Ian Bicking: a blog

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1. Me In Berlin & Amsterdam

   I’m going on vacation in a couple weeks to Berlin and Amsterdam, flying to Berlin on August 12, leaving from Amsterdam on August 27, and transitioning between the two sometime in between. Things Emily and I should see or do? Care to meet up? On vacations my evenings tend …

2. My Experience Writing a Build System

   Lately there’s been some interest in build processes among various people — Vellum was announced a while back, Ben has been looking for a tool and looking at Fabric, and Kevin announced Paver. At the same time zc.buildout is starting to gain some users outside of the Zope world …

3. Thoughts About the Erlang Runtime

   I should preface this entire post by noting that I haven’t used Erlang, just read about it, and I handle most concurrency using Python threads, a model for which I have no great affection (or hate). But I was reading two posts by Patrick Logan on Erlang and it …

4. Which way?

   Do you believe the world is (a) getting better, or (b) getting worse?

   Please explain. Please, no more “both/neither” answers: choose just one

5. pdb in the browser

   People have asked me a few times about evalexception and pdb — they’d like to be able to use something like pdb through the browser, stepping through code.

   The technique I used for tracebacks wouldn’t really work for pdb. For a traceback I saved all the information from the …

6. The GPL and Principles

   For the most part by the time I finished writing my last article on licensing I had mostly convinced myself that the GPL isn’t a practical license for most projects. That is, outcomes when using the GPL aren’t likely to be any better than outcomes using a permissive …

7. Governance

   It occurred to me… Django is something like a dictatorship… or maybe an oligarchy. At first it seems like Pylons is the same… but no. Pylons is clearly feudal. I lord over Paste, WebOb, FormEncode. Mike Bayer lords over Mako and SQLAlchemy. Ben lords over Routes, Beaker, and Pylons.

   I …

8. Choosing a License

   I thought I’d take some time to talk about licensing.

   Licensing is something that F/OSS programmers talk about a lot. There’s two major categories of licenses:

   • The GPL, aka Copyleft. You must distribute source with your application, and users get full rights to the source code, including …

9. “Something Must Be Done”

   Listening to Tavis Smiley’s show tonight, and the segment My America where they talked about gun violence. At one point they quote a man who lost his brother to gun violence:

   You can be in a club and bump into somebody on accident, a little of your liquor, a …

10. WebOb Do-It-Yourself Framework

    My old do-it-yourself framework tutorial was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I rewrote it to use WebOb. Now: the new do-it-yourself framework.

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