Ian Bicking: a blog

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1. 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 …

2. 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 …

3. “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 …

4. 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.

5. 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 …

6. 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 …

7. 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 …

8. App Engine and Open Source

   This is about Google App Engine which probably everyone has read about already.

   I’m quite excited about it. Hosting has been the bane of the Python web world for a long time. This provides a very compelling hosting situation for Python applications.

   I’m not as interested in this …

9. JSON-RPC WebOb Example

   I just saw this json-rpc recipe go by as a popular link on del.icio.us. It’s yet-another-*Server based recipe (BaseHTTPServer, XMLRPCServer, etc). I don’t know why people keep writing these. WSGI is in all ways easier, clearer, and more useful.

   So I figured I’d give …

10. Environmental Guilt

    I was offhandedly reading this post, which talked about Earth Hour, and about hating on SUVs:

    Also thinking of a nice, simple mass-action for discouraging the SUV-ites. Simple, direct; when you see someone driving an SUV, slowly shake your head in disappointment and disgust at the stupidity of the …

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