Land of the diff(1) fish

Moved

Dave — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:11:41 +0000

I moved my blog to my new domain, http://docgno.me/

Pylons: First Impressions

Dave — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:58:31 +0000

So I’ve been playing with Pylons a bit. If you don’t know, Pylons “is a lightweight web framework emphasizing flexibility and rapid development.” It has a lot of the features that are expected from a modern MVC style web framework.

So what is so cool about Pylons? Well first off, it’s modular. If you are a Rails user, you’ll probably know that Rails 3 is going to become modular as well. This is very cool. It allows you to select the best project for a given task. In Pylons, this means you can use Mako, Jinja, or whatever else you want for a template engine. You can use SQLAlchemy, SQLObject, CouchDB, or nothing for your ORM. This is great and, in my humble opinion, the most logical way to work. Why bother reinventing the wheel, which you will end up making square, by the way, when you’ve already got a Ferrari? Granted, the Ferrari probably also has slightly square wheels but at least you didn’t have to make it. Pylons also suggests reasonable defaults (Mako and SQLAlchemy) if you’re overwhelmed by the options.

Pylons also has a feature that I haven’t really seen anywhere else, an Interactive Web Based Debugger. This means when your app blows up in development mode, you can instantly see the state of the objects in question, as well as examine the call stack at any point during program execution. Way cool!

I’ve not used Pylons for anything other than the toy apps in the tutorial examples, but I’m looking forward to learning more. I’m fully expecting run into crufty edges. Every framework has them. Pylons (and soon Rails 3) allows you to pick (hopefully) the least crufty thing for the job. I’ll be posting my impressions as I learn more about Pylons.

Social Networks

Dave — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:08:59 +0000

I was looking at my email today and noticed that I had received several messages for LinkedIn that I had forgotten about. I don’t use LinkedIn, but my boss and several other people at the company I work for do. I don’t really get the point of LinkedIn and apparently I’m not the only one who doesn’t get it. I talked about this on irc and really came to the conclusion that this isn’t a problem that LinkedIn has. It’s a problem that all social networks have. What they are trying to get at is emulation of the same sort of networking that we do naturally in every day. They try to represent the relationships we form at work, at school, and at home. I find the way that social networks go about this to be unnatural however. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if in return something useful was gained. In the case of Twitter, for example, by forming these relationships, I gain information about the hour to hour existence of my friends and family. I’m not really sure what I get from other places like Facebook or LinkedIn. Pio pointed out to me that ” a lot of people use them as a crutch because they don’t know how to use real internet services”. They allow them to have a single place to post pictures, video, etc. I think a better idea would be for someone to build a site that pull all of these services (Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc) together and provide a single interface for all of them. Maybe someone out there is already doing this and I’m just too lazy to google for it.

Charlene Li talks about this better than I have.