I forgot to post last week that my latest article for David Mertz’s column, XML Matters, went live on the IBM developerWorks site. It’s fallen off the front page now, but it was gratifying to make it there. The article is Ajax Tradeoffs: The many flavors of XML, and it is an exploration of various XML (Open Office, XHTML, custom) and non-XML (JSON, CSV) formats for data exchange in Ajax-enabled websites. I used my wife Daniela’s efforts at tracking her poetry submissions as my example data.  Read →

Well, I’ve been promising this off and on here in my intermittent blog, but I’ve had the code up on Google code hosting for some time now, my kids have tested out the latest version, I’ve fixed some bugs introduced when PyObjC switched from distutils to setuptools. It is still pretty raw, unpolished, unoptimized, but I’m ready to let the world see it and let me know what they think.  Read →

On Tuesday, October 3rd, at 7 pm, the Vancouver Python and Zope user’s group (VanPyZ) will be hosting two speakers. Paul Prescod will be discussing full-stack web frameworks in Python, and I will be presenting OS X programming in Python. This will probably not be a repeat of my presentation at the Vancouver Python Workshop (PDF slides, for anyone who is interested) but using Drawing Board and the InputManager hack to show how you can use PyObjC to build new applications in Python quickly and extend existing Cocoa applications easily. My focus these days is on how to take control of your computer and make it work for you, rather than the other way around.  Read →