After a lot of trepidation because of bad press, I've rapidly come to prefer Windows 8 over Windows 7. Because an equivalent-horsepower Mac is 3 times the cost of a Windows 8 machine, I'm moving back to Windows.

After two years of cogitation on Scala, the print version of the book is ready! (The Kindle version might take another month or two...).

For the last year and a half, Dianne Marsh and I have been working on an introductory Scala book.

The earlier workshop came about because of a last-minute opportunity, thus the short notice. Both follow the open style that I've been developing in recent years.

If you do any HTML/XML processing, you've probably heard of this powerful and useful package. Download the latest beta and run it on your code to help debug it and make sure it does what you need!

I'm not talking about the early adopters writing obscure code here -- that can probably be solved with a suitable style guide. I just debugged my way through an example that should have been trivial but I only figured out because:

In order for HTML5 to become the true user interface technology of the future, servers must be able to transparently push data to clients. People have been trying to do this for a long time, and WebSockets look like they will solve the problem once and for all.

My friend James Ward was explaining some of the struggles he had learning Scala, in particular partial functions.

I'm a big Amazon fan, and a Prime account is great when you live in the boonies. I've also become a big Kindle fan -- but I've just discovered that I'm only a fan of the old design: the amazing thin, light, black-and-white book-reader-only kindles.

I've been wanting to play with an Arduino for awhile, but there are so many (which is great, but confusing for the first-timer).

The folks at CERN did a great job of capturing my presentation there; you can see the whole thing online.

Visiting the ALBA Synchrotron in Barcelona and speaking at the ICALEPCS conference of people who program machines like this, I was struck by how much Python is used to run these systems.

I posted this on Reinventing-Business.com because it seemed more appropriate, but there are some items that might be of interest to readers here (especially the observations about the Stockholm user groups)

Following up on my previous article, I create a super-simple example where a web page communicates with the server (written in Web.py) sending a JSON request object and receiving a JSON object as a response, which it uses to dynamically update the page. Afterwards, James Ward quickly loads the example into Heroku using their new Python support.

I'll be in Europe from October 7-19, giving two conference presentations and speaking at one or more user groups.