Lonely Lion

“What’s the big deal with Rails?”, asks the adju.st guy, linking to my last post. The answer is: who knows. It’s very popular, and is pulling a lot of non-traditional eyes towards the exciting world of open source web development.

Meh. It sounds cheesy because it is cheesy. Sure, Rails is just another framework, but if PHP has taught us anything, it isn’t important how good or bad something is, what’s really important is how many graphic designers it can snare. Ruby on Rails is the current blog-darling, it looks like Django is starting to pull some of its wind (or at least share its wind). Python and Ruby, as languages, attract nice bright people that like to hang out with other nice bright people, so a sort of get-together is inevitable. I’m happy that Chicago seems to be one of the first such explicit “Ruby people, meet the Python people” towns. As of yet, not much has happened in the way of scheduling this, but it’s at least somewhat exciting.

lighttpd has popped up on my radar a few times over the past couple of weeks. I just now checked out their web page for a few minutes. They claim that their server is faster than Apache. I’ve had load problems for a while now on CiN. I’m wondering if this might be worth trying for some of the heavy PHP sections of the site, like the message board.

It’s worth a shot. I have a fairly long list of things that need to get done, so this may very well go nowhere, but it’s going on my “someday / maybe” list.

The Scribbler

Parallax is coming out with a new robot geared for the beginning robotic programmer, but with enough “oomph” for the more advanced hobbiest. It seems like a great concept, and looks like it will make BASIC Stamp programming even more accessible.

I also like the fact that it emphasizes the programming aspect of the robot over the construction of the robot. Not that hardware engineering isn’t interesting, but to me, writing the software is the most exciting part. I’m very excited to see what people do with these.

There’s some talk about a Chicago Ruby / Python meeting of the minds to specifically discuss Rails at some point in the not-too-distant future. I’m not entirely sure where the thread started, but Ian brought it to our attention this morning.

I like this sort of thing, as I’m not a fan of the us v. them attitude. Unless the them is M$. In which case, I’m all for it. Actually, even that isn’t totally true, but it’s fun to say. I hope that this meetup idea happens, I’d like to learn Ruby / Rails.

ASPN : Python Cookbook : Easy to use object-oriented thread pool framework

I saw this recipe this morning in the Python Cookbook, and wanted to mark it down for later digestion. Distributed computing, in it’s many forms, is something that I’m not terribly comfortable with a relatively new professional programmer. I mostly just rely on server “containers” to handle any sort of asynchronise-ness that may come up.

However, the whole idea of big multi-threaded / forked stuff is appealing. The BeeSim project that started as a Perl OOP exploration project, and is now getting ported to Python for further development is a good candidate for some threads. It would be neat to have each bee be a thread. I haven’t checked any of the Python code into the public Subversion repository as it’s mostly just stubs anyways. Hopefully I’ll flesh it out in the next couple of weeks. As fun as the Bee project is, it’s really on the waaaaaay back burner.

One of the reasons I’m moving it to Python (apart from the fact that Python is awesome) is to build out some sort of Myghty based web-front end. For now, the immediate goal is to port, class for class, method for method, the whole Bee backend from Perl to Python.

I’ve also had this book on my virtual safari bookshelf for a while: SCTHUMBZZZ.jpg” alt=”AI for Game Developers” />. The world that I’m creating for the Bees, and the Bees themselves, are great candidates for some AI exploration. All in all, I’m enjoying the project as a sort of “thing to do on the train.”

I’ve been a fan of Intelligentsia coffee for about two years now. I like the fact that they enjoy what they do, it clearly comes through in the product. About six months ago, they started to offer unroasted beans on their site. I didn’t realize that it was possible to roast at home. Finally, two weeks ago, I bought Home Coffee Roasting : Romance and Revival from the book store.

Here’s the thing: you roast the beans in a stovetop popcorn popper. The book recommends Sweet Maria’s for beans and equipment. After ~ $60 (including shipping) I had a whirley popcorn popper, a candy thermometer, and 8 little bags of various green coffees. I also signed up on the Sweet Maria’s discussion list. It has a good amount of traffic, it’s been interesting reading.

I’ve now roasted a total of three times. The first turned out pretty poor. Way too little roast. It was interesting, but needed just a touch more roast to really be considered good coffee. The next two turned out really well. I’ve roasted two varieties of coffee, one from Nigeria and one from Rwanda. The Nigerian had a heavy earthy taste to it that I liked. I think if I would have roasted for a bit longer it would have turned out great. The Rwandan is very good. Both times it roasted to a nice oily deep roast. Flavor wise, it’s pretty plain. I’m going to try and tone the darkness down a bit on the next roast to try and let the varietal flavor come out a bit more. I’m not sure if the dark is killing something else in the bean. We shall see.

I was surprised at how quickly I picked up the techniques, never having seen anyone roast before. It’s really not that difficult. However, it is pretty messy. I did all three roasts on the side burner of our gas grill out back. The coffee smokes pretty heavily, and creates a lot of chaffe.

I need a better way to track information about the roasts, so I can recreate successful ones with some sort of accuracy. For now, I’m taking notes on index cards for each roast. It’s not a bad system, but the nerd in me wants to get computers involved. I’m still not entirely sure how, or where, but computers and or robots will get involved at some point.

Adrian Holovaty presented Django last night, in a sort of sneak preview for it’s release this week. Django clearly has a lot of features that will be welcome to Python web development. There were actual oohs and ahhs from the group during the presentation.

Ian Bicking presented some functional programming techniques for Python. It was a good talk, which led to a lot of interruptions and general discussion. With any other group, interruptions are a problem, with the chiPy group it’s usually a good thing.

Lastly, we decided on a title for the first run of the book club. For now, I’m just linking to Martin Maney’s post explaining the title and some first steps. We’re going to open the club up to anyone, regardless of your opinion on Python (or Chicago) so if you’re interested watch the wiki.