Guess I blogged too soon about the resolution to my problems with Google’s personalised home page calendar gadget. I logged in this morning only to find that all of my November appointments up until 20th of the month had become invisible. They are still there in my calendar, of course — they just aren’t accessible via the calendar gadget on the home page.
If you are listening, Google: I want my November back!
The Register reports that Sony are attempting to flog a 007-branded laptop bundle consisting of a Vaio TX, a digital camera, a screen privacy filter and an aluminium attache case. Hmmm. I wonder if the battery doubles up as an explosive device?… 
The Django project’s installation of Trac seems to be suffering from an ever-worsening spam problem. I checked the project timeline for 27 October and saw 32 tickets reopened by spammers, compared with 2 legitimate new tickets reporting defects, and 2 changesets. How difficult would it be, I wonder, to prevent this with a captcha-based system of some sort?
Googling suggests that there’s been some discussion of captchas within the Trac project, but that incorporation of such a system into Trac won’t be possible until the 0.11 release. The 0.10 release, however, allows the use of the SpamFilter plugin, which supports regex filtering, IP blacklisting and Akismet. Is Django’s Trac site using this to the full extent possible (or using it at all)?
I suppose the other solution would be to restrict the Trac site to registered users only. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
This is exceptionally cool, and a real testament to Python’s flexibility.
RavMonE.exe, the piece of malware that Apple have thoughtfully shipped with some recent iPods, is the W32/RJump worm — and its written in Python. Infamy for our favourite programming language, at last!
I’ve decided to try googlizing my life a little more by experimenting with a personalized Google home page. Some of the gadgets are quite handy; currently, I have feeds from various Python and Java-related blogs and news sites delivered straight to my home page, along with a list of the last five things that I’ve bookmarked with del.icio.us, the local weather forecast and a Google Calendar widget.
The latter is causing problems, however. I began playing with Google Calendar yesterday, prompted by the sudden failure of an old and decrepit iPAQ PDA and the loss of my entire diary. (No, I didn’t keep it regularly sync-ed with a PC, largely because I’ve not been able to make this work for Linux — but that doesn’t really make me any less of an idiot!) Anyway, the idea of a centralised, shareable diary, accessible from anything with Internet access, now has some appeal. Only trouble is, it doesn’t work properly — or, at least, the Calendar gadget doesn’t work properly.
Basically, I’ve discovered two issues. First, the gadget won’t pick up my calendar data when I sign in to Google via google.co.uk, but will work if I sign in via google.com. Gmail works via either domain, so why should Calendar be any different? The second problem is more worrying. I added two calendar entries for 31st October via the normal Google Calendar page, but the calendar gadget on my home page thinks that these events are taking place on 1st November!
I’ve fired off emails to Google and to the creator of the Calendar gadget, and await their responses with interest…
It’s that time of the year again, when our final-year students begin their project work. In the run-up to project selection, it was tremendously encouraging to see how many of them were keen on using Python in general, and the Django framework in particular. And it now looks like two or maybe three of my four students will be making significant use of Django. Java doesn’t go unrepresented either, with one student planning on doing interesting things with Eclipse and version control.
Anyway, I hope all of my guys get stuck in and do some good work. Projects that go well can be as rewarding for the supervisor as they are for the student!
Filed an Eclipse bug today. Nothing show-stopping - just an annoying little problem with how the Javadoc view displays the doc comment for a class. It’s Bug 159775 in Bugzilla
Fuzzyman reports that an active member of the IronPython community has released his own version of IronPython, containing various bug fixes and enhancements, because the IronPython team are apparently “unable to accept outside contributions”.
This is disappointing news. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to sort out a better development model. IronPython is one of the most interesting things they’ve done lately, and it would be a shame if the project failed to build momentum simply because Microsoft couldn’t bring themselves to embrace an inclusive, community-driven approach to software development.