The B-List: Latest entrieshttp://www.b-list.org/feeds/entries/2013-04-05T04:05:54ZJames BennettGood tools2013-04-05T04:05:54ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2013-04-05:/weblog/2013/apr/05/good-tools/
<p>Apparently we’re in one of those every-couple-of-years cycles of everybody and their brother rushing to adopt/encourage others to adopt the hot new programmers’ text editor. This time around it’s Sublime Text, which, though I haven’t personally tried it out, does seem to at least be a very nice editor. If you were just starting out and needed a quality text editor, I think you could do a lot worse than Sublime ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2013/apr/05/good-tools/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Persistence2013-01-29T03:55:52ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2013-01-29:/weblog/2013/jan/29/persistence/
<p>The last couple weeks have been rough, on a personal level. Nothing I can’t get through with a little help (and thankfully, there is help), but nothing particularly fun to get through, either. I’ve spent a lot of time going over and thinking about some old issues. Part of that has involved digging up a bunch of things I wrote years ago; a minor crisis occurred this past weekend when I tried to ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2013/jan/29/persistence/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/reddit takes a new direction2012-02-13T09:21:45ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2012-02-13:/weblog/2012/feb/13/reddit/
<p>Several months ago, reddit shook with the news that longtime subreddit /r/jailbait — dedicated to, well, you can probably guess — had been <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/l7rcs/rjailbait_admins_officially_decide_to_shut_down/">shut down by its own moderators</a>. Yesterday, reddit shook again, with the news that a variety of other subreddits, arranged on similar topical lines, <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/pmj7f/a_necessary_change_in_policy/">were being shut down by reddit’s admins</a>.
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<p>Predictably, this has caused a shitstorm. It has also caused calls for bans of other subreddits which have nothing to do ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2012/feb/13/reddit/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Apropos2011-11-19T00:00:00ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2011-11-19:/weblog/2011/nov/19/apropos/
<p>Abraham Lincoln, remarks for the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg battlefield, November 19, 1863:
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<blockquote><p>Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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<p>Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great ...</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2011/nov/19/apropos/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Napoleon's battle plan2011-08-21T02:53:39ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2011-08-21:/weblog/2011/aug/21/mozilla/
<p>So, right up-front, let me just say that May is one damn fine month to <a href="/weblog/2011/apr/27/quo-vadimus/">quit your job</a>.
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<p>As previously noted, I’d been in rather an epic funk, and once my last day was over and all the paperwork was filed, I went on a mission to spend my summer doing anything other than sitting in front of a computer. I traveled a bit, saw friends both old and new, indulged some of my ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2011/aug/21/mozilla/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Quo Vadimus?2011-04-27T09:47:57ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2011-04-27:/weblog/2011/apr/27/quo-vadimus/
<p>I’ve been in a rather epic funk for quite a while now, and for most of it I didn’t know why. I just knew that I didn’t really feel motivation to do much of anything. No motivation to deal with things at work, no motivation to work on Django or any of the open-source projects I’m involved in, no motivation at all. I’ve basically been treading water. This wouldn’t ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2011/apr/27/quo-vadimus/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/A stateful problem2010-12-24T09:07:30ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2010-12-24:/weblog/2010/dec/24/states/
<p>So, this week we dropped <a href="http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2010/dec/22/security/">some security updates</a>, which you should definitely check out if you haven’t seen them yet.
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<p>We also released <a href="http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2010/dec/22/13-beta-1/">the first 1.3 beta</a>, which is an important milestone since it means 1.3 is now feature-frozen and will get only bugfix and polishing work until the final release. Quite a few useful things made it in between alpha and beta, and a couple just barely slipped in under the ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2010/dec/24/states/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/The news done broke2010-11-02T23:43:27ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2010-11-02:/weblog/2010/nov/02/news-done-broke/
<p>(or, “Dear Louise…”)
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<p>Once upon a time, Jacob wrote <a href="http://jacobian.org/writing/breaking-news/">a wonderful insider’s view</a> of how our election coverage works, and noted that basically the whole thing’s held together with baling twine and duct tape. That was 2006; it’s now 2010 and midterm elections are upon us again. As I write this I’m actually at my desk at the Journal-World office, and for the first time tonight nothing’s actually broken. So ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2010/nov/02/news-done-broke/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/django-FUNserver2010-11-01T23:12:44ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2010-11-01:/weblog/2010/nov/01/django-funserver/
<p>Step 1: <code>pip install django-funserver</code>
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<p>Step 2: Add “funserver” to your <code>INSTALLED_APPS</code>.
