Lonely Lion

CNN.com – Google tinkerers make data come alive – Jun 9, 2005

Holy cow, being Slashdotted is neat, being CNN’d is neater. Nice work Adrian!

The June chiPy meeting was last night, we had a series of lightning (boooooom!) talks, some planned, some spur of the moment. The meeting was pretty well attended, despite a Server Beach datacenter outage that took the site down from ~ 2pm until after 5.

The lightning talks fell into two categories, stuff we like and want to share, and stuff we made and want to share. Michael Tobis told us about operator overloading, with an example of how he gets around writing regular expressions (he hates them, he’s in the minority). Robert Ramsdell compared Tkinter and wxPython (no clear verdict). I fumbled my way through a half-assed mx.DateTime show. Jason Gessner presented Myghty, and Ed Summers showed us pylucene. Phew.

Then, in the second category, Adrian Holovaty lifted the curtain on chicagocrime.org, and Jason Huggins presented his web testing suite, Selenium.

So, in short, it was a very productive night. Great presentations all around, any of them could have been extended to a full blown meeting.

In addition, here’s some bullets:

• chicagocrime.org uses a custom web framework called Django that Adrian and Simon Willison are going to release next month. From the little that he showed us, it seems like it could be a very slick web kit.

• A as-yet-unnamed Chicago area University (I’m not sure if this is top secret or what) wants to make a bid to host the next Pycon.

• Some guys from Meetro came to the meeting last night, although it’s written Lua, it seems like a neat application.

• A guy from Textura, a web app for construction management written entirely in Python, came. It’s good to see that the business community is using Python, and seeing value in attending the local meetings. Good work Textura

Man. That’s a lot. Great meeting last night.

This whole Summer of Code thing from Google really makes me wish I was a full time student. This sounds way better than a summer working at a movie theater (sort of). I’ve been poking through the different idea lists from the various participating projects, and was particularly excited by this one from the Apache Software Foundation:

The [WWW] Perchild MPM allows httpd processes to run as a different user, per-vhost or directory. The current implementation has several design flaws, and is not stable or secure. This Project would involve the design and implementation of a new MPM that allows different parts of httpd to run as different Users.

That would be super-cool. I have a hard time with suexec, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. The idea of starting multiple server processes, each owned by a specific user in a virtual host would be awesome. It would change the whole way I do server sharing.

Please. Students. Do that one. I’ll buy you beer, or coffee, or whatever.

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I wrote a review of Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel for the chiPy reviews page. It’s an excellent book, and a great way to get started with Lisp. I highly recommend it.

I installed svk on my laptop this evening. I do a fair amount of work on the trains in the morning, and was getting frustrated that I couldn’t make commits until I got home. After last month’s chicago.pm meeting, I thought I’d give svk a try. I finally got around to installing it tonight. It wasn’t nearly as bad of an install as I was led to believe. There’s a dmg package for OSX, which made installation pretty easy. I spent a half hour or so getting everything working the right way. Now I have a copy of my main Subversion repository mirrored to my laptop. I can make commits to my hearts content, and then sync the work back to my repository. Very nice.