DjangoCon is the first official international Django conference. It aims to bring together the community and provide a wide range of sessions, panels, lightning talks and showcases of Django usage within various businesses. The first DjangoCon will be on September 6-7, 2008 in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex. I'll see you there.

So enough time has passed that I believe twitter is more than a fad :) I tweet: http://twitter.com/jcgregorio. Next up: Skype. Hope you find it to be fun :-) Posted by Bill Higgins on 2008-07-30 Really out in front of that adoption wave, aren't we? Posted by Mark on 2008-07-30

Ben Laurie: A more minor objection to the IETF that I hope the OWF will solve similarly to the ASF is that it is actually too inclusive. Anyone is allowed to join a working group and have as much say as anyone else. This means that any fool with time on their hands can completely derail the process for as long as they feel like. That's a Social Denial of Service Attack, and it can be handled by a good WG chair and "

Being a parent has it's ups and downs. Up Three of the four children at a sleep-over. Down A midnight call because someone can't sleep without a very specific stuffed animal. Luckily it's a short walk to the neighbor's house. Up All three make it through the night, which is a first for one of them. Down The eight year old throwing up that morning because, shockingly, you cannot subsist on gatorade and popcorn for dinner and then only get five hours of sleep.

A video introduction to the Atom Publishing Protocol: If you have trouble seeing the text in the video you can click through to YouTube and watch the high resolution version. Hi Joe, This was relaly useful, thanks. I'm just getting to grips with these technologies and short tutorials like this are great. Question, when you say media I think of video and audio. However does what you said about media apply to other binary formats such as .

When Jeff Atwood's latest article Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal crossed my desk I knew what the reaction would be and recorded it in del.icio.us: Expect the relational database zealots to crawl out of the woodwork on this one. Comments will include, "you suck", "use postgres", this article is harmful", and "I used to think you were smart Jeff..." It's 24 hours later, how did I do? you suck This is why this article is wrong, Jeff.

I just updated my Projects page. breaking up my monolithic listing of projects into "Specifications", "Software" and "Planets". I also added a new section - "Presentations" - for all my old presentations.

15 years ago: HTML was designed to be simple. Folks are supposed to be able to whack out HTML with a text editor -- no rocket science required. ... I suggest that it should be the responsibility of the _server_ to produce valid HTML. Of course the client should be robust in the face of errors. But I suggest that when a client and a server differ on their interpretation of a document, the client is at fault if the document is valid, and the server is at fault if the document is not.

President Bush: Good afternoon. Across the country, Americans are concerned about the high price of gasoline. Every one of our citizens who drives to work, or takes a family vacation, or runs a small business is feeling the squeeze of rising prices at the pump. To reduce pressure on prices we must continue to implement good conservation policies, Like raising CAFE standards, which I have staunchly opposed during my entire administration.

Via Bill: Mark Levison: "I've started a page on the Scrum Alliance wiki to document Agile/Scrum Failures. The failures are not of the process itself but of the humans associated with the project." I can see the point in the rest of Mark's post about tracking failures, but that statement comes dangerously close to the No true Scotsman Fallacy. This is a similar trap that the believers in the Free Market Fairy fall into when they claim that the reason that the Free Markey Fairy hasn't cured all of our woes is that we don't have a "

I'll be presenting twice at OSCon 2008 which is coming up in just a few weeks. My first presentation is "(The Lack of) Design Patterns in Python": In many dynamic language communities such as Python, there is a distinct lack of Design Patterns. Are the communities ignorant of Design Patterns or is there something else going on here? This talk is based on my well-trafficked article Python isn't just Java without the compile, which compares Java to Python and other dynamic languages.

From Wikipedia, The Funarg Problem Funarg is an abbreviation for "functional argument"; in computer science, the funarg problem relates to the difficulty of implementing functions as first-class objects in stack-based programming language implementations. I've been thinking about this in the context of the Professionalization of Scripting Languages, does anyone know if any of the processor manufacturers are working on adding silicon support for activation records? Well, if they think this problem is peculiar to stack-based programming-language implementations, they should consider the difficulty of non-stack-based programming-language implementations.

If you haven't visited my site recently, I've redesigned, or undesigned as the case may be, stripping out as much as I could, dropping background images, etc, following in the minimalism of Mark and Ryan, though I doubt I'll ever get around to setting a Baseline. And removing administrative debris is easy since I don't have any, controlling my blog is all done via the Atom Publishing Protocol. Now that I've cleared the underbrush I'll start in on Sam's version of minimalism.

More has been written about the price of oil and the cost of transportation in the past year than in the previous 30. Before that we had the oil crisis of the 70s and since then our inability to make any progress on fuel efficieny has been strangled by the car companies and their complicit allies of all political stripes. Now the refrain we've heard from the car companies has been consistent and can be boiled down to the now familiar "

Tim points to a survey of bug tracking and source code management tool preferences. The surprise to me is that the three distributed version control system have garnered more than 60% of the votes. Would that have been even conceivable a year or two ago? It is illuminating to notice that the top 60% of bug tracking systems are shared between three of the worst such systems on the planet.

Protocol Buffers have been open sourced. They're one of the first things you learn about when you start at Google and they're used everywhere. The release supports C++, Java and Python, but Brad is working on Perl support. What's the reason for lack of PEP8 compliance for the Python support? Posted by JB on 2008-07-09 Google has their own coding style guide for Python which doesn't always line up with PEP8.

Wow, suddenly gedit went from the notepad of Gnome to something much more. It's no Acme, but I wonder if you could get some of the same effects by writing a plugin like Tool Launcher that also exported a FUSE filesystem. What amuses me is that he got excited over what is effectively a one-liner in vim (by shelling out to date) and probably about as easy in Emacs, I’m not sure why anyone would get so thrilled over being able to extend their editor when such a simple desire requires that much ceremony to fulfil…

I love all the stories about the search for water and possibly life on Mars and the new discoveries of more earth-like extrasolar planets, but I just think there's a bit of a perspective problem when it comes to presuming that being closer to earth-like is better when it comes to the search for life. Yes, the only known sample point we have of life is that existing on our own planet (for now), but that doesn't mean that our planet is optimal for the formation or survival of life.

I missed this book when it was first published, but picked it up recently and was really impressed. While the title would have you believe it was focused on the internet, in actuality only the last chapter discusses the parallels between the telegraph and the internet, while the remainder of the book is actually a well written history of the telegraph, which bodes well for the endurance of this book; instead of coloring the whole book with the perspective of the internet as it exists today, it is left as a straight-forward history that will probably take on fresh meanings and perspectives as the internet grows and our relationship to it evolves.

The latest draft of the multipart/related extension for atompub is now available. And in case you missed it on the mailing list, this spec will be proceeding on the standards track.