grahambinns.com

Here:

I’d use these [tips on using Python with vim] if I wasn’t still scarred from the time vim encrypted my file instead of saving it because I had caps lock on by mistake.

Bless.

Wow.

Once again, I'm late in getting on a particular train of thought. That's not unusual, true, but I should have been slightly quicker about it this time round because a) it's something in which I'm really, really interested and b) one of my friends, whose blog I read, posted about it and I didn't actually pay that much attention until a lot of other people had jumped up and down, commenting on how fantastic this particular thing is.

So, in case you've been living under a particular sort of rock (i.e. the one that stops you finding out about new OSS projects, assuming you're interested in that ) here's the not-exactly-a-scoop.

You may have heard of a project called WriteRoom, a full-screen text editor for the Mac which costs, currently, $24.95. Now, I've been using a cross-platform WriteRoom clone, JDarkRoom, which is written in Java and is pretty much closed-source AFAICT, for quite a while. JDarkRoom has issues - beyond the two fairly major ones of being written in Java and been free as in beer but not as in speech (though that's not a reason not to use it). On Ubuntu it's pretty clunky, slow, and doesn't work at all unless you go and install the Sun JRE rather than using the one that ships with Ubuntu by default.

Anyway, as has been pointed out pretty much the OSS world over by now, there's now a Python (always dear to my heart) clone of WriteRoom, PyRoom. It seems to have found a lot of traction over the last week or so, because although it didn't work terribly well the first time that I tried it it's now perfectly useable - more so than JDarkRoom by far (I can't speak for WriteRoom, of course). It even does multi-buffer editing, which means that I can have this blog entry, and another one that I've been writing since Friday, open at the same time and happily switch between the two (this may sound like a really obvious feature, but you'd be surprised how much more efficient it makes me).

Now, don't get me wrong, I still love my vim, and there's no way in hell that I'll be using PyRoom for much besides blogging and writing for the forseeable future - why would I want to? But in terms of allowing me to actually concentrate on writing and stopping me from procrastinating it's fantastic, and it doesn't bug me in the same undefinable way as JDarkRoom does.

So give it a shot, if you're into that sort of thing. You can grab it from Launchpad http://launchpad.net/pyroom. I think you'll find it well worth it.

In other bloody annoying news, my Flickr import script appears to keep breaking my site somehow, to the point where I have to restart Apache to fix it. This is decidedly irksome. 

Today's xkcd strip, Python, gets it right once again:

Incidentally (he says), I met xkcd, a.k.a. Randall Munroe, when I was in the States. He's a nice bloke. 

There's a smallish set of my PyConUK photos on Flickr.

Hello good travellers. I'm here at the Birmingham Conservatoire, utilising the suprisingly good conference WiFi at PyConUK . Bon.

It's lunch time on day one and my morning agenda so far has covered SQLAlchemy (cool but for me redundant at the moment), Twisted (pretty cool but I need to know more) and PyPy (very cool), the talk about which was presented by Mike Hudson, one of my Canonical colleagues and one of the PyPy developers from back when it was getting funded.

I'm not a huge fan of conferences. For one thing they usually a) necessitate being away from home, b) as a result of a. mean staying in a crummy hotel, c) have crummy wifi at best and d) put me to sleep. So far I'm pleased to say that PyConUK has only fulfilled points a and b, neither of which are their fault.

Incidentally, I've discovered once again that hotel wifi, when not included in the room rate (as it usually is for work) is stupidly expensive. And, again, crummy.

Of course the upshot of wearing the developer pants is that the writer pants are on the hanger and may not get worn this weekend, which is a disappointment for me. I had planned to do some novel-the-second outlining to try and ensure that I keep on track; the story has lost focus a bit in the last chapter and I'm having trouble finding a way to get the protagonist into the next chapter. Maybe that's something to be fixed on the train home.

The other upshot of wearing the developer pants is that I have a huge desire to hack at things. PylibMTP, django_(xml)rpc and grahambinns.com version 0.2 all need work. I just don't quite know where the time's going to come from. Oh, and I have things to do for work, too, which of course have to come first (because, you know, I like to buy food).