As long as biased people are commenting on Matt's pining for a more innovative Miguel, I thought I'd throw in my two cents. I'm certainly biased* and have my opinions as well.

So yes, Matt made a technical faux paus in pleading with Miguel to develop more applications like Dashboard …

Just watched the screencast here about Owen Taylor's improved shell. Nothing revolutionary per se, but it just looks more beginner friendly (ie you can go and edit existing expressions, rather than using shell history). Kinda reminds me of the only time I used mathlab.... some 13 years ago. Now if …

My brother is the archetype of a hacker. We wasted many hours learning basic on the c64 back in the day. He used to hook up old monochrome apple monitors to stereo output and achieve some really cool visualizations. (Ben Harper's Opression is probably the best). He wrote tetris for …

Some interesting thoughts about testing and python found among gnome developers. Joe Shaw was explaining how most new gnome apps these days are written in either python or C#. They choose C# for their app (Beagle) because "[they] wanted a strongly typed language" (I think he meant static typing but …

Just a few (rambling) thoughts on OpenOffice I've been having as of late. My daughter just started Kindergarten and my wife is now caught up in the PTA. So unlike the tech world, which tends to revolve around excel spreadsheets, the PTA revolves around word documents. My wife is relegated …

Using the Plugin

Was watching this video describing how to "slice" web page designs two days ago and it inspired me. After a tiny bit of digging I found that one can easily script inkscape using python.

Here's the process I've used for slicing web layout with Inkscape. Create your …

Pygments is a source code highlighter. I believe the main purpose is to format code/markup for webpages (forums, blogs, wikis, trac, etc). (I used it on my previous post). But it also has renderers for latex, rtf and bbcode. I happened to desire an SVG backend yesterday, so I'll …

There's a difference between code when you know you will be using it later and code that you're going to throw away. There's also a difference between being lazy and taking time to follow best practices. Below is an example of two command line programs that do the same thing …

If one searched for Oracle and Rails they're bound to turn up a bunch of results that appear to indicate that Oracle is on the Rails bandwagon. How Web2.0 of them. (I'm trying to think of some funny snide remark about a rails acquisition, but can't really....)

• We're hiring …

I arrived in Portland last night for OSCON. From a conference standpoint, it feels very similar to when I attended in 2005. The attendance doesn't appear to have grown much and the exhibition hall is about the same size. Though there appear to be a few more "community" exhibitors than …