Thursday, October 31, 2002

Light-hearted, informative article on user input in Python. Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for a pointer to this delightful piece on Python scripting by Paul Evans. 12:34:15 PM

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Same Old Battle, Revisited: Does Open Source Kill Markets? Yesterday, industry guru Mitch Kapor and his team announced an Open Source initiative to create world-class desktop applications. Their first product, code-named Chandler after the famed detective, is a Personal Information Manager, or PIM. This is an area in which I have a strong personal interest. The news was only a few hours old before Don Park raised the question of whether such an effort would have negative economic consequences for the software business. Soon after that post, my buddy Chuck Shotton chimed in with a vote dissenting from Park's concern. Last week while I was at the Online Community Summit in California's Wine Country, I heard the usual "Nobody makes money off Open Source software" whine. The fact is, that isn't necessarily true. There are viable economic models for making money from Open Source. But even if it were true, the presence of a low-end product without BigCo documentation and support will never threaten a viable commercial product. So I'm with Chuck on this one in large part because it's the side of this debate I've always found myself on. Open Source and/or free software is A Good Thing. It's not a pancea. I choose to use some commercial products where there are decent Open Source equivalents, sometimes because of a key feature I need, sometimes becaue of interoperability concerns with clients and publishers. And there are some Open Source packages I might use if there were any support (even support I had to pay for) available outside the user community. (User support can of course be great but it can also be spotty, inconsistent, and wrong.) 1:00:47 PM

Sunday, October 20, 2002

Dan Gillmor on Mitch Kapor's 'Crazy' Software Plan I've written Mitch Kapor (whom I've never met) an email asking if I can help with the Chandler project. Here's Dan Gillmor's usual on-target assessment of what Kapor and his team are up to. They're using all my favorite technologies, including Zope for the ODB side of things. This is going to be fun even if it isn't hot. 11:57:09 PM

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Latest Python Released Python 2.2.2 is out. Python 2.2.2 is out. Download mirrors. What's new. (35 words) [dive into mark] 10:49:07 AM

Monday, October 14, 2002

Yippee! Pure Python Cocoa Apps Now Possible This is great news for those like me who worship at the altar of simplification. The (simple to use) Macintosh and the (simple to program) Python can now marry one another in the presence of the flavorful (but not always so simple) world of Cocoa! I'm going to start learning this stuff right now. I've become a Python addict and although I'm more enamored of working in PythonCard than in pure Python, this development promises the potential to do some interesting GUI stuff while waiting for the wxPython Macintosh port to become finally usable. Fun, fun, fun! Some Cocoa-Python Love [MacSlash: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion] 10:47:50 AM

Thursday, October 10, 2002

If you're into coding or understand it in the least, you'll love this And now for something completely different. Shelley Powers: The Parable of Languages.  Well worth a read. [Sam Ruby] 1:17:04 AM

Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Python Cookbook review is fair The Python Cookbook. Nice2Cats writes "Python is something of a programmer's dream and an author's ... [Slashdot] I've worked through some of this book and looked over its entirety. I agree with Nice2Cats (though I am canine-preferred myself) that this is a useful book if you've learned enough Python to do more than toy stuff. I found the Text chapter particularly fascinating and helpful and I'm about to tackle the one on OOP where Python's implementation is just different enough from my accustomed OO language, Smalltalk, that I need to twist my head about a bit and slam it into a well to get its attention focused. 9:57:41 AM

© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.