Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products

Crazy busy

by Kevin Dangoor

My blog posting these past few weeks hasn’t been up to my usual standard. I’ve been in an entirely new brand of busy for me. If the level of busy-ness was measured in caffeine, I’ve had some jobs that were closer to Root Beer, most jobs along the way were like a Coke or Pepsi. Right now, I’m definitely in Jolt-land. (I’m not caffeinated myself, but it seems like an appropriate metaphor).

TurboGears 0.9 will see the light of day soon (especially with all of the work put in recently by Michele, Alberto and Max). I’ve been working on my PyCon presentation and need to put some more time into the TurboGears book. The TurboGears email list is as busy as ever (665 messages so far this month). Progress is happening on spinning Zesty News off from Blazing Things, and I hope to have more to write about that soon. I’m starting up a new project called Docudo that I’m hoping will be taken over by someone else soon. TurboGears t-shirts are for sale. As soon as is humanly possible, I’m going to be working on something new for Blazing Things. All of this, plus a recent trip to Atlanta and the daily routine helping out with things around home.

Busy as it is, I’m having a great time with work.

As some of these things land, I’ll definitely post more about them here. On my blog, this is the calm before the storm (for me, it would be more like the storm before the storm).

Chat in Gmail

by Kevin Dangoor

For many people, including me as of last night, Gmail now includes chat via Google Talk. And I must say that it’s very cool and nicely implemented. I tried a chat this morning (I was using Gmail’s web interface, he was using gaim) and it worked great. The amazing thing was that the chat transcript in my gmail account was updated live as we were talking. I did a search for a piece of mail and that chat showed up while we were still going.

It’s a very nice piece of integration, and it makes perfect sense.

Lately, I’ve been having a little trouble with Gmail becoming unresponsive. I considered downloading my Gmail to Apple Mail, but the Gmail interface is just so much better for threaded conversations. There’s enough of a difference that I’m willing to put up with a little downtime for the sake of the better UI. And I thought desktop apps were supposed to be better?