The Google Docs editing UI is quite adequate, export to PDF / OpenOffice / Word is wonderful, and the collaboration stuff is strong but why cannot we produce modestly sane HTML or attach custom stylesheets? Joho the Blog (in March 2007): I've been using Google Docs to write documents that are collaborative. It's a good first gen product, and I...

Bill de hÓra: It occurred to me that by setting up a local hg, I had in fact branched, but without the overhead and ceremony associated with branches. Driving the cost of branches to zero is transformational. Indeed. I've been experimenting with Bazaar for a little while and had a strange idea: why not use branches as a project template...

Bill de hÓra: It occurred to me that by setting up a local hg, I had in fact branched, but without the overhead and ceremony associated with branches. Driving the cost of branches to zero is transformational. Indeed. I've been experimenting with Bazaar for a little while and had a strange idea: why not use branches as a project template...

Mr. McGrath is looking for a few good docheads (oxymoron, <ducks>) for an upcoming project. Experience in working with massive amounts of content a must, yadda yadda yadda.. But here's why I love Sean: he doesn't hire people (yes, docheads are people too) without the following qualification: If you cannot think of 3 good reasons why...

There's been a lot of good discussion around Udell's End HTTP abuse article. We need to get this figured out because it's almost embarrassing to be an advocate of standard approaches to building web applications when something as fundamental as the correct use of HTTP GET is butchered so often. Unfortunately, misuse of HTTP GET is just the tip...

I completely forgot to mention what is quite possibly the most important event to date in Kid history: the first real application to incorporate Kid templating is Ross Burton's sexy Tate (I said, “sexy Tate,” not “sexy Taint!”). It's an elegant, RDF / XHTML photo gallery that I'm dying to get my hands on. If you're into nice semantic...

I was searching for a specific piece of Dive into Python when I ran into this classic from diveintomark.org: Tom: "This is really good. You could probably make some money off this someday." Mark: "Maybe, but I'm not going to. I'm giving it away for free." Tom: "Why would you do that?" Mark: "Because this is the way I want the world to work."...

In Weapons and Coding, I made a prediction: The first environment [Java / .NET] to successful mesh static and dynamic languages into a coherent platform will win the interpreted byte-code market. Tim Bray must have come to a similar conclusion because he recently organized a meeting of the minds at Sun to talk about Dynamic Java. Here's a great...

> Great work. I took a cursory glance at KID and played> around with it for a while, and I like its simplicity and> elegance quite a bit. Really, a good start.well shucks..> A few things that I would like, or don't understand:> 1. Do the templates *have* to be compiled?No. Actually, I worked out a simple (cgi based) apache handler that compiles...

> The main> problem with Nevow's design, IMO, is dependencies: there's> about half a dozen really interesting but very different> technologies, each of which could/should really should> stand on its own Yep, that was my take as well.> As an alternative to Nevow.Renderer, you might try looking> at my own HTMLTemplate module> 404? I'd love to...

I'm trying to find a Python built-in that will return the first item i in a sequence that given a function f returns i when f(i) == True. I need this about every 300 lines of code or so (that's actually quite a bit of code in Python). The general use-case is running through a list looking for an item matching some criteria and then returning...

Ian Bicking in Python's Makefile: An example of this is buildutils. This package is, sadly, unmaintained; in part I'm writing this blog post to encourage people to steal/remake/repair the kind of functionality buildutils provides, and provide entirely new functionality. Buildutils is one of two Python projects I really screwed up on in my...

Ian Bicking in Python's Makefile: An example of this is buildutils. This package is, sadly, unmaintained; in part I'm writing this blog post to encourage people to steal/remake/repair the kind of functionality buildutils provides, and provide entirely new functionality. Buildutils is one of two Python projects I really screwed up on in my...

Joe points out the following from this interview with Twitter's Alex Payne: The problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time there���s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. (David and Rafe weigh in also. Good...

Joe points out the following from this interview with Twitter's Alex Payne: The problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time there���s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. (David and Rafe weigh in also. Good...