If you’ve ever wondered what the heck a Plone is, then you may want to check out this video.

How awesome would it be to launch a Linux powered balloon with a digital camera on board?!

Come on, admit it. That’s cool.

Earlier in the month, I did a talk at CPLUG on Instant Messaging with Jabber/XMPP.

The slides were done in Keynote, so the images leave out some of the screenshots of the Openfire admin interface, but you’ll get the idea.

Enjoy!

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Pyglet 1.0 was released not too long ago. It’s a “a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library for Python” and looks like it might be a good Pygame replacement.

Quoth The Django Book website:

The book is due to be published in December 2007 by Apress, but in the meantime you can read the “beta” book online. The final book will be posted when the print version ships.

Announced back in February 2006 originally with a March 2007 release date, pushed back to June, and now December… so we’ve been waiting for a while on this one. But Apress typically does a good job, so I’m looking forward to it.

Sometimes knowing what not to do when coding (in this case Python) is almost as important as knowing what to do.

I’m an Apple user now. And I’m attending my second Ruby meeting next week. Crazy days my friends, crazy days.

Tim Chase posted an interesting list of potential interview questions to comp.lang.python:

While I haven’t interviewed precisely for Python, I’ve been on the other (interviewing) end and can offer a few of the sorts of things I ask. I don’t expect perfect answers to all of them, but they show me a range of what the interviewee knows.

They are grouped by difficulty (basic, broader, advanced, etc.) and seem to be pretty reasonable. Worth taking a look if you want to assess where you fall in the spectrum of Python coders.

Quoth David Pogue:

But I’ve got a lot of questions, too—a lot of them that I don’t have answers for. In fact, I’ve been keeping a little list.

Some of them are answerless because nobody knows the answer. Some may have answers, but only industry insiders know what they are. And still others are answerless because they’re incendiary hot-button issues, and there’s no consensus.

I thought: What better way to find the answers than to lay out my list for the reading public?

Check out Pogue’s Imponderables. It’s an interesting list.

Christian Flickinger talks about setting your Facebook status via the API:

Welll, it appears that one month after Facebook asked me, and others, to remove my little cURL ‘hack’ for updating your Facebook Status, Facebook has finally implemented a users.setStatus() method in their API.

Interesting.