JJinuxLand

Long ago, I worked at a company named Echobridge. The lead engineer was a guy named Noel Rappin. He was a Squeak fan. I set about trying to convert him to Python. Years later, I picked up a copy of Jython Essentials . He was the co-author. Recently, I started talking with a guy name Ben Bangert. He had the idea of tying together Paste and Myghty into a new framework similar to TurboGears , but more devoted to pluggable micro applications. I donated some code, but mostly said, "No thanks, I'm far too busy with Aquarium ." His framework, Pylons , has taken off like a shot and is far more popular than Aquarium. When I went to PyCon, I sat next to these two guys at a WSGI get together. One of them had an English accent. I remember he said, "We had a look at the other Python Web application frameworks, but didn't find them suitable for our needs, so we wrote our own." I just thought to myself, "Yeah, welcome to the club buddy!" Months

I wrote an article for Linux Journal called Everything Your Professor Failed to Tell You About Functional Programming . Hopefully you will enjoy the article.

You can use Vim to output colorized source code in HTML. The following command translates all the .tmpl files into .tmpl.html files: for f in *.tmpl; do gvim -f +"syn on" +"let html_use_css = 1" +"run! syntax/2html.vim" +"wq" +"q" $f; done To learn more, type ":help convert-to-HTML" in Vim. What's especially cool is that Vim's syntax highlighting is one of the best and most comprehensive out there.

Tavis Rudd, the author of the Cheetah templating engine has been on fire lately. He's right about to release version 2.0. I use to have a long list of things that I wanted to either fix or improve in Cheetah. However, Tavis slammed through my list and added more than I could have hoped for. It's actually quite impressive how solid a piece of software it is. I've been using it in software used all over the world for a couple years, and now it's even better!

This is a must read .

Finally, an introduction to monads that I can understand.

I was cc'd on an email from Guido van Rossum today in which he said, "...Shannon -jj Behrens < jjinux@gmail.com >, who I believe was spared. JJ is a really prolific coder..." Ok, let me just sit back and bask in the glow for a little while before I remind myself that I code four times slower than most people and read books ten times slower ;) *sigh* ;)

When are people going to learn that Java makes a better input for programmers than an output from programmers? I bet ya end users are going to be real pissed off one day when they find out we've been treating 'em like idiots this whole time. GNU's not UNIX--just look at Emacs.