Lonely Lion

I just recently heard about Subversion from a guy in chipy.org. This morning, on the way to work, i thought I might try to replace my existing (small) CVS repository with Subversion, and use it to synchronize projects and notes between my laptop, webserver and desktop. I just saw this article (published yesterday) on O’Reilly. Good timing O’Reilly.

In other O’Reilly news, chipy is now an official O’Reilly User Group.

Chipy (pronounced chip eee) met for the first time last night. All was well. I think people enjoyed themselves. I got a couple of specific cool things from the meeting. 1) Smoke Ping and 2) confirmation that it’s alright to use a bunch of self.write() statements in a Webware servlet. It was great to meet everyone face to face, even though I was super-late. Special thanks to Imaginary Landscape and Ken Stox for providing a room and pizza. And also to Ian Bicking, who presented a web frameworks overview. Thanks everyone for coming out.

An announcement for a new version of Rule Core recently went out on the comp.lang.python.announce list. It seems like an interesting program. It responds to events triggered from a variety of sources, including XML-RPC, WebSphere and Tibco, then, based on rules, acts. “Acts”, I believe, means “trigger a script.”

All in all, this might be useful at work. Within Netbackup, it’s easy to create scripts that are triggered by job events. I’m not sure if something like Rule Core would make it easier for me to script reactions to these events, or if I’m better off just writing them in Python.

I’ve used JPGraph a few times for some “real time” graphs in PHP. It’s a nice package, and rare in the plotting space for being able to set arbitrary axes. It’s strange, but 90% of the plotting packages out there are aimed at science types that rarely need to just be able to plot something simple, with some weird X axis.

There is now a port of this nice module for Python. I haven’t yet used it, but I anticipate it will come in handy at some point. The link is here.

I was sort of bummed out that it seemed that all roads were leading towards having to install a big fat commercial IDE to play around with the Half Life SDK. It turns out though, that Microsoft, in their questionable wisdom*, has been kind enough to release a command line version of the compiler, as described in this page.

The * is for the following: as easy as it may be to instantly knock Microsoft, they’re pretty good to developers. At least, in my limited experience. Their MSDN site is easy to navigate, and they’ve made it possible for projects like Mono to go (so far) unfettered. If only Sun could learn from their example.