Lonely Lion

I’d cut off your stupid pony tail.

Do I win?

Just what it says.

After two weeks of other things getting in the way, I attended TechCoffee this morning. I didn’t stick to my plan to work on Maturin though, instead I worked on some new stuff for Tastebud. We’ve been including Amazon links in our articles when appropriate, so I started to work on a shop for the site. Nothing really fancy, just a collection of links. I wanted to use the new Amazon aStore, but the iframe isn’t cooperating with my site layout, so I think I’m going to whip up a quick database backend to collect Amazon links. The nice thing about Django is, I don’t feel any psychic weight from saying, “this really needs some database backing.”

I went to the Evanston Go Club last night, with a chess buddy of mine. There was a good turnout. I watched a few games, and played two games on a 9 x 9 board with a guy named Matt. I still don’t “get” the game. Like, for instance, how to win? It’s a simple game, but there’s clearly a lot going on. I don’t see patterns in it yet, but I’m interested in it enough to take the next steps. Playing last night got me over a couple of really basic hurdles. I just downloaded an upgraded copy of Goban, a Go client (including the GNU Go engine) that lets you play on the Internet Go Server.

Go!

A few of my work pals went to the Perl hack-a-thon this past weekend. They came back bearing gifts, including a great pdf on Parrot. Although I haven’t done much with the idea, I’m accumulating a lot of “how do you write a programming language” resources as of late. I don’t know where this is all leading, but it’s certainly fun to collect resources.

After six years of nearly weekly shows at Improv Olympic, I’m hanging up my Harold hat. The best part about being on a Harold team at IO is, you just have to show up to rehearsals and shows. The worst part is you just have to show up for rehearsals and shows. Because I’m a one show kind of guy, I think I got overly complacent with my performing. The shows became so regular that I felt like I wasn’t really doing anything new. This isn’t the theaters fault, it’s totally mine. Regardless, I need to shake things up. I’m going to lay low for a few weeks, until at least January, and then see what happens.

One thing I’m going to try and do is step up the Tastebud article output from one per week to two. We’ve gotten some good traffic from reddit and digg. We have a regular group of readers on the RSS feed, and continue to get lots of traffic from Google. All in all, it’s working out pretty well.

It’s sad leaving IO. I’m sure it won’t be the last time I perform there, but it’s scary nonetheless. My last show will be this Friday, November 17th, 2006.

Right here.

I just downloaded the new issue, it looks pretty good. Two articles, with a pretty facelift.

The Django-neers have started to release the first (to my knowledge) Django book online at djangobook.com. From the release notes: “The book is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means it’s free to read and redistribute. We’re in this to improve the (already excellent) Django documentation, not to make a quick buck.”

Taken on its own, Django is an impressive framework. When you mix in the attitudes of the lead developers on the project, the whole thing gets even warm and fuzzier. Congratulations Django team. Also, good work Apress, this isn’t the first book they’ve published that’s also available for free online..see: dive into python, practical common lisp. I’m all for making a buck, but I really like companies that understand that giving away something for free doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll never make money. High fives all around.