Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Category: Python/Zope/Plone

  • Docbook, Pandoc, Rants and Some Decent Free Fonts

    I’m working on a user manual and am in the process of discovering several tools to do the job. Here’s RSTA,  an online restructured text editor which lets you output into HTML and PDF. This is mainly of interest to people in the plone and python world. Python programmer extraordinaire Mark Pilgrim explains why he…

  • Book Review: Practical Plone 3

    With the proliferation of content management system (CMS) software, a need has arisen for good manuals. When a CMS starts out, user forums are usually the main place for help;  then someone will start a wiki, and a few people will write tutorials on their blogs. But if the user base for a CMS grows…

  • Ploneability Higher Education Workshop: November 7

    I’ll probably be attending the Ploneability Higher Education workshop at University of Houston on November 7.  Registration is free. I don’t work at a university per se, but my plone/ebook implementation should be relevant to people at the university.  Plus, I used to teach at a university in another life.

  • Plone 3 is released!

    Plone 3 is released. Lots of new features here. I’ll be spending the next two weeks working rather building out a plone 3 site for a new project. All I’ll say is, About Fu**ing Time! (Honestly, these are tears of joy)…

  • Houston Zope Python User Group (Houzpug)

    Here. It looks like Houston Zope Python User Group has a website (actually just a redirect). Let’s see how much google juice getting blogged about here gives the site.

  • Announcement: Python Unconference for Texas

    Here’s information about the Python Unconference in September The schedule is evolving, but it looks like the focus will be zope/plone and SciPy . . It’s hosted by the Houston Python Users’- group

  • Plone’s New look

    Alexander Limi provides an update about development on Plone 3.0. (here’s a screenshot). My ebook site will be backed by plone 3.0. I’ll probably be jumping the gun a bit, deploying on a release candidate or beta 2 version. (Or maybe, I’ll just test all my 2.5 work against 3.0 and magically change over in…

  • Plone Rants

    Torrent Freak, a website devoted to coverage of p2p/torrent technology news. Also includes a podcast. Martin Aspeli on the love-hate relationship people have towards plone: So following on from that is process. Outsiders always have a tendency to want to add more formalism to Plone’s process, but that kind of misses the point. Some formalism…

  • XSLT/Zope 3 Geekend

    It’s official. This weekend, I’m going to do some playing around with Zope 3/Five application development. I bought Web Application Development with Zope 3, a recently published book about the subject. Here are some appetizers to follow on the worldcookery site. I’ll be going through Martin Aspeli’s tutorial on 2.5/zope 3 development. I’ll be watching…

  • Things I have Learned

    Today I figured out why it’s so difficult to find lowcost plone CMS hosting: it uses buttloads more RAM than PHP CMS’s I also learned why it’s possible for digital cameras to become so cheap: they offer 90 day warranties instead of 1 year warranties! (Btw, warranty information is often missing on the product spec…

  • Email vs. Content Management

    Seth Gottlieb has a nice weblog about content management, open source and ploney things. (Another good one is Content Wrangler). Here’s his post about Smart Folders and plone (don’t know how I missed this one). Smart Folders (previously called Topics) are something worth getting familiar with. Places to start: Using Topics in plone 2.1 Here’s…

  • Plone, Noted, Admired (+ ArchGenXML)

    I’m determined to do my website in a weekend and started downloading/installing, only to be distracted by two things. Great programming video by Sean Kelley on deploying a plone site and specifically creating a simple archetype using ArchGenXML and ArgoUML. Basically you use a modelling tool to create a .xmi file which ArchGenXML converts to…

  • Wiki Resources

    Ultimate Wiki comparison guide. Highly technical. Andrew Stellman on how managers at corporations can learn from open source project management. Andy Oram: Rethinking Community Documentation . On the post before this one, I’ve been gathering lots of useful ebook links. Uche Ogbuji develops in python and xml. Here’s his copia weblog which is far too…

  • Pycon 3: Gadget Overkill

    I thought that bringing both my PDA and laptop to the Python conference was overkill until I ran into a man who brought 2 laptops and 1 PDA/Phone. “Having another laptop is convenient,” he said.  “That way, I can bring one laptop to a session while the other laptop is charging in my hotel room.…

  • Pycon Day 3: The Zen Nudge

    Last night, I was sitting around the conference lobby and overheard some people talking. One person was saying the conference was ok, though he’d heard nothing remarkable so far. Going to a techie conference can be a hit-or-miss thing. You never know what’s going to strike you, what’s going to be relevant. I’m reminded of…

  • Python/Linux/Nokia

    For the record, my last day working at Texas Instruments was Tuesday. (more on that later). But I’m now at a session about python programming for Nokia cellphones. (Nokia was Texas Instruments biggest customer). Curiously, in this room, I bumped into about 5 different owners of Nokia 770 PDAs, a device which  I own also. …