http://blog.ianbicking.org Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:42:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Lately there's been some interest in build processes among various people -- `Vellum `_ was announced a while back, `Ben has been looking for a tool `_ and looking at `Fabric `_, and `Kevin announced Paver `_. At the same time `zc.buildout `_ is starting to gain some users ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/06/19/my-experience-writing-a-build-system/ I should preface this entire post by noting that I haven't used Erlang, just read about it, and I handle most concurrency using Python threads, a model for which I have no great affection (or hate). But I was reading `two `_ `posts `_ by Patrick Logan on Erlang ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/06/09/thoughts-about-the-erlang-runtime/ Do you believe the world is (a) getting better, or (b) getting worse? Please explain. **Please, no more "both/neither" answers: choose just one** http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/06/08/which-way/ People have asked me a few times about `evalexception `_ and `pdb `_ -- they'd like to be able to use something like pdb through the browser, stepping through code. The technique I used for tracebacks wouldn't really work for pdb. For a traceback I saved all the information from ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/05/16/pdb-in-the-browser/ For the most part by the time I finished writing my `last article on licensing `_ I had mostly convinced myself that the GPL isn't a practical license for most projects. That is, outcomes when using the GPL aren't likely to be any better than outcomes using a permissive ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/05/06/the-gpl-and-principles/ It occurred to me... Django is something like a dictatorship... or maybe an `oligarchy `_. At first it seems like Pylons is the same... but no. Pylons is clearly `feudal `_. I lord over Paste, WebOb, FormEncode. Mike Bayer lords over Mako and SQLAlchemy. Ben ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/05/05/governance/ I thought I'd take some time to talk about licensing. Licensing is something that `F/OSS `_ programmers talk about a lot. There's two major categories of licenses: * The `GPL `_, aka Copyleft. You must distribute source with your application, and users get full rights to the source code, including ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/05/05/choosing-a-license/ Listening to `Tavis Smiley's show `_ tonight, and the segment `My America `_ where they talked about gun violence. At one point they quote a man who lost his brother to gun violence: You can be in a club and bump into somebody on accident, a ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/05/04/something-must-be-done/ My old `do-it-yourself framework `_ tutorial was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I rewrote it to use `WebOb `_. Now: `the new do-it-yourself framework `_. http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/04/17/webob-do-it-yourself-framework/ So I promised some more technical discussion of App Engine than my `last `_ `two `_ posts. Here it is: Google App Engine uses a somewhat CGI-like model. That is, a script is run, and it uses stdin/stdout/environ to handle the requests. To avoid the overhead of CGI ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/04/13/app-engine-and-pylons/