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<p>Step 3: Run <code>manage.py funserver</code>.
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<p>For best results, don’t do this on a real server.
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<p>Code is <a href="http://bitbucket.org/ubernostrum/django-funserver/src">here</a>, for those interested.
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<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2010/nov/01/django-funserver/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/On branching2010-02-02T08:09:08ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2010-02-02:/weblog/2010/feb/02/branching/
<p>Back in 2008 I <a href="/weblog/2008/jul/28/lets-talk-about-dvcs/">posted some rambling thoughts</a> on distributed version-control systems, largely in response to the huge amount of hype surrounding such tools (particularly git). Then at PyCon last year, amid even more hype as it was announced that Python will switch from Subversion to a distributed tool, I gave <a href="http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2009/pycon/dvcs.pdf">a lightning talk</a> reflecting on what I’d picked up and seen during the intervening eight months.
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<p>It’s now been a year and ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2010/feb/02/branching/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/django-registration2009-10-14T02:26:23ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2009-10-14:/weblog/2009/oct/14/registration/
<p>So, life has been eventful lately. There was DjangoCon, which was awesome even though I came away deeply unhappy with how my talk turned out; due to a lot of hectic things going on, it fell far below the standard I usually like to enforce for myself. I’ve got a couple things cooking for PyCon, though, which will hopefully make up for it. Things are starting to ramp up for the Django 1.2 ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/oct/14/registration/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Let's talk about WSGI2009-08-10T05:31:44ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2009-08-10:/weblog/2009/aug/10/wsgi/
<p>Recently Armin Ronacher (whose <a href="http://lucumr.pocoo.org/">blog</a> you should be reading if you do anything at all involving Python and the web) has published a couple of <a href="http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2009/7/30/nih-in-the-wsgi-world">good</a> <a href="http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2009/8/5/pro-cons-about-werkzeug-webob-and-django">articles</a> poking at the current state of <acronym title="Web Server Gateway Interface"><span class="caps">WSGI</span></acronym>, the <a href="http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333/">standard interface for Python web applications</a>. Some of his comments dovetail nicely into concerns I’ve been trying to put into words for a while now, so I’m glad he’s posting on the subject and providing some context ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/aug/10/wsgi/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/On "magic", once again2009-07-23T08:31:13ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2009-07-23:/weblog/2009/jul/23/magic/
<p>So it seems Giles Bowkett <a href="http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/07/do-you-believe-in-magic.html">is upset</a> about use of the word “magic”. I’m happy to agree with the general consensus from various fora that <a href="http://christopherroach.com/blog/i-hate-magic-why-django-rocks/">the specific article he’s complaining about</a> is, well, pretty much content-free. I could read that post over and over and still have no idea what actual things the author liked about Django or didn’t like about Rails. But I’ve pretty much learned to ignore content-free hype ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/jul/23/magic/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/When licenses attack2009-07-14T08:25:51ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2009-07-14:/weblog/2009/jul/14/licensing/
<p>Jacob <a href="http://jacobian.org/writing/gpl-questions/">posted twenty questions</a> about the <acronym title="GNU General Public License"><span class="caps">GPL</span></acronym>. Zed followed with <a href="http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html">an explanation</a> of why he placed <a href="http://lamsonproject.org/">Lamson</a> under the <span class="caps">GPL</span>. This has provoked some discussion around the internets, some of which I have read and some of which I’ve ignored.
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<p>Unfortunately, there’s a lot of noise drowning out useful discussion, much of it centered around alleging — directly or indirectly — that if you ask questions about how the <span class="caps">GPL</span> interacts with other licenses, you ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/jul/14/licensing/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/In pace requiescat2009-07-08T08:41:38ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2009-07-08:/weblog/2009/jul/08/xhtml/
<p>So the charter of the <acronym title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language"><span class="caps">XHTML</span></acronym> Working Group <a href="http://www.w3.org/2009/06/xhtml-faq">will be allowed to expire without renewal</a>. This is a source of consternation for <a href="http://www.zeldman.com/2009/07/02/xhtml-wtf/">some</a>, who feel that the <acronym title="World Wide Web Consortium"><span class="caps">W3C</span></acronym> is perhaps sending conflicting messages — how long until we find out that <acronym title="HyperText Markup Language"><span class="caps">HTML</span></acronym>5 isn’t <em>really</em> the future, either? — and, perhaps, smug “I told you so” satisfaction for <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/07/06/this-is-the-house">others</a>.
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<p>I have little to add to either of those camps, so what follows here is nothing more ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/jul/08/xhtml/">Read full entry and comments</a></p>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/