So, you have to write this business document for a company which managers are going to read.  Managers are well-known for their inability to read more than a half-page at a time without some sort of graph, chart, or other visual stimulus.  Sometimes, I just sneak in a page of Urdu to check if they actually notice.  (They don't.  They do notice Python code, though.)

Now, I have a solution in this periodic table of visualisation methods.  You see, I can just close my eyes and shove my finger at the screen randomly (or print it out, put it on a wall, and throw a dart), and determine what visualisation I should use on this page of the document.

I'm sure to get my promotion once they realise we speak the same language!

If you're pretty new to the whole Wii vs. PS3 vs. XBox 360 debate, there's a pretty gentle explanation to why the Wii is doing unexpectedly well in this early stage of this generation of games consoles, called An Underdog Story: How the Wii Became Number One, mainly at Sony's expense.

I think the explanation seriously underplays two areas.   Firstly, that the Wii is probably doing so well because it delivered something unexpected - a feeling of something new and something fun.  And secondly, the impact of the positive word-of-mouth and collective dreaming about what it would be like to have such a new and exciting interface into games - both in terms of playing games, but also getting people thinking about new sorts of games that would be possible.

Of course, none of this is good for me.  It's hard enough living in a backwater that hasn't got a functioning distributor (yet), but the continued success of the Wii means it's hard to import them, as few consoles spend long on the shelves of the country they were distributed to...

The folks at UWC are hosting a "Digital Freedom Exposition" on the 19th and 20th of April later this year.  International big names like Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) and Lawrence Lessig (of, amongst his many activities, Creative Commons fame) will be there.  It's still early days, so there's not yet a fixed programme or a complete list of speakers, but it looks like it should be a good event.

Positive points for:

• Including at least one South African in the keynote speakers;
• Getting some cool international speakers;
  
• Marketing things in terms of freedom and getting people interested via UWC's historical involvement in such things;
• Making the event coincide with the UWC careers exhibition, creating a massive awareness and education opportunity;
• Having two pretty cool goals around a major problem I think we have - lack of awareness and celebration of local achievements and the people who've been involved in making them:

• to highlight and identify achievements and opportunities, celebrate them, and make them known broadly among all stakeholders

• to sample the landscape of Free and Open Source Software companies, especially in the Western Cape, who can render services to UWC and other organizations

Cynically (and, perhaps, idealistically rather than pragmatically), lost points for:

• 
  
• Not trying to be more daring and pushing a lot harder to put local people in place of international speakers (especially for the keynotes).  We need to build local heroes, and we're not affording them the space to do so.
• Comparing voluntary user choice between open source/free software/creative commons and proprietary software and content to the struggle against apartheid.  Although, patents and DMCA-like laws certainly are comparable, copyright isn't (at least to me and many other people who might support actions against patents and DMCA-like laws).  It's like using the term "intellectual property" - shoving a bunch of different things together and trying to treat them the same.

According to Ninty, a delegation of Nintendo high-ups are going to be visiting SA - one can only assume to do something about the distributorship locally.

Good on them (if that's the case) - the Wii is going down famously elsewhere in the world, and a well-priced Wii might do exceedingly well here - where a R6k+ PS3 is likely to be above what even the most distant parent who wants to buy their kids' love or quietness is willing to pay.

Maybe I've been living in the dark for ages and everyone else knew about it and didn't tell me, but Firebug is hella cool.  Firebug is a Firefox extension that makes web development life worth not committing suicide over - and version 1.0 has just been released.  It's like Web Developer Extension on steroids, although it's still useful to keep Web Developer around.

It has a Javascript debugger, which not only shows JS errors as you run, but allows you to pause execution with a breakpoint (optionally with conditions), and allows you to introspect values by hovering your mouse pointer over variables in the source code display.  You can also execute arbitrary Javascript in a Javascript console.  Oh, and watch your XMLHttpRequests as they occur.

