William McVey has taken some awesome notes from PyCon. Somehow he managed to attend a ton of sessions and take down all sorts of information in an organized way (a mind-map). There were a lot of talks I couldn't go to, so I'm glad to have this as a guide to breadcrumbs I couldn't collect myself.

I just got back from my first PyCon. It was a fascinating experience. It's hard to make a cohesive report, so here are my impressions.

» read more of: PyCon... (19 paragraphs)

Black Widow Bakery is a site run by an escapee from the technology field. In her case, she's followed her dream to be a baker. Her site is full of interesting cooking projects, the most interesting of which has to be the meatcake (an internal link: click the link on the home page). In answer to the challenge of what would be the masculine equivalent of an ultra-feminine wedding cake, she baked meatloaf in cake pans, "frosted" it with smooth mashed potatoes, and created the meatcake. Others have made interesting meatcakes too. Genius.

As a result of a last-minute decision, I'll be going to PyCon 2007 in Dallas. I've never been to a PyCon before, so I'm really excited to have a change to meet a lot of people who I've only known online. Also going from Tabblo will be Dave St. Germain and possibly Antonio Rodriguez.

We'll be on kind of an abbreviated schedule: from mid-day Friday through Saturday. The Sunday schedule looks really interesting, it's when all the testing talks are, but other duties call.

Robert Lang does some amazing origami, but more impressive to me is his examination and exposition of the mathematics of origami. I particularly liked his Polypolyhedra page, about folding orderly tangles from paper. His models are gorgeous, his math is impeccable. He also has original origami analysis software for download. There's a lot of very impressive stuff here.

I spend much of my day working in a text editor, so I'm pretty sensitive to how well it does (or doesn't) work. I'm always on the lookout for new entrants into the field, hoping for the perfect Windows programmer's editor.

Over the past few years, I've used (and paid for) a number of editors that came close, but which ultimately disappointed in some way, most recently Zeus, EditPad Pro, and TextPad. There are also a dozen more that I've downloaded and played with enough to see that they weren't for me: Alleycode, Boxer, ConTEXT, Cream, Crimson Editor, e, EditPlus, Emacs, EmEditor, Jed, jEdit, Notepad++, PSPad, Slickedit, UliPad, Ultra-Edit, vim, Xint.

In the past month, two new possibilities have appeared:

Intype is a new editor modelled after the much-vaunted TextMate. They are only just getting started, but as an example of how much they are following the TextMate model, they've implemented bundles before most other things you need in an editor (tabbed interface, undo, etc).

Although Intype has a long way to go to be a complete editor, the first looks are promising: it is polished and thoughtful, and the team is conducting itself in the modern way (screencasts, forums, releasing often, etc). And the interest is quite intense: someone has written a project manager for Intype which hijacks Intype editor windows to present the tabbed interface Intype hasn't built yet!

Overall Intype is very interesting, and I'll be watching its progress.

Komodo Edit is a free subset of Komodo IDE. For my tastes, it chooses almost the exact right subset of features. For example, it doesn't include Subversion integration, but I use svn from the command line anyway. It gets projects right: a directory spec, with file patterns to include and exclude dynamically. If the Find In Files features could search the files in a project, it would probably be perfect.

We have a need at Tabblo for a web front-end contractor for a short-term assignment (perhaps 1 month full-time). We'll have other work for the same skill-set in the future, so this could be the first of a number of assignments, or even a full-time hire if the stars are aligned.

The work at hand requires refactoring HTML and CSS, but Javascript, AJAX, Python and Django are all huge extras for the future. The work is on-site in Cambridge, full-time, or near full-time, starting as soon as possible. If you are interested, drop me a line.

¶   Attractors, another nifty Flash experiment toy.

¶   Using candles to generate electricity, which must be a fake, since how can current flow when there is no complete loop? And what would lighting a candle have to do with a nail stuck in the side?

As a Windows user, I envy a few things about the Macs around me. One of them is Quicksilver, the mind-reading launcher and shortcutter for OS X. There are a few simple-minded clones for Windows, though none of them come close to its beauty and power.

The best of the bunch that I've tried so far is Launchy. It seems to find the things I want, it remembers what my choices were, and it has plug-ins that allow it to (for example) interpret Firefox keyword shortcuts. I'm using it more and more to run programs, relying less and less on my existing methods (command line, start menu, and Free Launch Bar).

I liked the tongue-in-cheek Venn diagrams and charts in Indexed, especially the explanation of the pairings of the seven deadly sins in We're All Going To Hell.

I saw this video a few weeks back, linked from a post (since lost) about counter-intuitive materials: A pool filled with non-newtonian liquid. The mixture of cornstarch and water is a liquid, until a strong force is applied to it, at which point it acts like a solid. The result is that a pool filled with this slurry can be walked across if you keep moving briskly. Pause for a moment, and you sink.

I know this sounds like a joke, but it isn't: Helvetica is a documentary about the typeface Helvetica. Actually, it's about more than that:

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

I'm definitely going to go see it, if it ever shows in a theater near me, I just don't know if anyone will go see it with me!

A cake to mark a special (sort of sad) occasion:

For the longest time, I've struggled with the CSS that styles this site. It has grown organically, which is a nice word that means "without thought". It had gotten to the point where there were too many rules affecting too many elements, and I couldn't make a change without some unpredicted part of the page looking very wrong. I could see the effect my changes had, but I couldn't see why they did.

I was using Firebug, an awesome Firefox plugin that shows you the CSS in effect for an element. But I still couldn't see the chain of causation that got me where I was. I was using a recent build (0.4.1), but it turns out that Joe Hewitt had been a busy boy, because version 1.0 of Firebug is now available.

The leap in version numbers from 0.4.1 to 1.0 was entirely justified. If you'd been using Firebug and liked the way it was going, you have to get 1.0, because it looks like Firebug times ten. The killer feature for me is the CSS panel which shows what styles are in effect for the selected element, including all of the inherited styles, and which rules are overridden. Using this tool, it was straightforward to see what rules were affecting my layout, and to clean things up.

But there are a ton of other tools in Firebug: layout visualizers, rulers, Javascript debugger, network analyzer, etc, etc, etc. It really is amazing what's packed into it. If you're doing any sort of web development, you need to Get Firebug.