Blue Sky On Mars

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?

Cocoa, JSON & TurboGears: three great tastes that go great together!

Last night was the February meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group. As usual, it was a good, lively meeting. We had a presentation from Jim MacDonald on setuptools/Easy Install/Python Eggs, which led to an inevitable discussion about packaging tools and systems. Everyone seemed pleased at what setuptools brings to the picture (and I’ve been a big fan for several months).

We had another presentation from Steve Kryskalla which covered a very interesting project: converting a Chinese teaching web site to Python. The really intriguing part of his project is that the content of the existing site was all in images! With the help of PIL and pyparsing, he wrote a “proto-OCR” tool that pulled the content out and turned it into a domain specific language for the data on this website. He’s gone through a bunch of cleanup work and is starting to work on the real site (in TurboGears). Nifty project, and I’m glad Steve shared it!

Next month’s meeting has moved to Tuesday, March 7th since Mark (our host) and I will be in Dallas for PyCon and the TurboGears sprint.

Update: in addition to misspelling Steve’s last name, I also forgot to mention the always entertaining after-meeting discussion. We spoke for a while about RDF and, independently, the new Python.org site. Jim promises a future talk on RDF that should be interesting.