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The Waking Life and The Fast Runner

I went to SUNY Geneseo Film Festival last night to see The Fast Runner, which I have some thoughts on. I'm considering going back to school and wanted to see what it was like being on a college campus (weird? feel old? comfortable? stimulating?). There was supposed to be a discussion after the film, and I would have liked to participate, but it was late and I had to split.

Also this week, at the urging of my brother-in-law Jamie, rented The Waking Life and had one of those raise-the-bar, never-seen-anything-like-it experiences.

My New Favorite Local Site

Been poking at the postmodernism meme lately, especially as it relates to cultural appropriation, and stumbled upon KISS of the Panopticon, just down the road in Geneseo.

Discover Lazy Initialization

I'm finding myself going back to Scott Ambler's work a lot. One thing I discovered recently is the concept of Lazy Initialization.

Relationships as graphs

I've been thinking a lot lately about graph-based navigation in relational space, similar to the visual thesaurus from Plumb Design. Found another example at foafnaut, a visual UI to the Friend-of-a-Friend Project. Since I've been doing a fair amount of relational database design it seems like we need better visual tools that make development more flexible. There's a lot of mapping that goes on between legacy and new data and classes in an OO application. But it's inflexible as a process, and difficult to see.

The graph here is a visual representation of existing relationships but doesn't allow editing.

Avoiding Valentina crash in Director

I'm back into Director and doing database connectivity for the first time using Valentina from Paradigma. The V4MD Xtra was crashing Director MX and I discovered you need to init Valentina before you create the Xtra Object:

ValentinaInit(4*1024*1024,"","")
gVDB = new(xtra "VDataBase")

Running Zope behind Apache with Virtual Hosts

Looks like I've finally figured out how to serve my Apache Virtual Host sites from Zope folders, without leaving myself open to proxy abuse. Note that this issue isn't mentioned much on zope.org or in the Zope Bible section on running behind Apache. Hopefully this helps at least one of you not to make the mistake I made.

Playing with wxPython

As I mentioned, I've got this set of many-step processes to build the site I'm working on: a data store in Excel, a macro to output to XML, a bunch of XSLs to aggregate the data and output HTMLs, and BAT files to run the XMLs and XSLs through Saxon. This cries out for a GUI. In the old days I would do something in Director, but I don't have Director here, and I've been trying to move forward with learning Python.

So I've been digging around with wxPython, a Pythonized version of the popular wxWindows. After only a few hours poking at the documentation and experimenting I have the rudiments and a useless, text editor window that does nothing. But I'm getting the picture on how to hook this all up. The event handling flexibility is pretty impressive, and the massive array of controls available suggests a lot of possibilities. Great work on the demo!

Thinking about Shipping the Prototype

Saw one of Udell's old posts about Shipping the Prototype. Got me thinking about Hacks, Prototypes and Maintenance.

Zopey weekend

Spent one of those nightmarishly long programming Saturdays ensconced in Zope.

I'm finishing up developing my first Zope site, and there are some things I love about it and some things I hate. I'll start with the bad news.

Read the full story at Zope: love, hate.