Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.6. As I have claims to be a technologist I install and upgrade my blog software using Subversion. An upgrade simply requires issuing an ‘svn switch‘ command and then running the WordPress database upgrade via the page that presents. Usually this works like a charm. Today I had issues.

I’ve logged a support ticket but thought I should mention it here in case anyone else sees the same issue.

When I tried to log in after the database upgrade the login page just kept re-directing back to itself. The main page of this blog was showing, but with an error message stating (in part) - “error in akismet.php on line 487″.

After a little checking around I discovered that Akismet (the WordPress spam fighting plugin) needed to be upgraded at the same time as the core WordPress code and hadn’t. The old version (2.1.4) is not compatible with the latest WordPress release and needed to be upgraded (to 2.1.6). A simple workaround was to download and install the latest version of Akismet by hand so it wasn’t a huge problem, but it would have been nice if the WordPress Subversion repository had been updated to reflect the change.

Update: OK, it’s probably me. A fresh checkout of WordPress (release 2.6 or 2.5) comes complete with the correct version of the Akismet plug in. It must have a problem with my ‘svn switch‘ that I didn’t catch.

I just read, courtesy of Simon, a great article at the Guardian covering a presentation that Adrian Holovaty gave there last week.

Strangely enough I was talking about this with a colleague this very afternoon. My thesis was that data is generated by applications but should be considered independent of them. Treat your data carefully and you have a treasure trove of information that defines your organisation. Take an application centric view of the world and you end up with a load of blobs that are only meaningful in the context of your application code. If you can ever find a way to free your information you can find so many different ways of viewing, interpreting and analysing it.

In essence this is the excitement that surrounds mashups and the value that shown in sites like Chicago Crime and My Society. Expose the data and then marvel at what happens.

As I said in a (remarkably brief) presentation that I gave tonight - I’m Andy and I’m a data manager. If I can ever find a way of making a living taking data, turning it into information and making it available in new and interesting ways I guarantee that I will quit my day job in a heartbeat.

In case you haven’t seen this elsewhere;

Call for Papers
Open Source Developers’ Conference 2008
2nd - 5th December 2008, Sydney, Australia

The Open Source Developers’ Conference 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a range of operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. It is a great opportunity to meet, share, and learn with like-minded individuals.

This year, the conference will be held in Sydney, Australia during the first week of December (2nd - 5th). If you are an Open Source maintainer, developer or user, the organising committee would encourage you to submit a talk proposal on open source tools, solutions, languages or technologies you are working with.

For more details and to submit your proposal(s), goto: http://osdc.com.au/2008/papers/cfp.html

If you have any questions or require assistance with your submission, please don’t hesitate to ask!

We recognise the importance of Open Source in providing a medium for collaboration between individuals, researchers, business and government. In recognition of this and ensure a high standard of presentations, we intend to peer-review all submitted papers.

OSDC 2008 Sydney (Australia) - Key Program Dates:

30 Jun - Initial proposals (short abstract) due
21 Jul - Proposal acceptance
15 Sep - Accepted paper submissions
13 Oct - Reviews completed
27 Oct - Final paper submission cutoff

For all information, contacts and updates, see the OSDC conference web site at http://osdc.com.au/2008/

Also if you are interested in sponsoring, please see: http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/sponsors/opportunities.html

I’m sure I read this somewhere recently, but my scratchy memory and command of Google can’t bring it back to me.

Is there a Python idiom for accepting either a file name or a file object as a function parameter?

The closest I can get is this;

def my_function(file_name_or_object):
    try:
        open(file_name_or_object)
    except TypeError:
        file = file_name_or_object
    return file

Any improvements on this are more than welcome.

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.

• Dodging the rain by ducking into cafes #
• @alang I’m there. With bells on. #
• Another skinny cappuccino? Oh alright then. #
• Getting the barbecue ready? #
• Preparing the barbecue to burn a load of meat and fish #

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• Off to talk about Feature Driven Development #

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• Making calls, writing down random thoughts #

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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?

Inspired by Simon, I thought I’d follow the crowd;

andy47@Mort:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",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