Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

Well I am sitting here in my hotel on the last evening I have internet access, eating Pocky, typing away as fast as I can, wondering where the week went. Tomorrow I move to a coffee shop before heading back to the ranch. In the week before the trip I was too overwhelmed with last minute stuff at work (like migrating to Python2.5), and preparing to spending 10 days without all my electronics. As a result I only posted information on the potter predictions site. There were a million little things which I figured I would get done while having 10 days with little to do but some minor farm work. This also meant that all the things I like to post about had major announcements. It all backed up, but I still figured 10 days away from the daily regiment would allow me to clear out some of the backlog. No such luck.

Read the rest of this entry »

James Tauber just made an announcement concerning Potter Predictions; If you haven’t voted in the last 5 hours, please do so now, as over 250 new predictions have been added:

As the book is about to be released, I wanted to let you know what is going to happen on the site the next few days.

As of just under an hour ago, I closed the submission of new predictions. Voting on existing predictions is still open, though. I encourage you to go back to http://potterpredictions.com/ soon and vote on the predictions that have been approved since you last visited the site.

Voting will be closed some time between Thursday 11pm EDT (GMT-4) and Friday 9am EDT so the next 24 hours or so will be your last chance to record your votes.

At some point after the weekend, results will start being published. You’ll want to avoid the site from Friday night until you’ve finished reading the book Given that it might be controversial whether some predictions came to pass or not, we’ll probably poll members for their opinion in ambiguous cases.

I hope you’ve had as much fun using the site as we had building it.
And, of course, I hope you enjoy the book!

James

James has been adding features to the site almost daily. There are stats including sure things, fat chances, most obscure predictions, and my favorite, most controversial. Not to mention group and friend management, tags, and you can compare your choices with anyone else. You can compare your predictions to mine. At last count, there were 519 members, almost 400 predictions, and well over 40,000 votes! The site is beginning to slow a little as votes are being made at about 10 a second (rough wall clock estimate for 5min to account for django caching). About 250 predictions were added just today. Even though James claims to have closed the adding of predictions there seem to be another 20 new ones sense I started typing all this.

UPDATE:

No, I’m just approving ones submitted prior to closing. -James

WOW! I mean WOW! James Tauber has done it again, and no doubt I will be wasting enjoying my time on his latest site Potter Predictions. I love his cats or dogs site and reveling in the predictive Potterness. Of course it’s built on his Quisition framework written in Django. I added one prediction, and have a few others to add. I need to create a group and invite friends…. and to pick a name for the group before all the good ones are chosen. Gah, so much for working on my project tonight!

Once the book is released the stats will be closed and the results posted. I can’t wait… I soo want to know what people think. I need to e-mail the penny-arcade folks, tyco will go nuts for this!!!

[UPDATE: I got group Gryffindor!]

The family and some friends went camping from last Friday until July 4th at Wells State Park. I worked from home Friday (and yes I actually worked), and did not arrive until around 7:30pm. Our 3yo son wanted to ride his trike around the campground and seemed to have too much energy for the adults who spent the day setting up camp, so I headed off with him around the five plus mile grand loop. I figured we would go up hill as far as possible, then head back down once he had burned off enough energy. Being a 3yo he had unlimited reserves and we made it all the way up to the top, halfway between the South Trail entrance and the base of Carpenters Rock (map). I was quite tired and we stopped to prepare for the trip down. The trike wheels are quite loud and the sudden quiet sounds of twilight were quite nice. There was a rustling just off to the left off the road as something came through the woods.

Read the rest of this entry »

As announced on a number of other blogs, there is going to be a Python Magazine, and Steve Holden is going to have a regular column! Now I have something to hound my mailman over besides the last Harry Potter book! Subscribe now and get $10 off and a chance to win a MacBook! The subscription is both hard copy and digital. They are also looking for writers, no experience necessary. This is a magazing for Python enthusiests BY python enthusiests.

I already have plans to be supplying bound, professionally printed versions of the The Python Papers to the Cambridge Python Users Group. I will see what I can come up with for Python Magazine. As it is a subscription service, I will not be just printing out my PDF version.

Or maybe it’s LSD, it was created here after all.

Want to make a major decision with little oversight and little notice? Just do it just before or on a holiday. Every time I take some time off with my family I get back to find out that some major change or event in the ongoing Mass ODF saga (or marriage, or the Big Dig, or Cape Wind) has occurred. Seriously, if it is something people actually care about, but is influenced by special interests with deep pockets, the decision is made when the majority of the state population is eating turkey, unwrapping presents, dressing their kids in costumes, watching people run across Boston, or in this case trying to celebrate the birth of a democracy; (no irony there). At least it is not a smear campaign again, it is just the Massachusetts Government rolling over. The good news is, we, the citizens of Mass have a chance to respond.

UPDATE: Seems I am not the only person having problems, so is the British National Archive. The solution seems to be the ones who created the problem, Microsoft and OOXML. Hope they actually read the 6000 page specification and know how to implement useWord97LineBreakRules.

UPDATE 2: Sun releases it’s OOXML/ODF converter for MS Office. And no it will not handle Visio OLE embedded objects, as that is impossible for a non MS developer. Only Microsoft can do that, and they wont. Also here is an unintended answer to the question ‘Isn’t choice always good for the customer?’ I have seen on every blog about ODF and OOXML. And in answer to Marry Jo, because it is impossible for me to implement the OOXML standard completely. Only Microsoft can do that, and thus is not actually a standard by any rational sense.

Read the rest of this entry »