Friday, 20 December 2002

Java looking native (and the usual Python evangelism) This picture is from Swing Sightings 12, via Russell Beattie: There's no doubt about it, Java apps are looking much more 'native' these days.  Spaces was impressive; minor quirks aside, it behaves like a real Windows app.  Others are figuring out how to bundle the JRE with their apps properly.  Xindice has a nice Eclipse-based IDE that includes a JRE (making it actually possible to install). It still can't beat the Python/wxPython/IE combo on Windows yet, though -- for example, my BlogGazer has about a 3 meg install package, which includes the Python interpreter, the wxPython library, and enough Win32 COM stuff to let me plug Internet Explorer in to the app to give it HTML display (editing too, if I wanted). On the Mac, it looks like you can use the NeXT stuff in OS X to display / edit HTML.  NetNewsWire does it.  That should be accessible from Python too.  One day I'll get a Mac and port the one Windows-specific bit of BlogGazer over to use Cocoa, and it'll be nicely cross-platform.  All I need now is to figure out how to embed the Mozilla editor on Linux.  Perhaps ActiveState's Komodo IDE would be a good place to look: it uses PyXPCOM, a Python-Mozilla binding.  Hmm. 2:10:15 PM    comment []

Aardvark Daily: Perhaps the warning on the Domainz website ought to be changed to: Users are advised that the folloing activities are forbidden and will be severely punished by a total lack of action on our part... If you're a techie type in New Zealand, this newsblog (?) by Bruce Simpson is always worth reading. 2:01:36 PM    comment []

Brent Simmons: PyObjC 8.0 ships Bug fixes and new features. Change notes are listed. Though I haven’t had time to try out the PyObjC stuff, it sounds cool and I’m glad it’s happening. [ranchero.com] Is this something like Jython?  I've got to get me one of those Macs ... hmm ... 2:00:04 PM    comment []

New PyCS user Looks like putting the bzero readme online helped to raise its profile a little. Welcome to goneaway, the newest user on pycs.net! 1:01:08 PM    comment []

jwz: Yay for Alta Vista, boo for Google! Google nicely asked me to stop. They asked nicely enough that I felt bad saying no. But I asked them to add a URL on their site that would just redirect to a random URL from their database: WebCollage could use that, instead of hitting their search page, and it would all still work, without throwing off their hit statistics. They responded, ``Oh, that would be easy. We'll see what we can do.'' And then ignored my mail for (at current count) nine months. Recently, I got a similar complaint from Alta Vista. I asked them for the same kind of URL I'd asked Google for. They said, ``sure'', and it went live on their site two weeks later! Yay Alta Vista! Boo Google! 11:31:38 AM    comment []

Diego Doval: a new way to publish scientific papers This is interesting: a project to provide a free, peer-reviewed journal for many disciplines. And here is a New York Times article about it. [Abort, Retry, Fail?] 11:30:47 AM    comment []