Ian Bicking: a blog

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1. 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

2. 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 …

3. 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 …

4. 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 …

5. 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 …

6. “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 …

7. 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.

8. App Engine and Pylons

   So I promised some more technical discussion of App Engine than my last two posts. Here it is:

   Google App Engine uses a somewhat CGI-like model. That is, a script is run, and it uses stdin/stdout/environ to handle the requests. To avoid the overhead of CGI a …

9. The Mundane Nature Of Programming

   So, I was at a university the other day, talking with some people about a sprint project, and there was a student there. He was somewhat eager to write “algorithms”. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I was reminded of him because I was just about to …

10. App Engine: Commodity vs. Proprietary

    I like this phrasing of the debate about App Engine’s role, from Doug Cutting: Cloud: commodity or proprietary? (via). (Well, I like it more than the sharecropping phrasing referenced in my last post.) I guess I’m excited about this because like Doug I do want a “cloud” of …

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