geek

Via Daring Fireball: EtherPad to Shut Down After Google Acquisition of Parent Company AppJet

Sad. I just discovered EtherPad and one of my favorite things is its ad-hoc nature. Want to start collaborating on a document right now? Just go to the site, start a new pad, and pass around the URL. You could even make up the URL path ahead of time! No account is required; it Just Works.¹

I just learned about this project this morning. I like it!

http://www.tweenbots.com/

(I guess this was a good candidate for my first twitter tweet.)

During Steve Huffman’s and Alexis Ohanian’s Pycon Keynote, someone asked why Reddit was moved from Lisp to Python. The reason for moving wasn’t too interesting, but why they have stayed is. Steve gave two “huge” reasons Reddit continues to use Python:

I have had so many problems managing the wordpress software, it’s ridiculous. If I could find a decent replacement, I’d move everyone over, but this appears to be the best out there. It reminds me of the time when all web browsers sucked and all email clients sucked. The sad thing is, WordPress used to be really solid; now every new version feels a bit more degraded than the last. Perhaps I’ll let them blame it on using PHP.

On most sites I visit, error pages are infrequent. On Twitter, problems are so common the error pages have their own cultural currency. Sadly, I still regularly hit errors without such soothing imagery:

The group I work with has thought about using Django a few times, but our biggest concern has been the lock-in you get with their base components. We’re already happy using SQLAlchemy and Genshi for a system application in our project. Besides liking the tools we’ve picked, we’d like to avoid using multiple tools for the same task. On the other hand, if a second set of tools provides a framework we’ll totally rock with, sign us up!