In terms of HTML, it allows you to drill down to elements via the DOM or by using an inspector to choose the element you want by moving your mouse to the element.  It lists the full element path to the element, and all the styles that apply to the element, and allows you to edit those styles - even if in multiple different files all over the Internet.  You can also view and manipulate the style via the stylesheets without reference to a particular HTML element.

Oh, and you can graphically see exactly what files were requested for this page, when the requests started, and how long that request took to be fulfilled.  And the headers sent in the request, and the headers returned.  And the content.  Useful for your XMLHttpRequests...

Colour me impressed.

My friends over at KnowledgeTree are making a good start to the year by adding RSS support in KnowledgeTree.  They've got last transactions on subscribed documents available as RSS, and will be adding support for arbitrary documents via RSS using the saved search system.  This was one of those items that kept on cropping up in our want-to-do lists, but always too low on them.

Of course, the other side of the RSS support can be quite weird.  Reading your news on a KnowledgeTree dashlet?  Oh well, at least it makes a good screenshot!  And, who knows, maybe you want some information from something like SugarCRM on your dashboard.

It looks like my baby is doing well - it's also recently been listed in the Optaros Open Source Catalog, which hopefully will bring about a number of good enquiries.

And also in KT-land, the irrepressible Anna seems to be having a ball with her new baby - a much-deserved VM server for testing KT in the many combinations it is tested before she stops beating the developers with a stick and let them release their software.

For me, ToscaWidgets is one of the most exciting things I'm watching grow at the moment.

From the first Hello World test with TurboGears, I realised there was just something special about its widgets system (and the videos certainly didn't hurt either).  It felt much like when I started using WebWare and FunFormKit, and subsequently got to know FunFormKit a little better, coming to appreciate simple things like the validators/converters and then auto-generating admin pages for objects using adapters and SQLObject, but amplified.

If you haven't used either, the winning idea is bundling together not only the visual/behavioural/content aspects of a component in terms of Javascript, form fields, or other HTML, but also the validation and conversion of whatever is entered into the browser into something useful to you as a programmer.  Reusably - just steal it from someone else - and extensibly.  And with standard reactions to invalid input - to the point that you don't have to worry about 99% of the problem cases.

But as much as I like TurboGears, I'm not going to be using it exclusively.  I'm using Django at work, and I've been look admiringly at Pylons recently for a little personal project.  The biggest advantage I see in TurboGears is the re-use of good default existing components and being able to use alternates from the existing components out there.  Which means that when you're not using the standard dispatching mechanism (by using Routes, for example), the standard ORM (by using SQLAlchemy before TG 1.1, for example), or the standard templating engine (by using Genshi before TG 1.1, or using Brevé), it's sometimes hard to motivate for using TurboGears.

Anyway, despite often not using the components chosen by TurboGears, it's that the components I do use are generally available that appeals to me.  For example, Django's ORM doesn't interest me until I can use it in a TurboGears or Pylons project (and until it doesn't have those hideous __exact things in the parameters).  But I liked what I saw in TurboGears's widgets, and FunFormKit wasn't a realistically active competitor.

So, when ToscaWidgets was announced - the TurboGears widgets system rearchitected to not rely on TurboGears or CherryPy, I was really happy.  While it would probably be a hard sell to make it the One True Way to other mega-framework folks, here's to hoping that it'll be easy to use whether you're using TurboGears, Django, Pylons, web.py, or any old WSGI or even CGI application.  (And don't forget Zope!)

(and here's to hoping that the new layout I'm using hasn't introduced ugly problems preventing Python luminaries from posting again...) 

Most reviews fall into one category - half-hearted, impersonal, shallow, "objective", and non-confrontational in their views.  Authors tend to be happy about this - since at least they're getting some advertising.  Readers tend to be happy about this - since they're not required to engage.

But then there is another category.  In The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman, you don't find the trite and polite review described above.  And you can feel the pain of having to sit through 473 pages of this, and the fear that this might be something he'd have to be subjected to again.

