The talk that my first blog post was based on is now available for audio download here. It's a good introduction to what caused the creation of the language as well as a few jabs at other languages.

Enjoy

So after spending around 16 hours (and writing about 700 lines of original code) on Saturday preparing an entry for The Eighth Annual ICFP Programming Contest, I thought I'd share my notes and some thoughts. A chunk of this is Python specific. (see this thread for metrics of entries using …

I attended the BayPiggies meeting where Drew Perttula talked about his lighting system, light9 tonight.

The crowd was a little smaller since there was no free dinner, but there was a pretty good turnout. What a small world, Drew works two buildings away from SpikeSource at PDI, and I play …

Not quite sure how to react to this. The only reason for the "switch" as I understand from reading the keynote is a speed bump. Since MacOSX will only run on Apple sanctioned x86 hardware, is there really a difference if it is not ppc inside? There "shouldn't" be a …

I attended a discussion by Peter Yared, CEO of Active Grid sponsored by SDForum tonight.

It looks like he has a pretty revolutionary vision of app servers (the java folks might be a little disappointed). Among current IT folks there is a groundswell of support for using LAMP (Linux Apache …

It appears that Google has a new way of recruiting, paying students to become open source developers.

I'm thinking about this Summer of Code thing and the only reason I can think of for doing it (other than not being evil and maitaining geek karma) is for recruiting. If google …

For those interested in testing and Open Source, my employer (SpikeSource) is throwing a TestFest on June 17th at our offices in Redwood City, CA. Our Test Upload Service allows you to test your code (open or closed source) against various platforms. Come eat our food, drink our drinks, try …

So I've been spending a little bit of time doing the python challenge. It is interesting and somewhat addicting. A few other people at my work have also started on it, and it seems to have picqued their interest in python.

This seems like it could very good marketing for …

I was lucky to get a seat (and dinner) at the standing room-only presentation by Alex Martelli tonight. The talk, which was a repeat of his PyCon talk, called Python Design Patterns and OOP, was hosted by Google. His theme throughout the talk was that of delegation in OOP (object …

I just had a wierd experience. While rocking my son to sleep I saw something jump across the floor. The lights were kind of dim but I was pretty sure it was too big to be a spider and too small to be a rodent. Upon closer inspection it was …