HASH and laptops

We had a good Hacking Society of Hobart meeting last Saturday. We've started screening the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures. tjs is watching them with us; it is always cool having someone around to be a target for ravings (interspersed with the *occasional* ranting) about lisp.

Also, my Toshiba Satellite is literally falling apart. Every time I open or close it, little bits fall off. It's almost 3 years old, and I'm really drooling over jml's new Powerbook, so I'm going to see if I can't get my gracious boss to hook me up with one on salary sacrafice.

I can't remember if I mentioned how awesome Richard Jones is. Except he doesn't IRC. Everyone should IRC.

Fred Drake too.

OSDC 2004

I just got back from Melbourne last night at around Midnight. OSDC 2004 was pretty cool, although not as cool as PyCon. I finally met Richard Jones, the author of the Roundup issue tracker and other way leet stuff. His talk and the recent introduction of the roundup wiki (with actual _examples_!) has inspired me to hack more on the Twisted roundup instance. I'm going to be switching it off the horribly slow CGI interface and the horrible slow bsddb backend (according to Richard). I'm also going to try to get proper email interfacing (incoming and outgoing), priorities, etc. Thanks for the kick in the face, Richard. :-)

I gave a lightning talk on Twisted on Friday. It was cool, but not terribly surprising, that almost half of them (50+ mostly non-Python programmers) knew what Twisted was. It went really well, according to myself and those I've talked with about it, and a few people had a chat with me afterwards. Chris Wright is an old schemer (or, at any rate, a guy who knows and loves continuations) who's using Python in intensive care; he was interested in the stuff I was doing with Deferreds and Greenlets. Another guy whose name I didn't catch was lamenting POE's apparent suckiness and was interested in checking out Twisted.

I also saw Anthony Baxter again; we indirectly traded war stories about release management. I helped Tim Stebbing write a text editor with PyGtk. Holocaine and I discussed the Twisted community. Etc.

Happy open sourcing,

radix