42

Mission21 - Rowan Atkinson Amazing Jesus

Another YouTube clip used by Steve to challenge the 24x7 discipleship stream at Mission21:

YouTube - Rowan Atkinson Amazing Jesus.

Moving 42 onwards

At the start of another calendar year (by the way: Happy New Year everyone) I have decided to make a few adjustments to the way that 42 works.

Some of these are simply acknowledging what is already happening and others are new directions. Some will take effect immediately and others will take time to filter through.

None are particularly radical and they should not radically change the nature of 42 from what it has already become.

Firstly, I want to recognise that the content on 42 has changed considerably since it started back in August 2003. There now a far greater focus on Christianity and on Cycling with all the IT technical areas in significant decline. I'll probably write a "state of the category" post for each existing category outlining the future of that category within 42.

Secondly, I am going to do a split. Initially I am having a separate cycling blog called Cycle Life at http://cycling.warnock.me.uk I will have more cycling content on there than I have had on 42 recently and it will have a slightly wider focus. Not just recumbents or fixies but also news and wider implications of cycling (environment, health etc).

Thirdly (eventually) there will be a design update to recognise the lack of recent content in some categories (Java, Python etc) and hence the overall change in focus that has already taken place.

Fourthly, I may move 42 (complete with all existing content) over to WordPress (or possibly another weblog application) running on my TextDrive hosted server. I am just upgrading my Lifetime hosting there for an awesome price and will have enough capacity to run 100's of blogs like 42 (oh and also close my other hosting accounts).

That'll do for now (but don't forget to go a subscribe to Cycle Life to catch all the good stuff about to come there).

OLPC, Python...

Ian is going to be working for the One Laptop Per Child project part time for a while. See OLPC, Python...., there is plenty of interesting stuff there about this project.

Feed tidy-up

Just done a little tidy-up.

• You can now see proper feed icons, all over 42
• The feeds that were not working are now
• All the old RDF feeds are gone for ever, I have not been able to redirect them so if you are subscribed to them, in which case you probably won't see this message anyway ;-)
• You can now subscribe to 42 by email

Fair trade Software Development

Although a joke, as is often the case there is a kernel of truth in this: Stephane’s thoughts corner… : Fair trade Software Development.

Jumping ship to RubyOnRails

As anyone who has read anything here in the past will know I have been a long term fan of Python. I still am and Python is still a favourite for me. I still think it has the potential to be incredibly popular web platform and huge progress is being made on lots of different froonts towards that.

Will Python dominate after Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails has been the darling of web development for a while now, thanks to the highly successful pioneers such as 37signals and the frustration with Java J2EE for web based user interfaces. However, it looks to me as if this may be changed by progress in the world of python.

Python Web Framework Statistics

This Python Web Framework Statistics is a good idea. Could be used for lots of other comparisons like

• programming language popularity see my earlier results
• python templating tools eg cheetah, kid etc
• python db layers eg sqlObject, sqlAlchemy etc

WSGI is making a real difference

This Ingredients to the Pylons Python Web Framework demonstrates nicely why all python web frameworks should be based on WSGI now (not nice to have in the future but needed now). RhubarbTart is another good example of the advantages of building on WSGI (and specifically both these use PythonPaste).

An alternative example is httpy -- a sane and robust HTTP library for Python which does indeed look sane and have some neat features, but surely now is the wrong time to launch something that aims to compete with WSGI. In fact I suspect that httpy would fit easily under wsgi, in the process allowing some code to be dropped. Essentially all httpy needs is a wsgi coupler (in its own terminology).

Turbogears moves closer to 0.9

See TurboGears 0.9a1 released! at Blue Sky On Mars and TurboGears 0.9 Preview Site!.
Also notice that Ian is working on a SQLObject version 2.