems like everyone is concerned about whether they're a specialist or a generalist, about lack of focus, about distraction. In the past few months there have been big stories about technology, that amount of media produced and its searchability is making us stupid, that the pace of communication is, say, akin to driving drunk. Perhaps one of the problems here is that we're all making comparisons between ourselves and our tools, that our behavior is unrealistically expected to be ordered, laser-like, systematic, sortable by alpha in row 1. It's not, never has been. Are there too many distractions, too much media, frivolous communication too easy, etc.? Sure, but you know, you can usually control your environment (one of the upsides of having the very tools that are claimed to cause the problems) and with a little bit of practice actually use the things around you productively. What may not have changed is the education to do so -- teach not only how to read, but how to make time to read properly. I'm going to schedule time now to become distracted and enjoy it.