Living Code

My latest article for David Mertz’s column XML Matters is up at IBM developerWorks: Lighter than microformats: Picoformats Ajax without X, Microformats without angle brackets went live a couple of days ago. It isn’t so much about XML as how to avoid XML. My feelings towards XML are that it is useful and good, but overused and not a panacea. By providing some alternatives, maybe some of the backlash against the “XML everywhere for everything” meme can be averted.

I’ve been meaning to post about the article, but I keep getting caught up preparing my presentation for the Vancouver Python Workshop on Saturday (the workshop starts Friday August 3rd and goes through Sunday August 5th). My talk this year is on using [PyObjC] to create applications and plugins for OS X using Python. I’ll get the slides up after, as soon as I can. I’m also planning on doing a shorter version of this talk at Bar Camp Vancouver which is 6 pm Friday, August 25 to 6 pm Saturday, August 26.

And I should have mentioned the Google talk at the Vancouver High Performance Computing User Group before it happened on July 27th. Narayanan ‘Shiva’ Shivakumar came up from their Seattle office to present mostly old information from their published papers such as The Google File System, MapReduce, and BigTable (video). The talk over beers after was fun, and it was good to see my friend Mark and find out he has a blog, even if it’s over my head much of the time.

Well, that’s my update dump. More stuff on actually using PyObjC coming Real Soon Now.