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.

In my article on JavaScript, I observed that we need a new language that generates good and safe JavaScript, so that you no longer have to think about either JavaScript issues or cross-browser problems. Little did I know that the solution(s) had already appeared in the form of JQuery and CoffeeScript.

The feedback from my previous article has been very helpful, and it has raised more questions about RPC technology. I've also included notes about converting Python libraries from Python 2 to Python 3.

Although it's often uncomfortable, I think the best approach to learning a new language or technology is just to grab your nose and jump feet-first into the hole in the ice.

One of the things I've loved about Python is that it was built as a community from the beginning. Language design decisions are genuinely discussed and struggled with as a community. But with Java, I've always felt like the adults were telling me what to think.

In his 17-minute keynote at O'Reilly OSCON Java 2011, Martin Odersky gives one of the more succinct and clear explanations I've seen on why shared-memory concurrency is virtually impossible to get right.

James is in Crested Butte for the month because his wife is doing a medical residency rotation here. This morning we had a couple of epiphanies over coffee.