Lonely Lion

“YAPC Schedule is online,”
:http://www.yapcchicago.org/the-schedule/ and it looks great! I’m especially excited for the Tuesday Perl6 track. Perl 6 seems like the butt of a lot of jokes lately (some of which come from my own mouth) so it’s great to see a whole day devoted to getting people excited about it again. I’d love to see Perl start to take some cool-share back from Python and Ruby.

I never actually blogged about the RailsConf schedule being online. I guess it was released when I wasn’t really up on blogging. It’s a good mix of tech talks and technique talks. The BBC talk is pretty high on my list, followed by the migrations and switchtower presentations.

With YAPC and RailsConf back to back, it’s going to be a great week.

Although I stand by my earlier claim, I’m very excited to say that the magic-removal branch is pretty awesome.

There isn’t one enormous change to point to, it’s more like a bunch of little changes that add up to greatness. The full list is on the wiki.

I’m happy to see signifcant namespace changes, this from myproject.blog.models import * is way better than from django.db import models, and first_name = models.CharField(maxlength=30) is WAY better than first_name = meta.CharField(maxlength=30).

Sure, they seem like trivial changes, but I’m pretty sure significant work went into making the API more intuitive. Any one change doesn’t make Django hugely better, but taken as a whole it’s awesome by a thousand papercuts.

Man…I really like this. Way to go Mrs. McAvoy. She sure is good at her work.

Brand new bee board design, now with 100% more pretentious quotes!

There’s another Comedy Apiary

That guy has a tremendously successful NYC underground comedy blog, sited in lots and lots of other underground comedy blogs as the premier underground comedy blog. It’s so underground, it’s practically above ground.

I received a sort of nice cease and desist email from said-owner of the original Bee themed comedy website this afternoon. After some google-chatting, we decided that we’re actually best friends. No word on whether or not my awesome Bee board will change it’s name to lessen the brand-dilution effects of the original Bee board.

I’ll keep everyone updated.

In the mean time, we’re really hoping that David Cross posts on our awesome Bee board. That would be pretty neat.

I was checking out the release notes for Python 2.5. Nothing in the language features section was particularly interesting to me (honestly, most of that stuff needs to be run through the Ian Bicking filter before I really understand it’s usefulness). The ability to pass info into a generator is kind of neat.

However, one thing that does stand out is the inclusion of sqlite3 in the standard library

Although it’s easy enough to install, that’s a definite plus for ease of use, and confidence in distributing code that’s backed in some way by sqlite. +1

After checking out that message board circa 2002 (see my last post), and talking to a few people about what made it cool…I whipped together a chat app for the front page of the bee board. It’s sort of like Campfire very very very lite.

It’s a train-ride-app, as in, I started and finished it on the El ride from the Loop to Francisco. It’s pretty unpolished…we’ll see if people like it. I’m not culling conversations, so I think the next step is to archive them in some form. After that, it would be cool to let people authenticate themselves against the bee board user table. For now though…it’ll be fun to just let it run anonymous as all get out.

With the recent release of the super-high-end-CiN it got me all nostalgic for the bad old days of totally unmoderated bits. I was pointed to an archived shot of the original Improv Chicago which split off of the Improv Resource Center sometime in 2000.

Then, because of some bad code, Improv Chicago moved to some sort of new fangled board (I don’t remember the software.) Things went further and further, and the need for tighter controls kept coming up. Eventually, the owner (Sven) decided to sell the board. It sounded like ransom to a core group of us, so we registered chicagoimprov.org and went to town with a fresh install of PHPBB.

We kept relatively strict controls on content in the beginning, but things started to spread out. Some disagreements of political content on the board led to a split among the original five admins. Then there were more splits over something or other.

Then I gave the domain back to Bop Socky, two of the original five that started CIN.

Recently, more fighting led to me starting up the Bee Board.

Hrmph. All this stuff is sort of depressing. All the schisms and breaks and chopping up of web territories…it’s all a big damn shame.

That shot from 2002 is great. I miss that. Through all the changes we made over time, I get the impression that we were trying to legitimize improv on the web, which I think has ultimately been pretty successful.

For me though, I’d love to have that 2002 energy back. It makes me pretty sad.

I just posted this on the Bee Board

An O’Reilly link to an email by Doc Searls about Web 2.0

It’s very idealistic sounding…I like it a whole bunch. Web 2.0 is a pretty overused term, check out this video of a thing I cohosted a while back. About half way through the q&a part, we asked these two guys (often cited as being leaders in the Web 2.0 movement) a question from the audience, “What is Web 2.0.” There was a pretty huge groan as response.

I get why typical developers don’t like the term (Web 2.0? Marketing bullshit!) but I still contend that there’s some new ideas out there in the world that I really do like.

I don’t typically post hard-tech type things for my improv folks, but thought this would potentially be interesting to them. Improv and Open Source have a few similar elements. In both, you have the potential for lots of personal satisfaction, but there’s a very slim chance that you’ll be able to make a living off of either path.

Although Web 2.0 is really about new business models, it takes a lot of its cues from open source practices (agility, democratic organizations, giving users tools). Like I said in the post on the Bee Board, I understand why all the marketing hype has eroded the phrase, but the concept of Web 2.0 is still very alluring.