This Thursday, the 1st of May, 2008 from 6:30pm there will be a social gathering of the Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc.
Laptops, OLPC’s, code review, show and tell etc allowed and encouraged.
We meet in the ground floor area next to P.J. O’Briens Pub internal entrance in the;
Grace Hotel at the corner of York and King Street in Sydney, New South Wales 2000. See you there
Comments Off
As the feedback I got on the daily twitter posts was entirely negative they are gone. Sorry for that folks.
It seems that I’ll have to write more original content instead, I will see what I can do.
Following on from a theme that Simon has been pursuing here is an interesting piece – How SimpleDB differs from a RDBMS. A thorough analysis of SimpleDB, but I think the extra value here is in the comments. I particularly liked Greg Jorgensen’s submission that programmers just don’t like RDBMS because they take some learning. Whilst I don’t have empirical evidence to back up this supposition I can say that most Java programmers I’ve come across go slightly green if you suggest that they can solve most problems with a SQL statement (and yes, that was meant to be read ironically).
If I can sum up the message of this post and it’s comments it is that we should be thankful for having different tools available to us, because this isn’t a one size fits all world. Where you’ve got a big list of simple things ™ tools like BigTable and SimpleDB work well. Where you’ve got large pieces of unstructured data (sometimes referred to as ‘documents’) you can use CouchDB, and where you have complex, structured data that has to adhere to certain validation and usage rules use a relational database. Each of these will store up to terabytes of information so let’s not even talk about (the myth of) scalability. Choose the right tool for the job and stop insisting that every problem is a nail.
So to answer my question from the title of this post – still around, and still kicking arse.
Whilst there has been a dearth of decent posts here recently I have been beavering away in the background. In the meantime, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and installed the Twitter Tools plugin. This joins the wonderful worlds of Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion and Twitter into a value added multi media powerhouse.
Now instead of large amounts of peace and quiet you will be treated to a daily summary of my inane babbling here on the blog and in the feed. Who said technology was no good?
Comments Off
Inspired by Simon, I thought I’d follow the crowd;
andy47@Mort:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5dt%sn",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
187 cd
66 whoswho
46 svn
30 python
20 rm
16 ls
15 open
13 vi
13 grep
10 ipython
Comments Off