Pythoneer

After reading about the Nixie watch on engadget.com I recalled that my christmas present will be much cooler! It will be even more geeky! The Nixie watch seems very clumsy and easily breakable and not that fashioned. I think retro is not yet in again.

What makes a gadget really geeky and what will really make the chics hang on your every word is something that looks familiar and needs explanation! And the A-24II is this kind of thing! It looks stylish and like a watch. But once you look at the display you think it is something else. Mmmmh, may be a game? Just come up to me chics, I will tell you :-).

Let me get this out first - I really like the Web2.0Show podcasts! Keep on going Chris and Josh. It’s always interesting to listen to the latest news presented this way, I just love to plug in and learn on my way home, which is a 20 minutes walk, so that’s perfect for one or sometimes two podcasts. Thanks.

Yesterday I was listening to episode 7.2 with Jason Calacanis, one of the Weblogs Inc. guys. It was really interesting to get some insight on what companies are doing. But at some point this guy just doesn’t show much sensitivity it even got a bit rude. The last five minutes when he was more or less closing the show the Take over my Podcast headline came to my mind. May be that’s what the american business guy is like. But over all it was very interesting, it just left a bitter after taste. Anyway, I have subscribed to some of their feeds. Let’s see if the content is worth it.

Ok, I got that off my soul. Besides that it seems there is quite some movement going on in the browser based web development and especially with the stuff they now named AJAX. I am quite curious and I will follow the further development. Thanks Web2.0Show for raising my interest in web technologies again.

Besides that I am listening to:
Python411 … very nice Python for everybody show
Audible Ajax … from ajaxian.com, very professional top edge information
ITC Programming … mostly interviews with all kind of people, no releases lately
Pro PHP podcast … PHP info, to keep up to date
Polymorphic Podcast … too much advertising, probably gonna kick this one

I am pretty sure the new Nokia N80 will be my next cell phone. My first Nokia. It should have Python on it since it is a Series 60. That finally makes the things possible that I want, a portable input device that temporarily stores and provides the data that I actually have on my computer.

I see the mobile phone only as a temporary storage device, it just has no proper means for inputting and providing all kinds of data, as a real computer has. It just has no properly useable keyboard, the display is way too small. I really miss my old Psion, that was a great device! If they would release a new version of it I would buy it right away, the keyboard was just perfect and it all fit in my pocket.

Now with Python on board of the N80 it will be easy to realize the input device for my private finance software, that currently lacks that it still requires my brain for temporary storage and my brain’s software has quite some memory leaks.

Finally I will hopefully start to synchronize my calendar, address book, etc. with my mobile phone. Currently I am doing that manually. Actuall just because I had tried it one, synching my still-in-use-T60 with my Mac, but that really failed big time. It worked but it didn’t do it as I wanted. I gave up very quickly. I hope Nokia will do a better job here.

I am using Desktop Manager since the beginning, and it is just great. It handles everything: X11, Exposé, the Dock and everything just as I would expect it. It doesn’t show any unexpected bahviour as many of the other virtual desktop managers do.

Now I start having wishes of what I would like to have additionally. Since my PowerBook is my tool for everything I am also mixing work and private very much on it. I want my desktop manager to know when I am in a business environment (by detecting the network location(s)) and turning on/off applications or even switching between entire sets of virtual desktops. That would be cool. When I go home and I open my laptop, it connects to my home network it should automatically detect that and turn off all the business stuff, e.g. the TimeLog tool, etc. and it should turn on my NewsFeed reader, the IRC client and so on.
A first step might be adding rows of screens to the Desktop Manager, that would already help a lot. I would simply have a row of virtual screens that contains all the private apps and another with all the business stuff.

Well I downloaded the source, may be I get do dive into the code some day …

Thanks Rafa for suggesting Gotan Project, great music!

I just read via digg.com (I slowly start to understand how it works) about a new programming language. One could start collecting programming languages, so many that I am coming across lately.

read more | digg story

I really loved to learn the Python shell, for those who don’t know what it is, here it is:
I just had a simple issue, I was looking for the path where testoob is installed. Oops, I have a local copy of it in my projects folder. So lets remove the project project-path from the sys.path (which is the default import path Python uses) and reload() the module. Way cool.

It’s just sooo handy trying things out on the Python shell, if you didn’t use it yet, start doing that!

Ori just released a new verison of TestOOB, congrats. I had actually planned to contribute another tiny feature, but didn’t get around to implement it yet, but I will get into gears now.

Great tool …