Andy McKay's blog

Just found this post on Brian's blog and its so good I'll reiterate it here, where Jeff Griffiths comments on starting Flickr in Vancouver:

I would go even further and say that one of the critical success factors for Flickr *was* that they were not just 'toiling in obscurity', but that they were IN Vancouver. Up here we have lots of talent, a relatively low cost of living ( compared to the valley at least ), and all sorts of added lifestyle bonuses that San jose will never beat ( climbing / biking / snowboarding / music ). And for Flickr in particular, a major part of their early success was a loyal local following of users; witness the hugeness of the Vancouver tag. I would smugly theorize that Flickr's ability to find their users was helped in a large way by their being in Vancouver, a city that seems to breed tech-obsessed shutterbugs more than most places. I dunno, I think it's probably a bad time to start a company in San Jose, but it's hard to say when that would ever be true given Caterina's qualifications. Vancouver, on the other hand, seems to be a fine place to ( re ) start a company...

At the time I of course would have pointed out that Enfold was another company in that list that's running in Vancouver and hiring. Since that's not the case, point moot. However I spent many times it seems saying "No I'm not moving to Houston*" I love it here. I still do and I think its a great place to start a company. * Houston is the lowest ranked city in US (68), Vancouver the highest in North America (3). We've heard this one many times before anyway.

Was helping a person on irc the other day. The problem was they were including a string into a template. The string was coming from a property on an object, that property was being acquired through acquisition. The code was something like this: tal:content="context/getSectionText" So the what's the problem here?

• What's the chance you will remember in 6 months what getSectionText is? Go away for a day then try to remember (ok, perhaps I'm just getting old). But you'll never remember that is a property on an object and there is no easy way of finding that out.
• There is no easy way to change it.
• There is no easy way to list them all - short of waking up every object and examining it.
• You could conceivably get hit by security when someone workflows the object with the property for you (admittedly perhaps less of a concern).

In this case I prefer a Python script that searches the objects location and returns a value. Here's an example that I pulled from Enfold Systems that displays a different image on the top of every folder.

# add in new images here
images = {
  "desktop":"enfoldsystems/sections/desktop.jpg",
  "server":"enfoldsystems/sections/server.jpg",
}
url = context.portal_url.getRelativeContentPath(context)
img = None
# in this case we are looking for url's like
# products/server or products/proxy
if len(url) > 1:
  # look up the images
  if url[0].lower()=="products":
    product = url[1].lower()
    img = products.get(product, None)
# set the default
if img is None:
  img = "sections/homepage.jpg"
return img

Next we add this into the skin. In this case this is called getSectionImage and the template reads: tal:attributes="src string:$portal_url/${context/getSectionImage}" Not the worlds most sophisticated peice of code but...

• It's easy to remember, when looking in our templates and I spot the line getSectionImage, its easy for me to look in the skin and remember there is a script called getSectionImage even now two years later.
• I can easily see what all the images are and alter them.
• Never any security to worry about.

The only real problem you have is that for complicated requirements, that script can get complicated, but that's true of properties too.

TiddlyWiki: a complete browser based wiki system. No server side software needed at all, just HTML and JavaScript. Ideal for auto-running off a USB drive if you want to carry around a wiki system.

Sometimes I do a bank transaction at a teller. I know even saying that seems wierd nowadays, I've lived with cash machines as long as I can remember but going to a bank, speaking to a person and do a transaction is a rarity. And then, its for setting up something for web access. So I give them my card and say I want to do something simple, set up bill payment, get some foreign currency. What follows next is a flurry of typing that would put the average emacs using developer to shame. What on earth are they doing? Writing out my life history? They seem to be going through an insane number of screens containing everything in the world (on the odd occasion I've been able to see). Ok, so that's odd, but what I find I really odd is the simple principle of the less buttons people press, the less mistakes occur. If I was designing an interface for lots of people to use (read tellers) I would be focusing on making easy and fast and one of the key ways to do that is not to have the teller type in a large amount of information. This is easy and glib to say when I'm not designing it and a mere mortal like me can only shudder at the hideously complicated historical complexities in such an application. But c'mon, a 10 minute keyboard hammering to set up a bill payment? Something has to be terribly wrong with this system.

