Andy McKay's blog

For the last 9 months or so I've been using a 11 inch Sony Vaio. My Macbook arrived last week. I was chatting to a friend the other day and asked why I moved to a Macbook. I really loved the Sony Vaio and it's impressed most people who've seen it. Alan convinced me it was a good laptop and he's right. Now ignoring the obvious reason - my laptop is owned by my previous company, not me - why did I switch and which did I prefer? The answer is the Macbook. One of my main reason things I look for in a laptop is the portability and here the Sony Vaio is supreme:

• Weight and size: light and small. Actually is usable on a plane.
• Hibernation support: good, restart is about 20 secs (time to restart and Windows to think about it).
• Battery life: excellent 8 hours if you put on maximum, I've rarely run out.

Comparatively the Macbook feels like a battleship compared to the Vaio. I'm getting used to it but at first I'd forgotten laptops weren't tiny little things.

• Weight and size: heavier and bigger. But nowhere as big as some.
• Hibernation support: fantastic restart, about 2 seconds
• Battery life: good 6 hours advertised, haven't tried yet.

So what are the deciding factors: OS X (which I love) and price (~$2.1k compared to $1.3k Canadian). I think there would be a real market for Apple if they could make a small laptop for road warriors. Something the size, speed and weight of the Sony running OS X. It would be perfect for users who use their laptops in many places and I would buy it tommorrow.

I've been asked this at least three times on IRC in that last few days. I think this didn't get covered in my book, so here goes. If there was a standard Hello World page template, it would look like this:

Via Mike Davidson and Jeffrey Veen:

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence. - Friedrich Nietzsche

To quote Jeffrey:

This helps explain simple anomalies in user behavior at your site. Why do people search for terms that are listed right in the navigation? Because it's easier to type the word you want than pick it out of a list.

Regular readers may remember posts on ZopeZen about my fun at US Customs. I have a tale to tell about my latest trip... I'm writing it in the US though so I should probably be wearing my tin hat to stop them intercepting my signals. I was on my way to Houston to do training. 

Doing training in Houston this week and just remembered something: I enjoy training. Just a note to myself so Google can remind me in a few years time that I said that.

The 29th Folk Music Festival (Flickr) was this weekend and the whole family is just in recovery mode. It's a fantastic weekend but going from 9 am - 12 midnight with 2 kids over the weekend, spending all day in the heat is at the same time the most wonderful and exhausting weekend. I'm such a stick in the mud, I know what I like and Sunday was a chock a block full of Dan Bern and Ruthie Foster, so I was happy. Unfortunately this year for me there were no new discoveries, no new must hear artists, which is the first time in a while. That's a shame. For those of you attending the Vancouver Python Workshop, this is the view from Jericho Beach and is just around the corner from Locarno Beach, which is where the barbeque is.

Attended a talk at cmprofessionals.org last night. Who knew there was such an organisation, and they might be in your city. Apparently they have been going for about a year and talk every couple of months, so I'll hopefully be going again. It's a different group from the Python or Plone groups, I naturally sat down and got out my laptop to take notes.... only one there with a laptop. The talk was on the Vancouver 2010 website. It's built using The Level's software. They are a content management start up in Vancouver. It's rumoured their main contract is a big project for Google (was confirmed last night that they do something for them). Before the Torino cames they had to get the content out of the old web site and get a new site up and running with a new design in the new CMS. The organising committee (Vanoc) has got their sponsor Bell Canada to do the site which then used The Level. There was a team of 6 people building the site over 3 months, with 3 content editors plugging in the content. There's probably many more involved in the auxilary, but that seemed to be the core group. The lady doing the talking (who's name unfortunately I did not write down), showed us a demo of editing content. Being one of the few techy people in the audience I was curious to get a quick preview of the editing interface. Basically it's an in place editing system, most of the template is fixed with a few areas you can edit. Common to editing systems a little button pops up so you can edit the post, which takes you to a new page. That pages is just like a Plone edit page, but out of context... enter the data in a few fields and the text into a simple wysiwyg editor. From a few comments made it seems clear that the system has some sort of relational or xml database backend. Content is pulled out and transformed on the way using XSLT. Spotted a few things in there like versioning and staging but nothing really stunning. Ah I'm such a cynic, but c'mon I thing automatic RSS feeds, css for mobile users and so on are standard these days (although I'm sure people say similar things about Plone with different topics). My two questions: localisation and accessibility were answered deftly. They even did focus groups for accessiblity prior to launch, good for them! Didn't get into specifics about the traffic, would be curious. From here the site is fast and I can imagine during Turino there was quite a peak of interest. A quick ab gave me: Requests per second: 22.73 [#/sec] (mean) However I did it for 50 requests and got a server timeout. Eek, better not run benchmarks on other people's servers :) Moving to the games is going to be an interesting transition, the site needs for getting all the data from the games out is a different challenge, something I'd like to see more talks on.

About 5 years ago at a Python conference, I met this crazy guy who talked about Python, Windows and said so many things - many of them made sense. That guy was Alan Runyan and what a nice guy he was. It was about 4 years ago I got into Plone and started doing some stuff and sure enough Alan was there. 

Yay, new MacBook was ordered today. It's the cheapest one they have, I'm such a cheap person with things like laptop's but at the moment finances are a little shorter than usual. Besides, it will just mean upgrading in a year or two or when I break it :) Next task - go and find some RAM to get that seriously upgraded from the base 512. Going back to a sole development box will be nice, in the last year I've been jumping between a Windows Sony Vaio (which I like but it doesn't run OS X) and my Mac mini (too slow). With tools like QuickSilver, terminal and even insanely simple things like symlinks, I find myself just way more productive on a Unix-like platform than on Windows. So c'mon Apple get that laptop to me as fast as possible.

I've set up ClearWind to use Wordpress the same blogs database and code as this server. Which meant I had to start editing some PHP, ick. It turns out to be pretty straightforward, using the category I included all of one category in one blog and excluded all of a category in the other... the only problem being that now the RSS feeds include everything so have to filter ClearWind out of that, apologies if you follow my RSS feed. The key bit of code for doing this was this page.

The Vancouver Python Workshop is taking place in August, 2006. As an organiser ClearWind is processing all payments for the conference. Andy will also be speaking there. If you have any questions regarding registration please contact andy@clearwind.ca.

I saw CSpace on digg touted as the "a platform for secure, decentralized, user-to-user communication over the internet". And guess what, it's written in Python.