Some friends pointed out that the os/x beta for “skype”:http://skype.com was available. I’ve installed it but haven’t made or received any calls so all I can say is that it looks like a nice os/x app. Some rough edges on the UI but I didn’t download it for it’s UI ;)

Another new-for-me app is “Adium X”:http://www.adiumx.com — a multi-protocol chat program similiar to trillian. I’m going to run with it for a couple of days, instead of iChat, and see how it fairs.

That’s the term lainens uses when she is trying to talk to me and I keep getting distracted by some action or event happening near me. Being an “interrupt driven” kinda guy has some problems ;)

anywho, the point of the title for this entry is that lately there have been a lot of coding distractions for me:

* worked with grant on getting some tellbot modules ported to supybot
* watched grant work like a mad-man on his wiki module
* more research into date and time input parsing
* the usual bug fixing and feature adding at work
* digging deeper into the world of twisted
* getting more ideas for projects than I can ever implement

That last one is an ever-present issue and something I have just learned to deal with :)

One of the things I was reading in the blog-sphere is the talk of using Atom[1] as a data packet and creating small tools to read/write produce/consume the data packets. As “Ted”:http://www.sauria.com/blog points out in his post on the matter[2] it is not a new idea. One thing both of us seemed to concluded is that just the presence of a storage/search engine for Atom nuggets is not enough – you need to have good tools to feed the beast and tools and/or front-ends to tame it.

It seems that many of the things I either read about or thought about dealt with this concept of creating pipes of data and the filters to use them: XMPP pubsub using Atom[3]; my work on modules for tellbot; conversations with Ted and other “OSAF”:http://osafoundation.org crew and so on.

Pardon me while I throw a context exception …

Go USA womans soccer! I caught the last half of the Gold medal match between the US and Brazil today and man was I glad I did. Excellant play on both sides (30-odd fouls!) lead to a 1-1 tie at the end of regular play which caused it to go into extra time where in the 23rd minute the US scored. I say again:

Woooo!

:)

1. “http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002885.html”:http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002885.html
2. “http://www.sauria.com/blog/2004/08/25#1074″:http://www.sauria.com/blog/2004/08/25#1074
3. “http://saint-andre.com/blog/2004-08.html#2004-08-10T17:01″:http://saint-andre.com/blog/2004-08.html#2004-08-10T17:01

Yesterday Grant and I decided to “push the button” and release tellbot 1.0 – woohoo! Of course the first bug report came in about 4 hours later :)

It’s always fun in a scary, wobbly, hole-in-your-stomach kind of way to take something and put it out for the world to wander by and say “so?”

But we did and I like it. While it may not be the best python code out there, it’s ours. Ok, enough of the rah-rah stuff – just wanted to celebrate and note the event.

oh – right – where to get it: “tellbot 1.0″:http://www.code-bear.com/tellbot is the project page (sparse as it is) and on it is a “link”:http://www.code-bear.com/code/tellbot-1.0.tgz

After a couple of great weather days we are back into the dog days of summer – blech! Still, it allowed me to get the yard mowed without having to worry about heat stroke :)

Grant and I had been working very well together on getting TellBot to the point where we would feel comfortable with releasing it to the world as 1.0. Astute readers will notice the use of “had” in the previous sentance — basically while in the middle of talking thru some refactoring we found supybot. It’s an amazing python bot that has tons of plugins, great structure and an active team working on it: everything we had planned for TellBot!

After thinking it over we came to the conclusion that it would probably be more productive to help the supybot team with the plugins that TellBot has and they are missing than it would be for us to continue with yet-another-bot.

Not to say that TellBot will be abandoned — I’ll still work on it as a testing platform for my python learning.

Currently I’m working on another interesting idea – trying to figure out how to bolt onto wxPython a set of routines that will allow gui testing. Working out some of the major items to see if it’s feasible and that alone is making me learn a lot about wx’s internals — a Good Thing(tm)

more to come later…