Moved "The week in tweets" Out of the Way (Or: The Medium is Part of the Message)

What seemed like a good idea, turned out to not be so. Sure, archiving tweets in a personal place is a reasonably good idea. But mixing twitter-style communication with blog-style communication not so much.

Moreover: trying to comment and give extra context to weekly tweets as a way to produce blog-style content was a bad idea. I found myself without time to do it anyway, and the result was messy. I only realized the messy part when I approached my blog as a reader, by the way.

So, since the mixing was the bad idea but archiving tweets for future reference and better search engine indexing was not part of the bad idea, I came up with an easy fix: My tweets are now being archived on its own separate blog: for week in leo.tweets().

Finally, I've been recently more aware on the fact that on communication, the medium tends to be an important part of a message. This is an important barrier for efforts pursuing unified communications, which see the proliferation of mediums as a problem and aspire to deliver all kinds of messages through a single medium. From a purely abstract standpoint it kind of make sense, but I'm not sold yet that this is a completely good idea in practice. You know, you don't write documents, mails, blog posts, tweets and instant-messages in the same way. More importantly: you don't read them in the same way either.

Not to mention that filtering by medium is a useful search operation when looking for information (e.g.: "look for documents about database systems" or "look for blog posts and tweets regarding the quality of Ergohuman chairs").

I guess there is space for balanced solutions between the current state and the vision that the-medium-is-completely-abstracted-away. But I don't like to predict the future, and this post ends right here, without prophecies. Sorry for that.

Firefox Performance Tip: FlashBlock

I'm the kind of geek who has lots of tabs opened almost all the time. They are either search results, or "ephemeral bookmarks" (pending reads which could turn into permanent bookmarks if they prove to be interesting), pending tasks, or always-open applications (GMail, Google Calendar, ...), and thus having from 10 to 30 tabs open is not uncommon.

The problem: I use Firefox. No, no, wait, I like Firefox! Not that much, but can't work without its extensions anyway. Back to the problem: it is very known that Firefox performance goes down very quickly when (ab)using a lot of tabs. It eats memory and CPU like hell.

Well, some time ago I found a very easy way to get the CPU consumption level down: the FlashBlock extension. It stops the execution of flash apps until you explicitly click them.

Most of the Firefox CPU consumption here turned out to be flash ads using my CPU to do annoying animations on which I couldn't care less. So FlashBlock is a good way to kill two birds with one shot.

Barry Schwartz on Practical Wisdom

It's shocking when you see someone delivering a very clear and powerful message on a topic extremely related to something you have struggled to communicate.

So when I saw Barry Schwartz on TED talking about our loss of wisdom, it resonated a lot on me. I won't add anything else, as Barry put it much better than what I could:

“...rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an overreliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom.”

Barry Schwartz, On our loss of wisdom.

But it's not all about logical, dry arguments. His delivery of the argument is really superb. It's only 20 minutes so go ahead and take a little time to see his inspiring talk!

Invited to FLISOL Puerto Montt

One month ago I received a mail from the organization of the Puerto Montt node of this year's FLISOL. I was glad for receiving such invitation and naturally said that I'd be happy to be there.

Fast forward to right now, FLISOL is going to happen this Saturday, on more than 200 cities around Latin America. My participation on Puerto Montt will consist on a two-stage talk, starting with an introduction to Django (like the one I did on the Encuentro Linux ) and then jumping to a Django/Jython integration talk (like the PyCon one). I have an hour and half to do all of it, which is good because I won't be forced to compress the content too much, but keeping people attention for such time span may be a challenge.

So, if you are in a Latin America country, check out if there is a FLISOL node near you. Chances are the it will, and you can have a great time there, either getting help installing Free/Open-Source Software on your machine, listening to interesting talks, or just hanging around with nice people who appreciate the OSS idea.

django-jython 1.0b1 Released!

I've just made the first official beta release of the django-jython project: a collection of utilities and database backends for Django development on the JVM.

You can download it here. I've also written the release notes, detailing the important changes since the code was produced under the Google Summer of Code program last year. Here is a summary with the more important points:

• modjy integration and war management command updated to work with Jython 2.5b2 and later.


• Added doj.test.xmlrunner.junitxmlrunner, a Django test runner for producing JUnit-compatible XML output (useful for integration with continous integration tools like hudson, cruise-control, etc)


• Compatible with the 1.0.X branch of Django


• Compatible with Jython 2.5b2 and later releases

For now, PostgreSQL is still the only supported database. But we have important progress on MySQL, Oracle and MS-SQL database backends which hopefully will make it into next beta releases. The plan is to get the 1.0 release out a week or two after the final release of Jython 2.5.0.

As usual, feedback will be very appreciated and bugs should be reported on the issue tracker.

Back from Chicago

Wow, finally I've found some time after returning from my trip to Chicago.

The main reason to flight there was obviously PyCon, and being there was just great: Lots of clever and friendly people talking about fun and interesting topics revolving around the Python programming language. Even with my not-so-good spoken English skills I was able to have very interesting conversations with very smart people hanging around there. Oh, and my Django on Jython talk went well too! (the video concatenates the Pylons-on-Jython and Django-on-Jython talks. Anyway, both are interesting and quite related!).

Another big thing for me on PyCon was our announcement of the “Definitive Guide to Jython” an upcoming book which is a collaborative of Josh Junneau, Jim Baker, Victor Ng, Frank Wierzbicki and me. The contents will be licensed under a CC license and thus will be available online. One of the main concerns of the team was to be able to have such free licensing and seriously, Apress is such a wonderful publisher for allowing it without any problem. Obviously, if you want the full book experience, you may want to buy the book from Apress when it comes out to print (later this year according to the schedule).

After PyCon, I stayed almost a complete extra week on Chicago, and it was a very good idea. It's a very nice city (I didn't thought it was going to be so nice being so big) full of many places worth to visit. I had a lot of memorable experiences there. I don't have enough time to describe all there here, so here is a quick list of keywords as my poor summary: snow, elevated train, lots of good museums, long walks on downtown, fire alarms(!), jazz, soul, funk, pizza, parties, skyscrapers, zoo, architecture...

More importantly: I also met great people there. Here is a big virtual hug for Sarah, Martin, Freddy, Bozidar, Coleen, Natalia, Patricio, Gina, Jessica, Amber and Martin S. -- they are all very nice people with whom I shared many fun moments on Chicago, and two weeks ago I didn't even knew that they existed! This is the best aspect about traveling, in my humble opinion.

Now is time to go back to my normal activities and try to catch with work and the university as soon as possible. But there are a kind of experiences which mark you in one way or another. This trip was one of them!

Fixed-width font on Gmail again

Looks like Gmail changed the classes of their HTML elements again, as the last trick for fixed font stopped working.

Fortunately, the update is very simple:

@-moz-document domain(mail.google.com)
{
    /* GMail messages and textarea should use fixed-width font */
    .gs .ii, textarea.dV {
        font-family: MonoSpace !important;
        font-size: 9pt !important;
    }
}

As usual, the previous snippet should go into the userContent.css file under <your firefox profile>/chrome/