Blue Sky On Mars

links for 2008-05-15

delicious — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:35:37 +0000

Web-based spreadsheets with OpenOffice.org and Dojo - Java World

(tags: dojo ajax spreadsheet)

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Twitter Updates for 2008-05-14

Thu, 15 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

Retiring Hillary’s campaign debt ($20M) means more fundraising for her. She needs to give up and stop wasting money that can go for election #
@ianlandsman the weather we had yesterday has probably just arrived where you are (Chicago is a preview of comming attractions for me) #
why is it that iMovie can record live from my HDV camera but Final Cut Express and Adobe Premiere cannot? #
San Franciscans: put your name on the proposal for the George W. Bush Sewage Plant (thanks davewiner) http://tinyurl.com/3sequ3 #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-05-13

Wed, 14 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

as of r4568, TurboGears 2 now uses Paver for its builds #
@markramm: here’s a static language rebuttal (not too convincing IMHO): http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000483.html #
@mpirnat file a bug report. i happen to know some folks that keep up with stuff like that #
cross-domain js is a pain #
@voidspace xdomain js loading is possible, Dojo has an XD build: http://dev.aol.com/presentations/AjaxExperienceXDomain/index.html #
@voidspace but some things get tricky and don’t work as easily as they do when it’s all in your domain #

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links for 2008-05-13

delicious — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:40:35 +0000

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back

Steve Yegge on dynamic languages and why their performance is ultimately going to rock.

(tags: software development dynamic languages performance)

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Twitter Updates for 2008-05-12

Tue, 13 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@cgseller yes, apple kb is great. I’d recommend it. Nothing bothers me about it so far. #
@dalmaer: LiveScribe is interesting except I don’t write things out by hand and don’t use Windows and most software folks I know are similar #
@dalmaer yeah, i saw the bit about the Mac version coming. For what it is, their impl. does look super slick. #

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Rob Bean’s Big Moo Canoe

Kevin Dangoor — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:20:51 +0000

That’s a helluva canoe:

That’s my cousin, Rob Bean. He’s standing next to a 23 foot, 35 pound (!) canoe that he’s planning to paddle some 250 miles in a charity event he’s calling the Big Moo Canoe. He’s hoping to raise $5,000 for Heifer International Heifer helps to fight hunger and poverty around the world.

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Programming language warts: Newspeak

Kevin Dangoor — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:49:50 +0000

There’s a new language that is soon to be open sourced called Newspeak. Gilad Bracha and team are creating a new language to address what they see as the future of programming (online/offline operation, lots of service oriented design, more concurrency). They’re angling for a Smalltalk-like environment and, indeed, their current implementation is in Squeak.

Ignoring that there’s at least one other language called Newspeak, it seems like Gilad Bracha’s Newspeak is built on reasonable premises. You can read a bit about what Newspeak is like. Newspeak is definitely not done yet, but things like this give me some doubt:

note that the caret (ˆ) is used to indicate that an expression should be returned from the method, just like the return keyword in conventional languages

If I were creating a programming language, writing a sentence like that would give me pause. I would ask myself “why am I doing this differently?” If everyone in the world is using return, why choose ^? To save a few characters of typing? Really? The Newspeak document does not explain why it’s like that, it just states matter-of-factly that ^ means return.

Though they reference Self as an influence for Newspeak, they chose to go with classes rather than prototypes. That’s a good decision for adoption, because people are familiar with and like classes.

Anyhow, I think Newspeak looks interesting and it will be interesting to see how it matures. But too many arbitrary changes from “conventional” syntax are likely to hinder adoption.

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I love my new Apple keyboard

Kevin Dangoor — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:58:49 +0000

“Apple Keyboard Kit” (Apple Computer)

I’m fixing up my home office a bit, and I was using a dirt cheap eMachines keyboard with my MacBook Pro. That keyboard had a PS/2 connector which I ran to a KVM switch (I did have two computers hooked up at one point). So, the first problem was that that keyboard was contributing the my overall cabling mess because of the KVM switch. The other problem was that my current desk, which I bought a few months back, has a much smaller keyboard tray and I’d have to peer under the edge of the desk to see the function keys. It’s also kind of annoying having the wrong meta key arrangement… I’ve been a Mac user for years now, and it would be nice to use a keyboard with Mac keys.

So, I went out and bought an Apple keyboard. It obviously fits much better on my desk. I have no problem seeing all of the keys on this little guy. Additionally, I’ve got to say that I really like the feel. I wasn’t sure that I would, but the keys of this keyboard have a nice tactile response while still requiring very little key pressure or finger travel.

Of course, the Apple keyboard is still a conventional layout keyboard, rather than an ergonomic one. I might be better off with an ergonomic keyboard layout, but for a standard layout keyboard I’m much happier with the feel of this one.

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Twitter Updates for 2008-05-07

Thu, 08 May 2008 03:59:59 +0000

@davewiner I think that’s wishful thinking. HRC has only slightly more lost now than she had yesterday #
@davewiner if the final tally has her losing Indiana, I would not be surprised if she concedes… but that’s wishful thinking on my part #

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Paver 0.7: Better than distutils, better docs and much more

Kevin Dangoor — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:55:29 +0000

I’m delighted to release Paver 0.7. If you missed my original announcement, the short story is that Paver is a new build, distribution and deployment scripting tool geared toward Python projects. My original announcement and the new foreword to the docs explain the motivation.

Ben Bangert and others pointed out a giant documentation bug in 0.4: there was a fair bit of reference doc but no doc that said “here’s how you get started with Paver”. Now there is: Paver’s Getting Started Guide.

Paver 0.7 is a big step up from 0.4 (hence the version number bump). I implemented one of the two major features I had planned for 1.0: distutils/setuptools integration. It’s really cool. Have you ever wanted to just slightly change how “sdist” or “upload” or “develop” worked? Now you can, just by writing a function in your pavement.py file. And don’t worry, you don’t need to duplicate anything between setup.py and pavement.py. It all just moves into pavement.py and Paver can even generate a setup.py file for you, since most people are use to the common “python setup.py install” command.

I’ve gone even farther than that with making it easy to use Paver and not annoy users that don’t yet have Paver. Paver can create a small zip file of Paver’s core bits so that “python setup.py install” will work just fine even for users who don’t have Paver installed. Paver can also create a virtualenv bootstrap script for you, so that users don’t necessarily need to install your package on their systems in order to use it.

Paver’s got new documentation tools that work great with Sphinx. It’s now easy to mark sections of sample code files and then include those sections in your documentation, using the built-in version of Ned Batchelder’s Cog.

And I’m definitely eating my own dogfood. Paver is built using Paver itself and the source distribution includes the paver-minilib so that setup.py install should work fine (let me know if it doesn’t!) The new Getting Started Guide uses the new documentation tools.

There are even more changes than these, and you can look at the changelog for the full list. Note that if you’re using Paver 0.4, there are a couple of trivial breaking changes.

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