Ever since del.icio.us and Flickr have become popular, Thomas Vander Vaal invented the term ‘Folksonomy’ and ever since, the concept has taken off. There’s even a paper presentation about it.

So, when Technorati came up with tags, should we be surprised? However, the possibility is amazing. Suppose I wanted to read about the latest in the blogosphere about WordPress, then I just go through all the related blog entries under the tag ‘WordPress’ – this is really cool since you get to read a part description even before you go clicking on to read the actual posts. This is like the latest news about anything. Period. No wonder, there are talks about blogging being the new form of journalism!

Speaking of WordPress, there’s already a plugin for Technorati tags.

Totally unrelated but yet cool is this mini-posts plugin – damn, that’s yet another reason to upgrade to WordPress 1.5! (I know, I know, its still in beta…)

Update : David Sifry writes a detailed post on Technorati tags.

I’ve been working on restructuring my book and split it into Part I – The Language and Part II – The Libraries. I am designing it such that readers can learn the language from Part I and be happy. Whenever they need to do more stuff such as GUI and databases using Python, then they can refer the appropriate chapters in Part II and get started on their programs. Of course, any interested reader can just read from cover to cover and be happy

This also means that I will be adding chapters on GUI and databases to the book (What? You didn’t get the hint??) – I’ve already started writing a database chapter and started on the DB API. There’s also another secret weapon that I am including in that chapter – something that surely raised my eyebrows when I first read about it and I’m sure it’ll do the same for you. It’s just one of the things that highlights the strengths of Python. I will keep you in suspense about it- you can read about it in the upcoming version 1.21 .

Today, I discovered the degree confluence project website and have been mesmerized ever since .

The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.

There are nearly 40,000 photos from 159 countries!!

I especially like this photo taken at NW of Mohaka, S of Lake Waikaremoana, N. Island, New Zealand.

Do you consider yourself a geek who loves to use GNU/Linux? Do you think you are one of the true geeks around who knows how to hack at it ?

Think again.

There’s an article in ‘The Hindu’ about Sharath Lakshman who has developed his own customized distro called ‘SLYNUX’. The amazing part is that he is a 15-year old student in 10th standard at Jawaharlal Nehru Government Higher Secondary School, Mahe, Kerala.

Excerpt:

"Another major feature about my OS is that it supports internal modems; something that other Linux versions normally don’t. It can also access most of the file types used in the Windows OS. In addition to this, SLYNUX also supports Malayalam fonts. I have even included an on-screen Malayalam keyboard," Sarath said.

By providing a flash player plug-in, a CD-burner software and a `paint’ programme, Sarath has also made sure that his OS is pretty strong on the multi-media front.

His official website is slynux.co.nr.

I was reading this interesting article on ACM Queue called Extensible Programming for the 21st Century – the author talks about the current state of languages, compilers and libraries and then he proposes a solution to solve most of the problems – write programs in XML format!

Before I pour my thinking on that, one particular paragraph did catch my attention:

Programming languages often grow by formalizing and generalizing the best practices of their day. Well-nested goto statements become structured programming’s conditionals and loops; records that are accessed only through companion functions become objects; functions that are identical except for data types become generics, and so on.

Insightful.

Ok, believe me, I took quite a while to digest what that guy’s saying about ‘extensible programming’ but its my understanding that it boils down to this – your program is always in a tree structure, you can imagine flowcharts to visualize this. So why not formalize it in the form of XML? Experienced guys will balk at this and say Lisp has been doing this for years! Yes, it has. So, why use XML? Because "S-expressions might have deserved to win, but XML has."

Its kind of really hard to imagine writing programs in XML, somehow I imagine I would never use such a language. I’m having a tough time just writing in DocBook XML! …. but still let me not jump to conclusions – the tutorial for the O:XML language looks interesting. You can program in O:XML like this:

[xml]
never!
always!
[/xml]

Hmmm.

I think I should really learn a functional language before making any judgements on this. I’ll probably take a look at Scheme or Haskell in future. Any ideas on which is the best FP (Functional Programming) language to start off with?

Just yesterday, Avinash was explaining to me about doing FP kind of programming in Python and how it is one of the reasons that Python is here to stay.

All this has got me interested in exploring the FP part of Python – rest assured, I’ll write about them in my book as well.

