Peterbe.com

I've now uploaded my photos from the FWC competition in Sutton (south-west of London). This time I didn't take the time to do any editing or naming of the files. I did quickly write titles for all photos but if you have any objections to these, please let me know.

To an outsider, what we do with the "demo event" might appear strange but one day I hope to manage to explain it. My favorite photo is from the Brighton Hove Demo team.

Last week I finally had my graduation ceremony. It was very well organised and ran smoothly. We met, got our hats and robes, then the ceremony began shortly. All of us went up one by one to receive our diploma which surprisingly mentioned our grade.

Now I've uploaded two photos from the day. They can be found here

I'm glad to announce the review of my own web application called CorpCalendar on ZopeMag.com.

The review is really quite detailed and accurate. It does acknowledge a few bugs but that's ok. I'll try to fix them soon. What made me the most happy was that the reviewer really manages to explain the benefit of CheckoutableTemplates with screenshots and examples. If you ask me, CheckoutableTemplates deserves more attention because it's idea is really quite useful. It bridges the power of the filesystem with its command line and the online storage with it's quick editing and exceptionalization. It'd be good if more serious Zope developers started using it so that with its Open Source license we can improve it together.

Maybe I shouldn't say this but the first working version of CorpCalendar took an afternoon to build. My company started using it (integrated into our intranet) already that same day. Then it took another afternoon to package and release to Zope.org.

Here's a little program I wrote recently to fix incorrectly defined characters into HTML entities. For example, this is incorrect:

<b>Bärs &amp; Öl</b>

But this is correct:

<b>B&amp;auml;rs &amp;amp; &amp;Ouml;l</b>

To demonstrate I have set up a little test page here so that you can test to convert your impure HTML content.
Run test program

For those computer people out there who don't know who Eric S Raymond is you've got a long way to go on what I'm about to write about. If you're not even into computers I can say that ESR is an old time computer hacker (not cracker which is something different) who is known for his views, publications, books and the fact that few people know as many programming languages as he does. He's simply pretty damn good with serious computer usage.

Anyway, in his How To Become A Hacker I read some interesting things today. The most striking one is this:

"Points For Style
Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking. [...]
Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do, Karate, Wing Chun, Aikido, or Jiu Jitsu;..."

On the home page: 6 distinctly different flashing/blinking animations and 14! different font displays (different sizes and different colours). It's got annoying background sound (if your browser allows it).

There's really very little good to say about this website. Perhaps the content is good if you have hernia; but if I did, I don't think I'd manage to stay long on this site. I actually think it's so bad that it might be a joke.

I've been trying to use Xjed recently instead of XEmacs because XEmacs took more than 3 seconds some times to start. If I have to start the editor many times in the day this really matters; and this happens when I use the ExternalEditor for Zope.

Now, to set how big the window should be or how it should look you edit the $HOME/.Xdefaults file. Mine now looks like this:

xjed*Geometry: 90x45+150+50

I knew nothing about this film went I went to see it at the cinema yesterday. No one had told me that it was a comedy and the opening scenes gives the impression of a black depressing film about a alcoholic loser who hates his life and contemplates committing suicide. Well, this is what the film is about. Him and his partner, a shopping mall and a fat bullied kid.

What makes the film to funny is the language Santa (played by Bill Bob Thornton) uses. The swearing and the sarcasm. Comedy is always funny if it's unexpected. The story is really quite sad and destructive much like Leaving Las Vegas and in such a morose environment every little joke is much appreciated.

Go and see this film. Don't expect a joyride but do muse over some of the little things in it.

UPDATE: Check out these photos of kids being afraid of santa

Just wanted to make you aware of my little recipe on the ASPN Python Cookbook

This is used in the next release of the IssueTrackerProduct for the email notifications.

If you missed the entry about Add links to text with URLs I suggest you read that first. This script has now been improved with bug fixes thanks to David Otton and Flump Cakes.

Download: addhrefs-0.4.tgz
It does not come with a nice installer because I don't think it belongs to the generic Python library anyway. If you want to use it, copy the file addhrefs.py to somewhere useful.