Blue Sky On Mars

• Finished ‘Potter’? Rowling tells what happens next
  The Deathly Hallows epilogue was not particularly exciting to me (though I enjoyed the rest of the book). But, in this interview (for folks who have read the book already), JK Rowling gives a few more bits about where the characters end up.
  (tags: harrypotter books spoilers potter)

As I mentioned previously, the August meeting of the Michigan Python Users Group is a joint meeting with the Ann Arbor Computer Society at the Google office in Ann Arbor. I have just found out what our meeting topic is…

Russell Whitaker, a Google software engineer, will be talking about Test Driven Development in Python. I was test infected a long time ago and I’ll certainly be interested to see if Russell has some tricks I haven’t seen yet

If you’re new to TDD, this is sure to be a good meeting.

Update: Registration has closed… we’ve got a full house.

For those who might be curious what I’ve been working on for the past year, check this out: ITPro: Reviews: EXCLUSIVE: Arbor Networks Peakflow X 3.7. 5 stars out of 6. Six star reviews seem a little strange, but I’m happy to see Peakflow X getting more additional positive press.

If you saw my release of TGWebServices in February, that work was done for the 3.7 release of Peakflow X.

• Script Software – Essential Mac Automation for Everyone with iKey
  keyboard shortcuts and automation
  (tags: mac software productivity)

• Walk Score – How walkable is your house?
  Gives a score to how walkable your house is based on how close by other things are. Not surprisingly, and unfortunately, my house scores pretty low.
  (tags: googlemaps mashup walking)
• Brendan’s Roadmap Updates: New Projects (IronMonkey and more)
  Mozilla has started a project to bring IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin. It will be very interesting to see how IronPython does performance-wise against CPython in the Tamarin environment. (Of course, one of CPython’s big features is the ability to link
  (tags: javascript mozilla future programming)
• Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python
  David Goodger’s OSCON presentation is a good overview of how to do things in a Pythonic way.
  (tags: python programming tutorial)
• SearchStatus | Firefox SEO Toolbar Extension
  (tags: firefox seo alexa google extensions extension)
• Chris Wilson keynote at TAE
  Includes some debugging tips for IE.
  (tags: microsoft internetexplorer ie)

• VirtualBox
  Open source virtualization that is currently in beta on the Mac.
  (tags: virtualization Software OpenSource free)
• Mindquarry for Collaboration, Teamwork, Productivity | Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software
  Java-based open source collaboration tool (interestingly uses subversion for version control)
  (tags: collaboration opensource groupware ProjectManagement)

• » Mail Your Child to Sri Lanka or Hire Indian Pimps: Extreme Personal Outsourcing
  Tim Ferriss includes some other outsourcing links and tells some crazy outsourcing stories.
  (tags: lifestyledesign lifehacks)
• KeyCastr: Easy Keystroke Visualizer
  useful for displaying keystrokes while doing a screencast
  (tags: screencast presentation tool mac)

It’s time to clear out my warehouse space for some projects that I am starting up. I have slashed the prices on the TurboGears Ultimate DVD and the nifty TurboGears merchandise (the MarbleGears marble maze, the tin toolbox and the squishy, stress-reliever toolboxes).

The DVD, with more than 5 hours of material, is now under $10 while supplies last.

• Strands
  uses coroutines to provide a more synchronous style of async programming in javascript
  (tags: javascript ajax)

Florent Aide has just released TurboGears 1.0.3. Congrats to Florent on a release with a whole bunch of good things! (See the changelog).

Florent and Mark Ramm have been pushing things forward at a great clip for TurboGears 1 and 2. Stay tuned (or even better, get involved!) for the coming 1.1 and 2.0a releases.