By the way, a good read is Paul Graham’s essay "Beating the Averages". He explains why Lisp was an advantage to him when building ViaWeb (which was later sold to Yahoo!).

Please do leave comments on your experiences with FP. I would be interested to hear about it.

I am formally announcing the Byte of Python book mailing list. The first post is reproduced below for your convenience:

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the Byte-of-Python mailing list Its exciting to write this first post!

New version

I just released version 1.20 of ‘A Byte of Python’ [1] and with the same I would like to formally welcome you all to the Byte-of-Python mailing list [2]. This first post is mainly about the philosophy and purpose behind this mailing list. For more details, regarding the new version, please see my blog [3].

About this List

This mailing list is in simple terms, a formal way for me to seek suggestions and comments from interested readers of my book.

Let me explain, in detail, the parts of the above sentence:

• The idea of a mailing list appeals to me because it provides a formal and easy way to have discussions. There are many other advantages such as archiving, digest options, etc.

• I will be writing my views and thinking on the roadmap for my book and soliciting suggestions and comments from you, the interested reader of my book.

• You are welcome to send in your suggestions, corrections, and criticisms about the book to the list.

• Please talk only on topics directly related to the book. General questions regarding Python should be posted on the comp.lang.python newsgroup where you will get better and more informed help.

• I want to keep this list as low-traffic and as meaningful as possible. In order to achieve this, I will have moderation on for all posts to the list. So, please be patient if your post does not appear immediately on the list. If certain mails do not need the attention of the entire list and can be answered by myself, then I will personally reply back (and not forward the mail to the list).

• Moderation also helps prevents spam mails to the list (as already experienced by me).

• I think these are reasonable ‘rules’ of the list – please let me know if you are uncomfortable with any of this.

  Hope to start some interesting discussions in future.

Thanks!

Swaroop

[1] http://www.byteofpython.info/version120/ [2] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/byte-of-python [3] http://www.swaroopch.info/archives/2005/01/13/byte-of-python-revived/

Interesting trivia: The list already has 11 members (excluding myself) even before this formal announcement.

Now that the list is also open for discussion, get ready to see a lot of action regarding the book in the coming months!

The 1.20 version of ‘A Byte of Python’ is finally out – this new release has been long overdue – more than 9 months since the last release. This is the revival of the snake charmer

This new version is a rewrite of the book and I’ve improved the explanations of most of the examples and added some new examples as well.

I took most time to rewrite my DocBook setup and to write new scripts to handle the generation of the various output formats. I tried to make it a platform-independent thing by using the Java-based DocBook tools but it was simply too slow and cumbersome. xsltproc simply rocks!

Okay, getting back on track… I will be formally announcing the mailing list for the book tonight (after I reach home).

I will be writing some new chapters for the book on topics such as databases, wxPython, new style classes, and hopefully chapters on advanced topics such as metaclasses and decorators as well. It’s gonna take time and patience and lot of feedback from you guys to help me accomplish this.

I haven’t planned on how to go about all this yet. However, you can join the mailing list if you want to give your suggestions, criticisms and comments.

Sidenote: I’m really groggy now, I slept at 5 am after making many edits to the book and then doing the xsltproc dance and uploading all the stuff to ByteOfPython.info and the Ibiblio mirror.

Check out Waiter Rant – its all about the experiences of a waiter in a New York restaurant. The latest two stories are simply hilarious. Its a must-read.

According to FeedBurner, Bloglines owns one-third of the RSS market. All hail Bloglines!

Bloglines is a website where you can subscribe to blogs and any RSS or Atom feed and when new stories are posted, you can read them from Bloglines. You won’t have to visit every website to read their latest stories. There are many other feed aggregators and ways of reading feeds from Live Bookmarks in Firefox to GUI software such as SharpReader. More info on aggregators are at Wikipedia.

I personally use Bloglines and find it very intuitive and easy to use. Some of the features I like about it are:

• Its fast.

• Its free.

• No ads (yes, really, there are no ads).

• Want to add a blog? No problem, click on Add and enter the LiveJournal user or Blogspot user name and then presto, it’s added.

• Want to write your own blog? No problem, Bloglines does that for you too.

• Want to save a particular blog post to read later on? No problem, simply click on ‘Keep New’ on the bottom right corner of the displayed post. You can save posts as well – its called a clip/blog.

