Everyone will be celebrating tonight, including Freenode:

04:55 [freenode] -lilo- [Global Notice]
Okay, folks, this is it. We are approaching New Year’s on Kiritimati, which is pretty much the first moment it’s 2006 on Planet Earth. Please come by #freenode-newyears and help us celebrate! :)

Heh. There are 363 nicks in that chan as of 11:35 AM EST.

Update: It’s after midnight EST, so it’s official…

year += 1
Happy New Year!

Lucent Plum posted an annotated arguments class that uses the getopt and sys modules to parse command line options (including -s and –long forms).

Great example code.

The kind people at ActiveState are currently giving away free licenses of Komodo Personal Edition.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go here and click the Buy button for Komodo Personal Edition. (Offer not valid for Pro edition)
2. Enter the promo code kmd3n9-ur8 and update your cart. If it worked, you’ll see that cost is now $0.00.
3. Hit the Checkout button and fill in your information. You will receive your license via email, so be sure to enter your address correctly.
4. Follow the instructions in the email you receive.

That’s it! You’ll have a full version of Komodo Personal Edition at no cost to you. The only catch is that the offer ends December 31, 2005… that’s tomorrow.

Also, in case you’ve never heard of it, Komodo is an IDE for Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and Tcl development. It works in Windows, Linux, and OS X. I installed it tonight for the first time (free, as above) and it looks great! Definitely better than Eclipse IMHO, and a little prettier than SPE. Definitely recommended.

Hat tip to Jacques Marneweck for the link.

Update: Corrected the date above. It should read December 31, 2005, not 2006. But according to Mateusz in the comments, it still works.

Perhaps I’m the last person on the planet to notice, but apparently WordPress 2.0 has been released.

Quoth Crissy:

I’m absolutely terrified to upgrade to the new WordPress, because I am quite sure it’s going to cause huge portions of my site to break down. That said, I hate not upgrading, because I feel like I’m falling behind or something if I don’t. Grrr…

My sentiments exactly. Ugh…

Update: Ok, the concensus seems to be that the 2.0 upgrade is pretty much flawless. I’ll have to try that out sometime this week. Wish me luck. :)

I gave up trying to get Gentoo installed on my Sun Ultra 5. Instead I downloaded the netinst CD for Debian Sparc and loaded that instead. Booted, and let the installer do its thing.

I’m currently running the 2.4.27-2-sparc64 kernel and everything seems to be working. Still getting some odd hard drive errors on boot (probably due to my botched Sun disk label), but other than that… so far so good.

As a side note, I added a new list of hostnames to the Naming Schemes website tonight. Enjoy.

Update: According to trave11er in #debian-sparc, the hard drive errors are nothing to worry about and should be ignored. They supposedly don’t show up with a 2.6.x kernel, so I’m downloading the Debian Testing release now. Time to reinstall…. again.

Another update: It worked. I’m now running Debian Testing (codename “etch”) with a 2.6.12-1-sparc64 kernel. No more hard drive errors during boot. So far so good.

Mateusz Łoskot has written a neat little Python module:

Small things also make us happy. Because I like small software gadgets, I created DecimalDegrees - Python module. Frequently, we - GIS and GPS users - have to convert coordinates between various formats. Here comes DecimalDegrees module which wraps all those higher math calculations into four Python functions.

I don’t have any use for it right now, but perhaps in the future.

I recently started down the dark and lonley path of trying to get Gentoo loaded on my old Ultra that’s been sitting in the basement. More on that later, but for now let me share one link that I came across while doing some research. It’s called My Sun Ultra 5 And Me.

Quoth Tony:

A few weeks ago, I stubbed my toe on my old Sun Ultra 5 as it sat there lifeless and unused in my apartment. Once my primary desktop, the envy of my geek friends, and a way to woo the ladies, its glory days have long since passed. As much as I would like to let it live out its days looking sexy and taking up space, I live on the island of Manhattan, where space is a premium. Since I can’t charge it rent, I decided I’d better use it or lose it. But what to use it for?

That’s pretty much my problem as well. Even if I get it up and running, the IDE interface in it is so pitifully slow I’m not sure what it would be good for. Sure I could run my IRC sessions from it for bragging rights… but not much else. Please share any good ideas below.

PS. Yes, I already know… “boat anchor.” Har har har :)

Hopefully everyone had a nice holiday break. I’m back, and regular posting should resume shortly.

It’s official. Kevin Dangoor and Mark Ramm will be writing a TurboGears book for Prentice Hall.

Quoth Kevin:

After a month of discussions with two different publishers (both of which sounded quite excited about the project), Mark Ramm and I have agreed to write a TurboGears book for Prentice Hall. Prentice Hall is the largest technical publisher in the world and will provide excellent marketing and distribution support for the book. The worldwide reach is important, as TurboGears has many users outside of the US.

This is certainly great news for the TurboGears community, providing the project with a ton of exposure. And as someone who’s written a technical reference book, I can appreciate the huge amount of work that Kevin and Mark and in for. Best of luck to both of them. I’m sure it’ll be a tough but rewarding experience! Congrats!

Nate explains how to make a Google widget. Cool stuff.