Finally got around to converting some old code from SVN to Git and getting it up on GitHub. It’s like looking back through a time-warp actually, as most of the code hasn’t been touched since the summer of 2007. Nearly all of the code is usable, but it’s all abandoned at this point. If there’s something there that strikes your fancy and you’d be interested in forking it into your own project, feel free.

This may be premature, but it looks like I’m live with the new site design and new blog engine. The design is HTML5 (i.e., it looks great to me in Chrome, not sure what it’ll be like elsewhere) and the new engine is jekyll. What does this mean for you, my loyal reader? Not much, really. I believe my port is transparent. Actually, the only problem I’m seeing right now is related to disqus—some of my comments that I know are imported are not showing up yet.

Lately I’ve been playing with testing frameworks all over the spectrum of languages. I’ve come to really enjoy using Cucumber for testing web APIs. Since most of my coding lately has been in JavaScript or Python, using Ruby with Cucumber allows me to completely segregate my tests from the system under test (SUT). This separation has worked great until recently when I needed to have the test system running in Python.

This is it. I've had enough! Seriously, people. OAuth is about maintaining control as a user and everyone wants me to give it up! I'm tired of constantly clicking deny. What am I complaining about? The constant abuse of Twitter OAuth login. Every site that I've visited that uses Twitter OAuth requires both read and write access to my account. The latest to do this is Paper.li, a service that looks really cool,

The entire subject of two talks and mentioned in several other, MongoDB was definitely a buzz at TekX this year. It's long been in favor in the tech community in Lawrence and has been used for some data crunching for a few projects at the local paper. Even with all of this exposure, I've yet to sit down and actually explore it. That changed Friday afternoon while I sat at O'Hare waiting on my flight back to Lawrence (which subsequently got canceled).

Originally posted over at the horribly designed travis.domain51.com (see what happens when you give a programmer CSS access), I thought I'd share this post here too since that blog is just getting underway. It truly is a shame that so many amazing non-profits are hidden behind horribly thought out websites.  Most of these sites deluge their visitors with information, even though great sites such as Charity Navigator exist to provide raw statistics and facts about non-profits.

This past few weeks has been crazy hectic. Business is going crazy, I'm in the final stages of launching multiple websites, and I've had a cold for the better part of two weeks. Unfortunately, these things have been conspiring against me and this past week I had to notify PyCon that I won't be able to attend and speak this year. Please accept my apologies if you were planning on attending.

I spent an hour yesterday afternoon on a conference call organized by the Sunlight Foundation about open government in Kansas. The Sunlight Foundation is an organization whose self-proclaimed mission is to use "cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable." It was really encouraging to see the interest in open government, but there's lot's to be done. We have some counties (20 according to the Sunshine Review) that don't even have websites, much less accessible data about their governments.

It's 37° F (2.7° C) and dropping. It's going to hover near freezing tonight, and come midnight... flip a coin - head's it rains, tails it's dry. And he's out there. I know he's not my responsibility. But isn't he? There's a big guy that's homeless here in Lawrence. You know him if you've lived in or around downtown Lawrence. The guy's really big. He started hanging around South Park shortly after the Salvation Army closed their shelter.

As someone noted the other day on one of my Facebook posts, I've been doing a lot of Python development. I've moved almost entirely to Python for development, web and otherwise. Instead of PHP, I reach for Django when I need to prototype an application quickly. One of the things I've been struggling with is how to build re-usable applications that are testable without having the entire Django stack running.