Tom Printy’s Blog

I attended Pycon this year. This is the definitive conference for all things python. This was a one of the larger geeky conferences that I have been to in a long time. I think that there are a lot of developers starting to migrate to the language. There are a lot of very cool things being done with python. I would venture to say that if you are a software development company that python can almost run your whole organization. I saw tools that will allow you to do everything from managing your systems (http://www.zenoss.com/), keeping track of your accounting (http://www.fivedash.com/) to programming windows based applications and mobile applications. This is truely and amazing ecosystem of software.

The main reason that I attended Pycon was to really nail down id python was something that I wanted to explore more and if Django can really help me put some of my ideas into action. I can say without a doubt that Python is something I need to spend a lot more time on, and Django seems like a very usable environment for creating web apps. I was even more excited when I passed by a booth that showed Python running on a Nokia N95.

So will I dump perl? No I don’t see that happening soon as I must use perl everyday to pay the bills, but I see all my new personal projects moving towards python. Once I start thinking in Python I am sure this will be easier.

Thanks Pycon for showing me the light.

I like to regularly attend the Elgin, IL city council meetings. I thought that I would share my observations of the meeting.

Tonight city council decided decided to spend 4,886,185 dollars for various projects around the city.
1,624,967 for generators at one of the water treatment plants.
2,186,007 for street projects in Country Knoll/Jefferson
1,055,732 For Walnut Avenue Neighborhood
19,479 for new furniture for Fire Station 7

The funniest moment was when Council was voting on rezonig petition 07-08. A joke was made by rep Walters when he ask a member of the audience that if this was approved would there be a Portillo’s put in. The audience member said “maybe yes”. Could this mean that Portillo’s will be opening a store in Randall Rd?

Other that that not a lot happened it was a very short meeting.

For the last couple of month a couple of guys and myself have been playing games during lunch. We started by playing risk and then moved on to poker. Today we tried the card game Fluxx. This is a game without rules. As you play the cards they actually create the rules of the game. It is pretty interesting. The first game we played took 45 minutes and the second game we played took 15. It is a very interesting game to say the leastand you have to really pay attention to the rules and to the cards that the other people have.  This is something I will most likely pick up so I can play with other people in the future.

This week I had an opportunity to purchase a Nintendo Wii. Since I am not a big game player I knew that if I bought the console I would be able to sell this for more than I paid for it. The question is how much. The prices seem to be all over the place.  I have setup a 5 day auction to see how it goes. Once the auction is over I will update here to give a final report of my findings.  For now here is my Nintendo Wii that I have for up for auction.

When the Google Charts API came out a couple of weeks ago I mention that I thought that writing reports would now be fun.  I had an opportunity to try out the api in a real world situation and it still isn’t fun. The problem is formating the data such that the chart api can accept it. The API has a limited range in which you can represent number. Depending on the representation you are limited to 100 or 4096. Therefore you have to take your raw numbers and devide them by 100 or by 4096 and then convert them to some whacky two character representation. Personally I think this is stupid.  Why can’t the api just know that a number like 206 means draw something that represents 206, or better yet it should figure out the range of the numbers and then figure out the scale by itself.  Besides these things the api works but it was annoying enough for me to just not put charts in the reports I wanted to generate, at least with the Google api.

I am happy to announce that we made our first little bit of money from Beaver Books.  There are now 60 users of the application and one of them bought a book for $47.00. While this isn’t really the results that I was looking for, ( I would rather it make a couple hundred dollars) it does confirm that Facebook can be used as a platform to make money. The hardest part now is trying to get more users. We have some other ideas for Beaver Books that we would like to implement but are crunched with time at our day jobs.

On the way into work this morning, I noticed a hand painted sign on the side of the road that read “Google Ron Paul“. I think this is really interesting! This is interesting to me because the sign does not mention that he is running for president, nor does it mention that he is part of the Replublican party. It just tells people that the are number 1 in Google and to go look it up. It is a very interesting way to call people to action. So go Google Ron Paul

Some may say that internet radio is dead. I don’t think it is. I am constantly listening to we radio when I am at home working on my computer. Sure there are alternatives like Last.fm and Pandora but I like opening a browser to Shoutcast and picking a station. Once xmms is playing I go about other things. Lately though I am tired of the shoutcast listing service. It feels out and outdated. It is one of those things that AOL has forgotten about. I think there is an opportunity for a new web stream listing service. There are still plenty of them out there that need help in being discovered. The new listing service should feel new and offer many ways for me to discover the stream.

Today is a glorious day for perl developers everywhere. After 5 long years of development perl 5.10.0 has been released and updating to all the CPAN mirrors.

The official notification can be found here: http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2007-12/msg00414.htm 

Happy Hacking!!!!!

While this is not a profound idea I think it is one that P&G could use to make a their dryer sheets stand out.  Divide a dryer sheet exactly in half with perforation such that you can use half the sheet.  Why use a whole sheet for a small load when half a sheet would do, or when you just want to use half the sheet for economical or environmental reasons. Sure you can rip it in half but wouldn’t it be nice if the manufacturer encouraged you to do so?