Today, I’ll liveblog and tweet from Northwest Python Day 2010. I’ll update this article as the day progresses.
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1734: The day’s over!
1717: More lightning talks. (I’m fading. Lots of great info and discussion today, it takes energy to stay focused!) A Google Maps – Twitter mashup. WebHelpers. IronPython. (Bleh.)
1647: Python vs. Ruby, Gary Bernhardt. Ruby fails to live up to the Zen of Python. (E.g., Calling functions with or without parens, gah! Rails has junk drawer of monkey patches.) Good aspects: Ruby core types have composability; Ruby has “the full Lisp chainsaw.” RSpec. “Ruby is ugly, Python is beautiful. But…” Compared syntactic expressiveness and semantic flexibility. Wants to see blocks added to Python.
1603: Python & GIS, Dane Springmeyer. Unofficial Python GIS SIG. Gentle guide to GIS. Where am I? Python and OO GIS. GeoDjango, GeoAlchemy / Shapely, GeoHASH for AppEngine, and Mapnik. TileMill is a tile rendering engine using Amazon’s cloud.
1513: Justin Cappos, a platform for developing and deploying networked applications. Clouds are great for scalable computation, no hardware purchases, minimizing IT overhead, and providing fault tolerance. But cloud providers need to make money somehow, sometimes including advertisements; there’s loss of privacy; censorship; and vendor API lock-in. Cloud computing erodes software freedom. P2P is an alternative, but problems with heterogeneity, short use patterns, fault tolerance, and distributed state management. His solution (Seattle) uses a safe virtual machine environment, and is run like a potluck. It executes a Python subset, which is implemented in Python.
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January 21, 2010 · 1 Comment
I’ve used the BumpTop 3-D desktop (Mac version) for a day. It’s a promising start, but not worth using, or paying for.
BumpTop’s visual metaphor is a 3-D desktop surrounded by four walls. It works with OS X’s Spaces, so each Space can be a 3-D desktop. This means each virtual desktop now has five surfaces (the desk and four walls) for icons. Application windows can exist only on the desk, while icons can be there or on any wall. This is useful, if you need more space for icons.
So: Think of an application window being attached to a Space, and a BumpTop 3-D background being attached to a Space. BumpTop represents your desktop icons. The application window and BumpTop aren’t aware of each other.
You can move icons (except for one kind, the “pile”) to any surface. You can swivel the view to bring any surface to the fore. (E.g., double-clicking the right wall will bring the right wall front and center.) You can slide an icon into a wall and watch it bounce off — Ooooo, physics!
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I’m trying a new 3D desktop, for Macs. It’s called BumpTop. I’ve only played with it a bit, but it’s interesting enough to keep it for the next couple of days, and see how I like it.
I already see one visual oddity… The BumpTop desktop is 3-D, but open application windows are 2-D.
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Historic Seattle now has a blog. If you’re interested in Seattle architecture preservation, check it out.
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Live-blogging day 2 of the conference.
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1532: Packing it in. The remaining sessions aren’t sufficiently interesting to me to stay. Got some things to do at home. I probably won’t attend this weekend, for the same reason. It would be nirvana if I was a journalist, but as a technology guy, I’m good.
1445: Session’s over. Consensus was, (a) Using the current generation of journalism tools isn’t that hard, (b) If you need customizations, “just” hire a contractor to make them for you, (c) Making a system that reduced online journalism’s technology load probably isn’t worth it. I don’t agree with any of these sentiments, but, they were in the majority. How odd.
Now thinking about whether to say for the 3:00 session.
1436: Michael Bradbury tries to bring the train back on the tracks. Some participants still want to play in the dandelions.
1409: Yep, in the weeds now.
1358: Group discussion’s driving off the rails.
1346: Technology aggravations: Content migration. Content held hostage to the hosting service, platform, and/or cloud.
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Live-blogging day 1 of the conference.
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17:54: Much good conversation about photography, information dissemination, and pricing models. I feel my control rods going in; time to head home.
16:05: Chatted with someone from the West Seattle Blog. “How much have you been affected by Fisher Communications‘ KOMO neighborhood blogs?” “Not at all.” Fisher’s astroturfing of their blogs was an open secret. “They’re cheesy looking. Professional and slick, but it looks like they tried to look amateurish.” Consensus was Fisher’s seeing maybe 300 hits/day from each one. Don’t know if that’s right, but I love a good rumor as much as the next man.
1530: Nowhere near enough power strips.
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I’m attending the local Journalism that Matters conference later this week. Should be very interesting, for both intensive discussions on where local journalism is headed, and for finding potential business for Meta Consulting.
I’ll tweet and liveblog from it.
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For my travel to PyCon 2010, I have three choices.
Fly. Total round-trip is ten hours and $480, nonstop. I’ll know what it’s like to be a cow in a slaughterhouse.
Bus. Total is five days and $245, with many stops. I’ll go insane.
Train. Total round-trip is eight days and $585, with many stops. But I’ll be treated like a human being.
I hate flying. Let me repeat that: I. hate. flying. The free-market does not work in the air travel industry. The airlines have no incentives to provide quality service, and the TSA is inept. This is what happens when a country is led by fear and willful ignorance.
But, 4.5 days of my time is worth a lot more than $240. And Amtrak’s combination of price and round-trip time is uncompetitive.
So I’ll fly. Moooooooooooooo.
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I’m peeved.
I like eating at Hilltop Ale House. It’s in a great location, has a fun atmosphere, and provides very good -to- excellent food for the money. Their soups can be to die for. It’s a good meeting place for start-ups, and they don’t hassle you if you linger a bit. Last but not least, I like Tim and Beau, bartenders/waiters extraordinaire.
Hilltop recently made two changes to their menu. Both of these changes suck.
Suckage #1
They silently reduced the size of their Goat Cheese Salad, I guess as a cost-saving measure. It used to be a kickin’ salad, but now it’s just OK.
Suckage #2, the Greater Offense
They committed a far larger offense in another dish. They removed the tabouleh from their Artichoke Hummus Pita Plate.
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December 7, 2009 · 1 Comment
We discuss, read, and tweet computer technology every day. But we’ll occasionally have a delightful “Oh wow!” moment that demonstrates how much technology has advanced, and what it might enable in the future.
I was lucky to have had two of them last week.
Moment 1 of 2
The first was when I realized that typical desktop disk drives are now $100/TB. For example:
Some results for WD 1.5TB disk search
Higher-performance and/or smaller-profile devices will cost more. But these Western Digital drives (available in .5TB – 2TB sizes) are at the knee of the curve for desktop and small server storage. They’re “green”: The smaller models have fewer parts (higher storage densities allowed WD to eliminate a platter); and they all use variable speeds, spin downs, and other tricks to cut power consumption.
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November 29, 2009 · 1 Comment
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Chuck Taylor and I are working on an early stage business idea. Wanting some help to move it forward, we submitted it as a proposal to Y Combinator. Per their instructions, the application included videos, which Y Combinator required to be submitted through Posterous. (A reason why they required the use of Posterous might be that Y Combinator funded Posterous…)
In the end, they didn’t select our application. (Oh well.)
Between my experience using Posterous, positive ink on ReadWriteWeb, and reading a few glowing articles and tweets, I’m left scratching my head. Posterous is OK, but I don’t understand why someone would use it instead of systems like WordPress or TypePad.
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I’ve enabled geotagging on this blog. That is all.
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