Well, not really. More techno than jazz…but I’m listening to Carl Cox radio and liking it a lot. Always gotta like finding new music without being treated like a criminal .

Joy! Some fun to be had. I’ve been trying to find a good, powerful, Pythonic GUI widget implementation for awhile now… Tkinter is well supported but less powerful; wxPython has great features, but is a THIN (read, know your C++) wrapper on wxWindows. There are some projects out there to improve the state of affairs…but they’re comparatively (new|not widely used), so tutorials and examples are sparse. However, I have a need for a simple GUI app…so I’m going to write it 3 times, and see which works best!

Chosen are:

• anygui (VHL, write same code for multiple backends, same concept as anydbm )
• Wax (built on top of wxPython)
• Mojoview (built on top on pyGTK2)

I will report back on my findings…

The dope on Wax — Simply put, Wax is a GUI toolkit. It sits on top of wxPython, removing some of the low-level aspects of that GUI, and adding some useful abstractions. Ah…excellent. Where have you been all my life!?

Woohoo! A new essay/talk from Eben Moglen: Freeing the Mind :
Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture

Heck…I let a week go by without commenting on
DragonCon ! What’s up with THAT?

A good time was definitely had by all. Probably not the best DC I’ve
been to…no really good new games this year, and the only book I
bought SUCKED
big-time. Worst scifi I’ve read in a long time. Of course, that’s not
DragonCon’s fault…

Great costumes this year, though, and we had a good time
overall. First year we rented a room…we’ll do that again. Now, of
course, the yearlong wait…*sigh*. Maybe we’ll check out
ChattaCon in January.

*sigh*…is there a reason Comcast
can’t just put info on outages on their website? ‘It’s too
complicated’…riighht. Whatever. My ISP
can do it… UPS can do it…heck, even the US
freakin’ Post Office can do it with some stuff!
Sheesh. Get real, Comcast. You’ve got the data…if I call in, I’ll
eventually get in touch with someone who’ll tell me if there’s an
outage or not. Just put the data on the Web, OK?

I’m pretty psyched… DragonCon starts on
Friday. It’s one of my favorite events of the year, big gaming scifi
nerd geek that I am…I hang out, see lots of cool costumes, go to
panels about Alien Autopsies, and play crazy-ass
boardgames
until 5am! Doesn’t get much better than that, does it?? *grin*

OK…I admit it. Regardless of my earlier reservations about Zope,
the return to using it for site management has really broken the
logjam on updates. Not only the blog, either…my
bookmarks list is
live again, as is a wiki for personal use as a scratchpad/dev
notebook. And I’ll try again for the upteenth time to get my head
wrapped around the “Zope Way”, so as to be able to contribute some
Products of my own!

But not for much longer, I don’t think. This is working out quite
well,
actually.
byline takes a little
getting used to, but it’s pretty nice to be able to use a real live
editor, and structured text, to work on blog entries. I’ve also
got the RSS feed for this weblog working, so about all that’s
left is the ability to edit through the web in extremis. Doesn’t
seem to be working right now for some reason. But I may flip things as
early as tonight.

Still also need a way to get all my old archives in with the dates
correct.

Ever have one of those days that starts out good…and then tanks?

I’m having one of those.

This day is no longer cooking with gas.

On the bright side, such as that is, this editor seems to be working
pretty well. I’m pleased; thanks pyrite!