February 2005 Archives

By sheer accident, I came across a quote that had me looking up some telephonic history. It turns out that Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone (originally the "harmonic telegraph") originally proposed people answer the phone by saying "Hoy Hoy!", said to be derived from the maritime greeting "Ahoy!". It was Thomas Edison, his sometime rival inventor, who proposed the word "Hello". Indeed, it wasn't until around 20 years ago when a historian uncovered the first written record of the word "hello", in a letter written by Edison in 1877.

So I propose that we all take a leaf out of Monty Burns' book, and answer the phone with Bell's original "Hoy hoy!". Who knows - it might catch on second time around?

While sipping at the firehose of techno-legal site GrokLaw (legal analysis of tech issues such as copyright and patents, focusing in particular on the SCO vs The World case), I came across a link to a fascinating blog.

Called PhilaLawyer, it is a particularly well-written blog written by a pseudonymous lawyer in Philadelphia. He writes in a gritty, caustic manner and pens highly readable insights into the not-so-squeaky-clean underbelly of the legal profession.

Of course, the number of entries I have in the wonderful NetNewsWire RSS Reader is growing way beyond the time available to read them... Such is.

A new contender in the enterprise messaging world is upon us. EWeek tells us that
a coalition of financial institutions are collaborating on an Open Source messaging queueing technology, AMQ.

Davies said the impetus for AMQ was a desire among financial firms to reverse the use of proprietary technology and increase the use of open source in Wall Street back-office systems.

It looks like MQSeries, Tibco and JMS will have some competition. It is highly significant to note that this is a group of financial institutions, not a bunch of university students with long hair and sandals. Clearly the benefits of collaboration and openness have become apparent to even this highly conservative market.

I'm using Python and C in one of the rather large projects I'm working on, and I'm using Pyrex to provide the bridging code. Once I got over some of the tricks involved in sharing types between extension modules, it was cooking with gas.

Now I have a Firewire camera running live in a wxPython window being displayed using PyOpenGL. Very cool indeed... Now all I have to do is hack in YUV support into Gandalf, and I'll be set!

Writing extension modules in Pyrex is dead easy, sharing them just takes a little extra know-how. You have to declare the cdef functions along with the data members in your .pxd file. Then the implementation goes into the .pyx module, which is compiled. The trouble I came across was calling cdefed functions between modules that used a common C type defined in another module. Clear as mud?

The solution was to declare the C typedefs in their own .pxd and import those into both, thus putting all the C types in their own namespace. Then two different extension modules can use the same C types from Pyrex code and all's well.

Podcasting seems to be all the rage these days. With the phenomenal success of the iPod, a new broadcast medium has been born. People are now producing their own mini-radio shows, and listeners can subscribe to them (much like an RSS reader subscribes to news content) and have the shows automatically downloaded for later listening.

And now that my favourite radio station Triple J is starting to produce podcasts of Hack and Dr Karl I have some very good reasons to get into it. (Unfortunately I don't often get to listen to Dr Karl's Science show on a Thursday morning, but it's always worth it if you can catch it.)

So now the question becomes: which software to use? Fortunately there are several to choose from.

I am currently playing with MarsEdit and Ecto to see which I prefer as a blogging client for my Mac PowerBook lappy.

My criteria? Easy to use, setup, works with my existing server software (currently Drupal but may change), sensible formatting of plain text (I hate manually typing html, I wish I could use something like reStructuredText), native Cocoa, saving drafts, and some other stuff. So far, they are both very similar - in fact almost feature parity AFAICT, but both have some annoying features that don't leave me with a clear winner.

I would really like to be able to add images to my posts, without mucking around with a separate upload step, and have captions and thumbmnails. Is that too much to ask?

I happened across a wonderful project called Cheetah yesterday. It is a Python templating engine, designed to be simple and fast. And from what I've seen so far, it certainly delivers on both counts.

Since one of my websites is restricted to basically only static content, I am going to use Cheetah to generate the content, so I can have common headers/footers, sensible navigation links, and all that sort of thing. I guess I will just have to forego comments (and comment spam!) for the time being, but at least I can have the dubious pleasure on this site...