Sunday, March 27, 2005

MyCatHatesYou

MyCatHatesYou dot com
Good site for some laughs. Plus I love cats.

PyCon DC 2005 Home Page

PyCon this year was great. We showed up at about 4pm the third day of sprinting, so it was hard to attach ourselves to a group, however we jumped in with Bruce Eckel's Adapters and Interfaces Sprint. Having read the PEP's the night before, we all talked about what we thought they were, why we would want to use them or not, etc. Plus we got to meet some very smart people (more on this later).

The con proper was great. We managed to make it to all three keynotes (waking up at 6:30 in the morning, yawn) and of course the SubEthaEdit crew were back, with a couple newcomers. There is something very satisfying/fun/educational about taking notes in real time with other people. I heard people say that notetaking using SubEthaEdit at conventions is common, but PyCon takes the cake for number of people/quality of notes. (The Google keynote notes were not going to be published online, yet we easily transcribed his slides, took note of what he said, almost word for word, got all the audience comments and did an excellent job of the Q & A session) All our notes can be found at Ted Leung's site here: [http://www.sauria.com/~twl/conferences/pycon2005/]. If you've never used SubEthaEdit, the coloring of the text corresponds to who typed the text. (I was light blue for the Google talk) Notice how collaborative it is. People form kinda unspoken rules of SubEthaEditing, usually a couple people will line their cursors up in order, ready to take the next lines of notes, one or two will go back and spell check or fix organization, someone will fill in the quotes section or links section if needed. It's super cool.

A [supercool] group of us are working on Fuse (maybe this well be renamed), which will be a cross platform Editor similar to SubEthaEdit. The project info can be found on the mailing list, wiki, or the BerliOS site.

Anyways, my general feelings on PyCon are that the conference is a great way to meet people and learn a lot of stuff, the python community is really awesome, in general, there is a lot of fun to be had. Unfortunately I always feel so stupid when I go. Almost everyone there is very, very intelligent. Most, if not all, seem to be involved in open source (which takes some intelligence to begin with), plus they use/helped create python (which also makes you smarter than the average joe), plus they're coming to the conference. So I get to mix in with the cream of the cream of the crop, which is a little depressing to me because, although I love Python dearly, I'm in college and hardly have the time/chance to use it, and I don't have anywhere near the experience in programming that the others have, and I've never worked on an open source anything (besides my dinky game which is released as open source, but I wrote by myself).

Ah well, it's still a lot of fun, and I'm not about to let a lot of really smart people deter me from going anywhere. :) [maybe by next year, they won't have such a step up on me]

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Google SMS

Google SMS is also hella cool. Basically you send a text message like "movies: showtimes 16801" to 46645 (GOOGL) and get movie times back. Check it out the link for different examples.

Infra Red Webcam

Infra Red Webcam is amazing. Even if you're not interested in the process, check out the photos at the end comparing things.
I want to do this sometime..

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Jef Raskin - Robot Rules the Rugs

A cute article by Jef Raskin, who passed away recently, about the Roomba (Rachel, this is for you). He also wrote a book called "The Human Interface" which dad bought and I skimmed, but would really like to read, and was Employee 31 at Apple.
Something that warms my heart is that he graduated from Penn State. (See?) :)