Once again, the new workshop format produced an easygoing, fun and educational experience.

An indoor water park, in Ohio, in the middle of the winter sounded like a very strange destination. But the conference turned out to be very diverse and stimulating, and I was able to try out version two of my new presentation, "The World is Dynamic."

This edition of my occasionally-published newsletter, which also goes out by email, covers upcoming events and the status of various projects.

Since I was going to be in the area to give the keynote at the CodeMash in Sandusky OH, we decided to hold the TurboGears Jam in Ann Arbor, where the main developers live.

The questions you forget to ask when you are interviewing for a job, but wish you'd asked after taking the job.

I've decided to just bite the bullet, get the pickaxe book, and slowly work through it during morning coffee breaks at Camp4 Coffee (a venerated Crested Butte establishment that is one of the centers of social discourse -- those of you who have come here for workshops know of which I speak).

Setting CLASSPATH for directories and jars driving you crazy? I finally decided to do something about it.

I think I'm really starting to get this "event" thing down. I can tell because, at the end of the "Web Frameworks Jam," half the people were saying "when are we going to do this again?"

I've been doing a lot of web programming lately. Although I've experimented with PHP, I keep migrating back to Python.

As long as we believe that it's possible to deterministically control the development of software, deterministic solutions will be the only ones that we can entertain. Only by letting go of the idea of determinism can we open up to other, less perfect ways of influencing the process.

Apparently Einstein went to his grave believing that "God does not play dice with the universe," that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was wrong, and that there was just some other variable that we weren't taking into account that would explain everything.

How can we see the problems that we face when building software through new eyes?

Some studies have shown that reviews are a far cheaper and more efficient approach to error removal than testing. These studies don't suggest that reviews should replace testing, but that you are missing out on some big economic leverage if you don't use reviews.

In the fairly famous "Defense Science Board Task Force on Military Software" released in the late 1980s, recommedation 29 was to "...develop economic incentives...to allow contractors to profit from offering modules for reuse..."

One commenter on my previous blog entry suggested that, because "Jini has recently been released by Sun as an ALV2 licensed opensource system. Thus, the door has opened for a whole new wave of distributed systems revolution."