Blue Sky On Mars

Oprius Software has the distinction of posting the second TurboGears job.

Swaroop C H wrote this morning (at least, it’s morning here!) to tell me that A Byte of Python now has TurboGears under the hood.

This has probably been all over the blogs already, but congrats to the folks of TextDrive who are now part of Joyent. Joyent has some really cool looking offerings and TextDrive expands what they can do in some interesting dimensions. Check out the press release.

Yesterday, the ever-resourceful Ronald Jaramillo introduced ModelDesigner for TurboGears, which he introduced with a nice, quick screencast. ModelDesigner lets you create TurboGears (SQLObject) model classes via some easy web forms.

ModelDesigner is part of the TurboGears Toolbox coming in 0.9. Ronald hasn’t checked it in to svn yet, but he promises to do so sometime soon.

The list of talks for PyCon 2006 is up. There are lots of good topics planned, including two TurboGears sessions. Mark Ramm, who I’m helping out on a forthcoming TurboGears book, will be doing a tutorial session on TurboGears. I’ll be doing a talk on “effective AJAX”, which is all about making a usable AJAXified web app (samples, of course, will be in TurboGears).

Though I’ve used Python for many years, this will be my first PyCon, so I’m really looking forward to it.

Since Wednesday of last week, I’ve had really spotty access to the internet. The timing was quite unfortunate with all of the activity going on in building TurboGears 0.9. Finally, today, I am back online and should be for a good stretch.

Ineresting sighting of TurboGears in the wild: Diggdot.us aggregates content from Slashdot, Digg and del.icio.us to give aggregator-less geeks a well-rounded, de-duped view of current goings on.

Yesterday, a whole bunch of people showed up for a meeting to discuss TurboGears 0.9. Not only did they show up, they stuck around for 3 hours. We had a lot to discuss and there are quite a few people contributing code. The activity level is great and I can’t wait to have a fully-baked 0.9 out the door.

The Michigan Python Users Group had its third meeting on Monday. There were 8 of us in attendance at the Humantech office, which has been a fairly consistent number.

Roger Espinosa gave a good talk introducing ElementTree and lxml.

And, as always, the unstructured part of the meeting was interesting and useful, covering a wide-range of topics. There was some interesting talk about Ubuntu (interesting for me, at least, since I haven’t run Ubuntu as yet).

We talked about scheduling, and I believe the final decision was that the next meeting is Thursday, December 1st.

I’ve been a Quicksilver fan for a while now, and I’m a recent convert to Kinkless GTD which uses OmniOutliner to implement the Getting Things Done style of, well, getting things done. This morning, I updated to the latest version and learned about a new feature: you can add new items to your KGTD inbox via Quicksilver!

If you’ve never used Quicksilver, it’s hard to imagine how speedy it can make things. With this Quicksilver action, as soon as something pops into my head I can just hit control-space, “.”, type in the thing that I need to remember for later, tab, kg, enter. It’s amazingly quick and unobtrusive and lets me store everything away so that I can process it later, GTD-style.

By the way, for the Python folks reading this, Quicksilver actions can be written in Python!

I’ll repeat my earlier calls: if you happen to know of something like Quicksilver for Windows (and you’d really only know if you’ve tried Quicksilver on a Mac), let me know. It’s painful to not have it whenever I’m using my Windows machine.