• You can also import/export your blogroll from/to an OPML file to interact with other services if you need to.

• The Bloglines directory has a humongous list of blogs out there. Explore!

• Bloglines generates a you-might-be-interested-in-this list of blogs based on your current subscriptions.

• There are notifiers for you on all platforms that you can keep running in the background and they’ll notify you when there are new posts waiting for you to be read.

• Bloglines tells you the number of people also subscribed to the same feed. This helps you judge the popularity of a blog and whether it is worth spending your time on that blog.

• When reading a particular blog and you feel the need to get more perspective on the same topics, just click on ‘related feeds’ and Bloglines will do the rest for you.

• I think this is a very subtle yet important feature – I read all the blogs in the same interface. Don’t you find it irritating that when you visit many websites, you have to adjust yourself to the layout of the site and figure out where the actual content is? This especially happens with commercial news sites. With Bloglines, the same simple interface is used for all the stories that you read.

• Bloglines has great Firefox support. They even have a Firefox center.

• They have a Web Services API and there are already many 3rd party tools and libraries using it.

  • Update: As JD mentions in the comments, FeedDemon is a GUI software that can use Bloglines. This is really neat!

• If more people read the same feed on Bloglines, it doesn’t affect the traffic for the original blog website since Bloglines has to just fetch the RSS or Atom feed once and everybody can read it.

• You can have a public blogroll. Check out my big blogroll.

• The ‘Search All Blogs’ feature simply rocks.

Phew! That’s quite a list of features. I think most emphasis has to be on the usability of Bloglines – somehow it feels so natural for me to use Bloglines. I am very picky to say such things about websites because there are so many things that could annoy you.

Best feature of all? Use it once and read anywhere. I usually read blogs at home but sometimes I’d like to read stuff at work when I’m bored or just waiting for a program to finish running. That’s the advantage of a web-based tool like Bloglines. Yahoo! and Bloglines are the two websites that are always open in my browser.

The only thing that really worries me about Bloglines is how’re they making dough? I mean, Bloglines is supposed to be a business after all, and I see all these great features and yet no ads of any sort or any paid ‘plus’ model either. I should actually be happy about that but I’m worried that they’ll do something nasty later on. Please don’t mistake this for FUD, I really love Bloglines and I’m going to keep using it – I just want to know how it’s going to survive.

However, let that not get in your way, just try Bloglines – you’ll really like it.

There have been a slew of announcements at the MacWorld 2005 Expo:

• Mac Mini – Get a Mac workhorse for just 499$ but you have to BYODKM i.e. Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard and Mouse.
• IPod Shuffle – It doesn’t have a display but you still get to hear great music in a great player.
• IWork and Pages – a "word processor with incredible sense of style"
• ILife ’05 – including the amazing iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, …
• ITunes – its getting bigger and better

The MacMini seems to be a great way to get the masses on to Mac – get them hooked on iPod and then next the MacMini.

It just seems that Apple has suddenly realized that it can cater to the masses as well. I’ve always considered Apple products to be for a niche market since they are so expensive and their products don’t play well with others. If you want Apple hardware, you have to use Mac OS and no Windows. Well, of course you can use Yellow Dog Linux… but on second thought, when you have Mac OS X, would you need anything else? – most Unix applications run on the Mac because it has a FreeBSD core under the hood. I still have doubts on this – for example, Zawodny feels that OSS seem like second-class citizens on Mac.

Other than that part, you have all the awesome i-products by Apple – that’s reason by itself for wanting to use Mac. Then you have the hardware – fast and good-looking (seriously, just check out the photos, they’re really stylish).

For now, I’m sticking to good old GNU/Linux and Intel combination simply because its here and its working. When MacMini comes to Bangalore in the coming months, I’ll check it out at the Apple showroom in The Forum. I’m sure most of you are thinking the same. Somehow, the idea of running GNU/Linux on a Mac box seems so enticing….

Read more about the new Apple announcements at MacWorld.

Updates :

• Engadget has a live commentary on MacWorld announcements.

• Om Malik talks about how MacMini can be a ‘fixed mobile PC’ – interesting way of using it!

• CNET asks Will you buy Apple’s new products? and also has comprehensive coverage.