Latest News >> 2008-09-29

I read Obie’s most recent post about his intense passion for Loverboy’s quintessential anthem, “Lovin’ Every Minute Of It”. I find the early 1980’s music is inspiring and uplifting and definitely suited to such important things as corporate culture, recruiting, and motivating the troops to do better. Yes, nothing gets a worker working better than a little Loverboy right in their ear.

2008-09-25

Don’t forget folks, the FU NYC show will be in a few hours (7pm-9pm). I’ll be icecasting this one at http://zedshaw.com:8000/fu_nyc and as usual you can use VLC, mplayer or many other players to play the stream.

2008-09-17

I got into music school last week and I’m going to study guitar exclusively for the next year. This is something I’ve always wanted to do, but just never had the chance. Either I wasn’t good enough (being self-taught for so many years) or I just didn’t have the money. After being laid off and getting a small package I decided to practice my ass off on the guitar, do a few live shows to get ready, and then audition for a school in the city.

2008-09-04

The Freehackers Union NYC show went insanely well. I managed to pull off a full live internet feed of the audio to people in FU and the show at the same time. We had about 10 newbies show up to give their first five minutes and 11 listeners on IRC/icecast. Some people showed up just to hang out, so we relaxed the rules and let them stay to build an audience. Overall, there were some cool projects presented and everyone had a good time.

I’ve been working in the salt mines lately trying to get my project out the door for the big mega-corp that pays my rent. That and I’ve been writing a lot in secret on my book or for other publications. Most recently I did an article for CIO magazine on Ruby titled You Used Ruby to Write WHAT?! that amps up the irony of my blog even further.

Yes, that’s why I’ve been ignoring everyone and not writing on my blog. It’s funny but when I read people who comment about my blog, they tend to say that I don’t write often enough for them. That I should just keep cranking out essay after essay for them to read and enjoy.

That’s why most other blogs are crap.

They try to write on a regular schedule and generally just end up writing things nobody really wants to read. When people read my stuff (at least my ranting stuff) they almost always say they read through the entire thing and enjoy all of it. When I read other blogs except College Callgirl I usually skim the first paragraph and then read the conclusion.

So, while I do take my time writing what I want to say, I also try to make it the best writing I can and articulate my opinions and thoughts entertainingly so people will read them and have something to say. Otherwise I’m just jerking off.

In the meantime, enjoy the CIO article. I may do more of these since they pay pretty well for the work involved and it was a lot of fun. I love the irony of me advising a bunch of CIOs about when they should or should not use Ruby. Absolutely fucking awesome.

PyCon This Month

I’m going to PyCon this year since I’m planning to do a lot more professional and hobby work in Python for now. I started playing around with it, found out that Python has an ass load of the things I need for the new Utu client. The GUI frameworks are very well done and complete, even the new ones trying to take on wxPython or PyGTK for the crown of “Official Python GUI”.

One that I’ve found which I really like is PyGUI by Greg Ewing. It has a simple Document oriented view of the world and does nice sane callbacks with a small set of components. It’s trivial to hook in OpenGL or 2D vector calls and works on multiple platforms. The documentation is also pretty decent, as I was able to produce this fun piece that uses a word wrap and SMAWK algorithm from D. Eppstein. That tiny little bit of code implements a document viewer that opens any text file you hand it, displays it word-wrapped (including hyphens) and then lets you click or shift-click the mouse to increase or decrease the font. That would have taken me forever to figure out and do in any other framework

That and my playing with Django, Python Milter, and PyGame has been fun as hell.

Here’s another thing about Python that I liked: I fucking learned it in four hours. I did Python programming many years ago when it was still green and worked in it for about 3 months professionally so I had an advantage. But with Python this time I only had to read the Python Pocket Reference once and I could write what you saw above. I spent much more of my Python self-education browsing code, reading about the community, checking out blogs, understanding libraries, and finding out what’s new.

I think that statement requires repeating: I didn’t have to buy any books to become comfortable doing Python programming. There is a whole ton of great Python documentation, including complete books that you can use to learn it. The books are well written and usually are also published in murdered tree form for the old people with bad eyes. This has helped me with my book buying habbit more than you can ever imagine.

With Ruby I had to spend weeks slogging through code and reading that shitfest Dave Thomas wrote. Back then Ruby people (except Ryan Davis) were really nice and fun. Thinking back now I see why Ryan Davis was such a prick to newbies like me since he probably saw the coming hordes of morons ruining his little party.

I also still haven’t figured out why the fuck I was backing Ruby when the Python guys clearly did a way better job at building their community and infrastructure. I kind of feel like I backed the wrong horse completely.

Oh, and try out Vimperator if you like Vim. Actually check it out either way since it’s a great example of giving people a rich GUI interface that is still very keyboard accessible. I’d love to see someone take this same interface idea and turn it into something for the blind.