And next door, you'll find a simple statement - that there isn't always just so much to choose between when looking at the best.  That there are clear winners.  In THERE IS ONLY ONE GAME OF 2006 (if only it were that only this title was capitalised, but it seems that's just how the site shows headings...), we can now feel the passion of someone finding something that's changed their lives.  (Admittedly, we can't be sure of whether it has been for the better.)

According to the well-timed Rands, it takes ninety days to finish your job interview.  The one that starts when you've already resigned from and left your previous job and started "interviewing" for the job you've left it for.

Two weeks (less than a sixth of 3 months) in, and he's quite correct on how you can't have much beyond a vague hint of how your new job after the few short hours of interview that got you the job.

My new job has quite a different feel to it.  Of course, that may be that the people who'll be deciding what projects I'm going to spend my time on are still in holiday until Monday.  So far, it's mostly the environment that's shown a difference.

For the first time since my first job, I'm quite comfortable with the lighting levels and the air flow.

My three most recent previous jobs have involved air conditioner politics - factions posturing for control over the exact temperature and settings on the air conditioners.  At IOL, this included multiple air conditioners set on different temperatures, making the trip from the reception to one's desk require multiple changes of clothes.

The two most recent previous jobs also had pretty poor lighting, with Jam Warehouse/KnowledgeTree having in essence a dungeon with altogether insufficient lighting.

Other aspects of the environment aren't quite so good.  Me?  In an office park?  Next to Dimension Data?  IOL is and iTouch was in the CBD - next to everything, exciting, vibrant.  Well, through the four-quad-lattes-before-2pm haze.  Jam has its great (except for the dungeon lighting) factory near Lower Main, a very short (2 min or so) walk from a number of great restaurants and sandwich places.  From CareerJunction, it's more than that just to leave the office park, let alone get the length of road that its premises take up.  (Although, the Fat Cactus is well worth the walk...)

Others are just quite new - like having gender parity in the office (and a woman MD). Or working at a place where the financial results makes everyone comfortable that their own bad work is the most likely cause of employment issues for them.  Or where there's an informal staff take-away lunch option.  Or that expects you there at exactly 8:30am, and expects you gone at 5pm.  Or that expects you gone at 4:30pm on Fridays?! 

Another 78 days to go...

My laptop is in for repairs.  I hope (since I suspect it may never be coming back).  Which has left me without a machine running a Unix-like operating system at home for the first time in over ten years.  So, for the first time in about the same amount of time, I'm using Windows with intent as something other than a games boot loader.

Okay, not intent.  I got tired of trying to make it remotely similar enough to my usual environment to do my productive work.  But web browsing, OpenOffice.org, and SSH.

I noticed earlier that there was this new-fangled Internet Explorer 7 in the updates.  I was somewhat intrigued, since generally you don't get new versions of software through updates - at least if you're following best practice.

Like others have, I generally recoiled at how poorly they made a tabbed interface (and besides the UI, Firefox at least learnt to tell me what URL I'm trying to go to in my address bar), and how unintuitive some of their new UI stuff is (for example, you can easily end up with a reload button instead of a "go" button).

And then, today, I wanted to check a page in IE.  And I couldn't go there.  Or to Google.  Or to any number of other places I decided to check.  It just didn't react to putting addresses in the address bar - no error messages, no change to the page, no dialogs hidden behind any windows, and me with no idea where to look for logs.  And no difference after restarting IE.

Except, for some reason, I could load up freshmeat.net - once, and never again.  No, I couldn't go to Microsoft sites either.  Except, say, if the site loaded up as my home page, and I clicked on links.  But type the address of the exact same page in manually in the address bar in another tab, and nothing...

Oh, and "Open" on the "File" menu works.

Oh, and did you know that if you type "asdf" into the address bar of IE, and press "control-enter", it'll change it to "http://www.asdf.com/"?  I despair at what lesson that teaches...

And, according to a knowledge base article, they've had this sort of problem before.  Great to see that they've improved things to provide more feedback when things go wrong...