Jonas Beckman

Weblogging has been on the backburner for a while. It’s actually November now - but I’m getting there…

On this day I was mostly wrapped up in other people’s problems. Writing about it felt wrong so I wrote nothing at all.

But some nice things happened, too!

I missed congratulating Hal on the birth of his son Ian. Better late than never: welcome to this world, Ian!

Garret has been 42 for a while now. I missed that, too. Here’s a late happy birthday!

Mark Pilgrim was fired for his weblog - and now he is hired because of it. Another happy ending!

Well, what can I say? I do like this kind of massage.

Everyone knows version control is a good thing that we should use more - but most of us don’t. Sourcesafe sucks, CVS doesn’t feel like Windows at all… some other day. Well, now my laptop is finally getting under control.

TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer. This extension is brilliant and so useful I’m becoming addicted.

I just started another round of Python hacking: the Swedish National Board of Police wants to add more stuff to the system we built for them. Great fun!

Late November I’ll be in Thailand. It’s a one-week retreat with the company I now work for: three days of tech workshops, then lots of R&R.

I’ll lead a small workshop on XML-based Instant Messaging (everyone has some firewall they don’t like ). And since lots of people are curious about .Net, we’ll hack up a C# prototype.

So far I feel very comfortable with C#. It’s easy to understand why Miguel de Icaza started the Mono project.

Lomi-lomi massage - try it if you can! I am now having a long session every Friday.

One of the things that is becoming clear to me is that the values and the basic core beliefs that make me a citizen of the modern West are different enough from those of fundamentalist Islam that there can’t really be a conversation between us. The divide in belief systems may be too wide for us to span…

Al is a lifesaver but not a pacifist. He wrote more about this yesterday.

Picking cotton for Bill. This is about different threat against freedom. Laws that make business easier for big media companies are not always a good thing - and what’s proposed here is outright dangerous.

Here is some good news: MIT will eventually put almost all their course material for free on the web. The site is not operational yet, but there is plenty of material online already. For old times sake I’ll link to Structure and interpretations of Computer programs.

Brian Livingston, writer of several excellent Windows books, says: there will be no XP for me!

Well, maybe MS just didn’t add the right features? Good for several laughs. Via Bruce Eckel

Remember I was worrying about Zope the other day? I know Garret can make it work, and Bruce Eckel uses it on his excellent website. On the other hand, these are brilliant and dedicated people. Hmmm… "perserverance furthers", I guess.
Brent Simmons is about to get himself a driver’s license. I am doing that right now, too - but I can’t recommend my school unless you live in Stockholm.

Oh, I forgot to mention: yesterday afternoon the police suspected a bomb in the bus i usually take to work. They stopped it and sealed off the street around the office for a few hours. We had our monthly company meeting that evening - our mailing list linked to the newspapers, as it happened, and added “the back door still works. We won’t cancel if it doesn’t get worse”.

A customer just called and wanted a little more Python work - that always feels good. And my Zope struggles are going better: Squishdot is a very cool Slashdot-clone which didn’t take many minutes to set up. But I’ll update to Zope 2.4.1 soon - why stop just because it works?

Independent arabic satellite network aljazeera is a very interesting news source. Here is an article describing how to translate it to english. Found on Poynter.org

The brittish Muslim News is a good independent muslim news site. And several arabic TV and radio stations can be found here. Most, but not all of them, are in arabic.

Mullah Omar speaks to the people of Afghanistan and Muslims around the world. But Voice of Shariat was destroyed in the bombing. So a tape of his speech was delivered to Voice of America and the BBC World Service, and they both broadcast it.

This started off a Metafilter discussion: should the enemy be allowed to speak?

BookNotes keeps providing contrary links in these days of gung-ho patriotism and biased news. I don’t always agree with Craig’s own bias, of course - but he’s doing some very good work.

Dan Bricklin: Copy protection robs the future.
Right now we are thinking a lot about terrorists - but the world’s big media companies are much more powerful and probably much more dangerous to the future of democracy.

Mark Pilgrim seems to be doing alright. Good.

Hmmm… I’m reading lots of Zope documentation. My first examples are working and I’m having fun - but I am also having some second thoughts.

Titus Brown compared Zope to a frustrating Adventure game. And Andrew Kuchling gave up and rolled his own after a while.

Right from the start, I disliked DTML (a homegrown markup-language for messing up HTML). But I do feel better about ZPT (Zope Page Templates) - even if it’s still a new and somewhat unfinished concept.

So I’ll keep reading and experimenting for a while… but it’s good to know there are alternative web solutions for Python.