Just My Two Cents » python

My eBooks library

jeff — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:29:04 +0000

Since getting my iPad in April, I’ve become a fan of eBooks. I took advantage of some coupon codes on O’Reilly last month and purchased electronic copies of many of my books. Here is a list of what I currently have on my iPad:

ePub format

PDF’s

I love the fact that I can carry around these technical books all the time and be able to look something up so quickly just by doing a search inside of the iBooks app. My only complaint with the iBooks app is that I have to add my books through iTunes. Would be nice if iBooks supported DropBox.

757 Python Users Group

jeff — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:42:14 +0000

Last month, we kicked off our first 757 Python Users Group meeting. We had 17 people attend. Tomorrow night, we have our second meeting. If you live in the Hampton Roads area, please stop by.

Heading to PyCon 2009!

jeff — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:19:14 +0000

I’m flying to Chicago this afternoon to attend PyCon 2009. I can’t wait. I’ll be attending two days of tutorials. The tutorials I’m attending are:

On Friday morning, I’m chairing one of the sessions which includes the following talks:

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone I follow on Twitter and hope to absorb as much as possible regarding Python and Django.

Selecting a Content Management System for work

jeff — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:47:08 +0000

I work for a city government. It’s actually my second time with them. I left them in January 2001 because I was ready to write web applications and they weren’t. Because the I.T. department didn’t care about the web in the 1990′s, the website fell into the hands of the Public Information Office. And its been there ever since.

A couple of years after I left, the I.T. department finally decided it was time to have a presence on the web. So they wrote a couple of “eServices”, bulk trash pickup, real estate assessment, etc. But they never thought about taking back control of the website itself. They concentrated on what I call “business apps” but totally ignored other types of web apps.

In the three years that I’ve been back, there have been on and off discussions about getting a Content Management System. The city originally looked at products like Vignette (don’t know why they thought they could afford that one). Well, the discussions are back on and this team it is getting serious. But there is a problem. Remember how I mentioned the website is not under I.T.’s control? You guessed it. PIO would like to make the decision on the product. And I’m not fond of what they’ve chosen. They are sold on Ektron. While Ektron is full-featured and could do everything we want (actually its probably overkill), I have a few issues with it. It’s expensive, maybe not to a city budget, but it is to me. And more importantly, it runs on Microsoft-only technology. It’s .Net, requires SQL Server, and uses Windows Servers with IIS. Yuck. I prefere to run my apps on a Linux server using PostgreSQL for the database. As a developer who would like to be writing cool web apps for citizens, rather than boring business apps, this is personal. I don’t write .Net now and I have no intention of writing .Net.

As an alternative, we looked at Alfresco. Alfresco is commercial open source. Alfresco is very powerful and web content management is only a piece of the Alfresco puzzle. Alfresco also does document management, image management, and record keeping. Unfortunately, our design team in PIO weren’t thrilled by it. I liked it but I now believe that it would probably be too technical and demanding for the few we have on our web team.

The next CMS we looked at is CommonSpot by Paper Thin. CommonSpot is a ColdFusion-based CMS. It has many of the same features that Ektron has and runs on our current J2EE platform on WebSphere. On a side note, we’re looking to migrate away from WebSphere to JBoss, but I’ll save that for another story. The biggest drawback I have to CommonSpot is that it needs ColdFusion. We have ColdFusion and I’ve written several apps in it, but my long-term goal is to move away from ColdFusion and utilize other languages and frameworks like Groovy and Grails.

So what’s left? I’ve looked at Drupal and Joomla but I don’t really care for PHP. I really want a CMS that I can build apps to work within its framework. We looked at Plone in the past, but I’ve never been a big fan of Plone. I always thought it was too complicated. Do you write your app in Plone? Or do you go down a layer and use Zope and the ZMI?

I’m a big fan of Django, so I contacted the Ellington team and spoke to them about Ellington today. Since Ellington is designed primarily for newspaper and publishing sites, I’m going to try and persuade our team that a city website should probably be more like a newspaper site and that Ellington might be a good fit. It doesn’t have the features of Ektron or CommonSpot, but I believe it may have just what we need. Plus, if there is a piece that is missing, I could add it myself or find it in the Django community.

It’s time to blog again

jeff — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:41:40 +0000

This time, its been six months since I last blogged. I keep thinking that I’m going to write my own blog using Django, but with 5 year old twins, there isn’t a lot of time to do this. So I’ll stick with WordPress for now.

What have I been doing this year? Well, I went to PyCon in March. It was awesome. I went to CFUnited in June. I thought it was second rate. And I got some training in Flex in July with FigLeaf. Waiting on my copy of Flex Builder to come in so I can start coding with it. Its some pretty cool software.

I’ve been looking at using Groovy and Grails for some future development at work. I’d like to integrate it with Flex for some applications I have in mind. I’m really getting interested in doing some serious mapping stuff especially since ESRI has opened ArcGIS up with the release of 9.3. They have API’s available for Javascript and Flex.

I bought a new MacBook Pro in June. I downsized from a 17″ to a 15.4″. I really could have used a new Mac Pro, but I can’t afford one of those right now. So I’ll get another year out of my PowerMac Dual 2.0ghz G5.

Can’t wait for PyCon 2008!

jeff — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:06:59 +0000

I’m set to go. I’ll be arriving in Chicago on Wednesday, March 12 in the late afternoon. I’m attending the tutorials on Thursday and going to the conference through Sunday. I can’t wait. I want to learn Python and Django so much that I’m paying my own way. I didn’t even ask my work since I doubt they’d ever send me to a Python conference.