In shooting additional footage for “Snakes on a Plane”. New Line has added in a line that was demanded by fans. Strangely, they were shooting additional footage to ensure that the movie goes from PG-13 to R. Though it’s not the kind of movie I’m generally inclined to see, I gotta say that sticking with the “Snakes on a Plane” title was a great move. You just know exactly what you’re going to get. (Hmm… Star Wars Episode II: Wooden Actors, Bad Script, But Yoda Kicks Butt)
Movies
How did I miss this? A Greasemonkey Christmas provides all kinds of great goodies for the heavy Gmail user. Gmail is great, but just yesterday I was thinking “man, I wish I had a keyboard shutcut for ‘trash this message’”. Now I do! I found this from Lifehacker’s Become a Gmail master.
Uncategorized
Yep, it’s that time again. I’m doing the hosting shuffle, which I last did back when TurboGears was first released. I have a couple of reasons for this particular shuffle: I want a bit more control over the things that are running as part of turbogears.org, and my dedicated server at GoDaddy is frozen at Fedora Core 2.
It is apparently possible to upgrade Fedora “in place” using yum. Unfortunately, it appears that it’s also possible to completely hose your box such that it won’t boot any more. I’d rather not go down that route, and I decided I’d switch over to a Debian box. I ended up choosing NetSonic, because they appear to be a good company that provides a decent box at a good price. I had a couple of outages at my first hosting company, Hostik, that were apparently due to “storms in the area”, which would certainly imply that their power facilities were not what I’d like. NetSonic seems to have things in a better spot as far as that goes.
Additionally, I’m setting up a shared account at DreamHost. Between the box at NetSonic and this DreamHost account, I’ll have more than 2TB per month of data transfer available and I should be able to incrementally add more pretty easily.
I hate spending time on this stuff, but I think that the control I’ll have in the end will ultimately be worth it.
Technology
Mark Ramm writes about the approach we’re taking to our TurboGears book in “Leanâ€? Book Publication. Mark set up all of the tools and classes, so he deserves all the credit here. It’s a good setup that I think will ultimately result in a stronger book.
Software Business
From the always relevant Boing Boing, comes this link to a gallery of Overloaded vehicles! This is not mild overload. This is the kind of serious overload the arrest you for here in the States.
Funny
Sometimes I find that there are kids songs that I’d like to do with my daughter, but I can’t remember the words or I don’t know the tune. This page: Sing Along Songs (Midis and Lyrics), NIEHS Kids’ Pages has the answer for quite a few.
Linkage, Parenting
Yesterday, I had an excellent time meeting with folks at TechSmith. You may remember that a few weeks ago, I urged people to pester TechSmith about a Mac version of their wonderful Camtasia product. A few emails with Troy Stein, the Camtasia product manager, later and I was off to meet with them to discuss a wide variety of things going on at TechSmith.
TechSmith is one of those software companies that makes great products and really cares about their users. That’s probably a big part of how they’ve been in business 18 years (and they’re still growing quite nicely, from what I saw). As much as it sometimes seems like all of the interesting action is happening in California, there are quite a few high-tech gems scattered about everywhere. TechSmith is in Okemos, Michigan.
By the way, if you live near Okemos/Lansing (or would like to) TechSmith is hiring (a lot!). They’re hiring all kinds of people and there’s likely room for software developers of many different backgrounds. Check them out!
(And I’m still working on convincing them about that whole Camtasia for the Mac thing 
Software Development
Robert Brewer has a nice module, Recur, which can be used for “cron-like” activities within a running Python program.
Linkage, Python
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Linkage
