a convenient truth

This is one of the silliest ideas I have seen in ages. I thought Dan Gilmore had more sense.

If you can’t tell the difference between the professional, the personal and fiction, perhaps you should get off the Internet and go back to watching TV?

I really don’t understand what all the fuss about Ruby on Rails is. For example This post. As far as I can tell Rails is nothing clever, uses a lot of old and rather bad ideas (like RDBMSes and templates-with-code-in-them) and is generally just the same as all the evil old Java frameworks that it is a relief to get away from.

As far as I can tell the only thing it’s really got is alliteration. Is that really all it takes to get some much attention?

Sure it’s a lot easier, faster and less painful than anything the Java guys use, but the same could be said of virtually anything. I can see why they are getting excited. These are people who use XML for choice, because it’s lightweight and agile compared to the language they are generally forced to use. By why the hell is everyone else getting so excited?

Answers on a postcard please.

Development for HamCannon is kicking off again after a hiatus. HamCannon is a customised outbound email engine, originally written for Plone 2.

The new version uses Gary Poster’s zasync product to integrate it with Twisted. This provides a much better framework for the long running aspects of the software.

The architecture is being completely reworked too, to provide core functionality that can be accessed from any part of twisted, all auditing done through pgasync, and potentially a custom sending component, rather than delivering via the local MTA.

One final piece is a Nevow front-end to provide control of the sending process, with feedback on progress. As much, or as little, of this as necessary can be provided to the Plone hamcannon tool and the Newsletter and SubscriberList objects.

There are some really interesting aspects to this architecture, and if there is anyone who wants to hack on it, see the Instructions for setting up a development environment.

Come find me in channel #hamcannon on the OFTC IRC Network.

This microformat ‘rel=”tag”‘ is a very interesting idea.

I saw it suggested a while ago somewhere that using wikipedia as a Foundation Ontology would provide a really simple way of bootstrapping the so-called “Semantic Web”. It seems to me that a combination of the rel=”tag” idea with wikipedia as the tagspace might be one way of doing it from the ground up.

It certainly gets around the problem that when I tag something as “python” I mean the programming language, whereas someone else might mean the reptile. Wikipedia distinguishes the two, with different URLs, and that solves the problem. As long as everyone uses English of course.

An interesting idea on blog aggregation for many-to-many blogs. Might be one for reptile…

Not very much by the looks of it. Good grief.

Nevow is in fact not a web framework. Which is a relief. Now we can all go home, phew.

I’m involved in a rather exciting looking new free software project, using my shopping list de jour of fun tech: Twisted, Nevow, Atop, with a heavy dose of zope.interface and pyparsing too.

Watch this space for more information, we beta in November…

Julius Caesar was addressing the crowd in the Coliseum. “Friends,Romans
Countrymen, lend me your ears. Tomorrow I take our glorious army to
conquer Northern Europe and I shall start with France. We shall kill many
Gauls and return victorious.” The crowd are up on their feet “Yes, yes,
hail mighty Caesar”.

In the background, Brutus turns to his mate and says “Caesar doesn’t half
talk some sh*te eh? He couldn’t fight his way out of a wet parchment bag.”

Six months later, Caesar comes back having conquered France and addresses
the crowd in the Coliseum. “Friends, Romans and Countrymen, I have
returned from our campaign in France and as I promised, we killed 50,000
Gauls”. The crowd is up on their feet again. “Yes, yes, hail mighty
Caesar”.

Brutus once again turns to his mate “I’m sick of his bullsh*t. I’m off to
France to check this out.” So Brutus sets off for France. Three weeks
later he comes back to Rome,just as Caesar is addressing the public in the
Coliseum again. Caesar is giving his usual patter to the assembled throng,
“Friends,Romans Countrymen, tomorrow we set off for Britain and we are
going to sort those b*stards out!” The crowd is up on their feet.
“Yes, yes, hail mighty Caesar”

Brutus jumps up and shouts, “Caesar, you are exposed as a liar. You told us
that you had killed 50,000 Gauls in France but I’ve been there to check it
out and you only killed 25,000!”

The crowd is stunned and all sit down in silence. Caesar gets up and looks
slowly round the Coliseum then across at Brutus and says

“Brutus, you are forgetting one thing. Away Gauls count double in Europe.”