The Vancouver Python Workshop is really gearing up. We are just about to announce the speakers and that should be a good line up, we'll be featuring a bunch of good speakers including people from Europe and Brazil. For me now its time to get down to the nitty gritty of doing all the budgets in detail, finance, registration and the like. It's a pretty thankless task, but all worked out ok last time, so should go through well this time too. I remember a chat with someone after the last conference and I'll have to get permission before I use his name, but his feeling was:

Better than PyCon

If you haven't checked it out do so: http://www.vanpyz.org/conference More the merrier.

The one key missing component from Google maps has just been filled in, you can now get geoencoding of addresses in the Google maps API. Yay! http://www.developer.com/lang/jscript/article.php/3615681

Paul, Tres and Chris formed Agendaless Consulting:

We are specialists in building large, custom web applications using a collection of technologies, centered around Zope and Plone.

Good luck to the three of you. I know with the talent, skills and abilities of those three that Agendaless will be a premier consulting company.

Of all the things that get my blood boiling as a cyclist is drivers who turn right directly in front of you. Fair enough, everyone has to turn right - but I just get incensed when drivers overtake, giving you lots of room, then instantly turn right blocking you completely. Where is the cyclist meant to go: left into the traffic, right around the front of the car, or hope you can brake in time before slamming into the car that is now braking. This has happened to me several times. At least once I've been unable to stop, and splatted myself on the back of a nice expensive car, hopefully scratching it in the process. I think the mental process that goes through the drivers is something like this:

• There's my right turn up ahead
• Oh there's a cyclist I'll can just speed past him
• He's behind me now, not my problem, let's turn right

Things they've forgotten: 1) there could be a pedestrian, car parking or other obstacle causing them to stop 2) cyclists can't stop as fast as cars. All they had to do was slow down... wait for the cyclist to pass then turn right or ensure they had left enough space up ahead. Please drivers, slow down and give us room. Rant over. And watch out Mr. Brown Chevy Minivan, don't do that too me again.

SQL on Rails. The screencast is worth watching:

Rails is a short-stack framework for developing database-contained web applications according to the Model-Model-Model pattern. From the Ajax in the model, to the request and response in the model, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-SQL development environment. Finally!

Ever used PloneShell and want some more features for it? Joel and I are running a sprint in Vancouver and looking for features people want in it. Here's what we have on our list so far:

• Faster start up
• Ability to change colours, fonts
• Easier startup, without having to specify all the paths
• Mac installer
• Reset without having to restart
• Turn off acquisition, only show methods and properties on the current object
• Easy user switching
• Easy security testing

Ideas welcome!

Lowry Digital Images get another news item on them:

The company deployed 700 Terabytes of storage to support the project. Company founder John Lowry explained: "This is true frame-by-frame digital restoration. When you have 42 miles of film, there's a lot to clean up."

Ian Caven will be speaking at the upcoming Vancouver Python and Zope user group and will probably have screen shots of this very transformation. Whilst the article mentions that they use a large number of Mac's they also use a huge amount of Python and Zope.

If you play Final Fantasy XI, then there are quite a few hacks out there that you can try. I've been playing it for a while and here's a simple one, swap your moogle for something else. All you are doing is changing the .dat file that renders the image of the moogle. There's something mildly amusing about asking a Gigas to do your gardening for example, although it is freaky the first time you go into your Mog house. A list of the files is here and a description: File link An image of the result:

At home I now run only two operating systems Ubuntu for everything that's not a Mac and OS X for everything that is. Was getting way too hard to keep track of all the things running and their quirks. I've just installed Ubuntu on a couple of old laptops to use as servers and its a breeze. Took me two minutes to realise the CD server install did not install a gui and then I have to:

apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

So far going well. Update: installed 3 towers of varying hardware and 2 laptop's and Ubuntu worked with only one hitch (hard drive size settings) in all cases.

A new CBC site has been launched and looks quite nice so far. One nice change is that in a nice post, the person in charge has described what and why, for example:

We've added prominent links to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds in the left-hand navigation of all of the news pages, so you can easily subscribe to feeds and get the news you want...

Good stuff.

For some reason I was thinking about this on the bus and it's stuck with me. Was in London Drugs many moons ago (about 4 years) buying a television. As I remember the conversation went something like this

Customer: I'm looking for a tv. Salesman: Great, so the main question is, how big is your car? Customer: Well it's a truck. Salesman: Excellent, so this tv here is a great buy and will fit in the back of your truck. Customer: Yeah it would.

Customer is now totally distracted from the cost, focusing on the size of the tv. He was good and was selling a truck load of televisions as we bought a few other bits and peices with a very, very slow salesman.