Up until now, I’ve always used the terminal for programming development on my projects. Because I’m so familiar with the advanced text editor vim , I can get a lot done on the command line, and it doesn’t detract away from what is actually going on behind the scenes, as a lot of IDEs seem to do. However, in reading the book Foundations of Agile Python Development (which I recommend highly), and through working in software houses using IDE s only, I’ve come to realise that I need to gain at least some familiarity with an IDE. ...

If you use Google calendar, and you’ve got an iPhone, or Windows Mobile phone like me, then you’ll be pleased to hear about the new Google Sync for Mobile tool just brought out into beta by Google. There were various ways to sync Google Calender events to Windows Mobile devices before, but nothing officially supported. Google uses an ActiveSync server to push the events to your phone, making things a lot easier. To quote : ...

I’ve been hacking in Python a fair bit lately, and the more I continue to use it, the more I appreciate its features. The enforced logical structure, pure object-orientation, namespacing and the python shell, are just some examples of great features that PHP doesn’t have. I spend most of my time programming in PHP looking up the syntax for the 4,000+ functions, and trying to do hammer out a logical OO structure to my projects. It just doesn’t seem natural. ...

I did something out of the ordinary this Christmas. I bought an “XO” laptop for a child in a third world country. I also bought an XO laptop for myself, so I can develop software designed to be distributed to the 1 million+ XO laptops out there in the third world. The laptop runs a Linux operating system, with an special interface programmed almost exclusively in Python. Most apps, called ‘activities’, run as python programs. This is ideal for me, as I enjoy hacking around in python, and Linux is - of course - very familiar to me. ...

I’ve started my own blog consulting business, helping people setup their own blogs, either for their company or for personal use. It’s called The Blog Factory , see the site for more information on what we do. In a nutshell, we can: Setup and customise WordPress blogs. Design custom WordPress themes. Develop tailored WordPress plugins. Host the blogs on our servers. Use our SEO expertise to improve traffic to the blog.

This is so cool.. Google are beta-testing a totally free hosting and cloud-computing resource called Google App Engine. The caveat is that your hosted app must be written in Python. Python is amazing anyway, and if you don’t know it, now is the perfect time to learn. Check this out for more information about Google App Engine: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html They’re giving away a very generous 500MB disk space and enough processing power to serve 5 million pages a month. Awesome!

Bacula is a great open-source distributed backup program for Linux/UNIX systems. It is separated into three main components: One ‘Director’ - which sends messages to the other components and co-ordinates the backup One or more ‘File Demons’ - which ‘pull’ the data from the host they are installed from. One or more ‘Storage Demons’ - which ‘push’ the data taken from the file demons into a type of archival storage, IE: backup tapes, a backup hard disc, etc I found it extremely versatile yet very complicated to configure. Before you configure it you have to decide on a backup strategy; what you want to backup, why you want to back it up, how often you want to back it up, and how you are going to off-site/preserve the backups. ...

This is an overview of current Linux support under Hyper-V, the free Windows Server 2008 virtualisation product. As you probably know, virtual servers allow the emulation of hardware in software. So you have a single physical ‘virtual server’. This virtual server emulates the physical hardware for several ‘virtual machines’ which sit on top of the virtual server. As far as the operating system on the virtual machine is concerned, it doesn’t notice anything different at all - it thinks it is running on a full set of dedicated hardware. However in reality, the virtual server is sharing its real physical resouces amongst the collection of virtual machines, assigning for example - 3GB of its memory to virtual machine A, and 1GB to virtual machine B. ...

The Stanford engineering department, often regarded as the best in the world for computer science education, has made its core CS curriculum free for anyone with an internet connection. There are some catches, ie: you don’t get your assignments marked, you have no contact with the lecturer, but all the same, it is really a great resource. The material is very high-quality, professionally filmed lectures and a full compliment of handouts and course notes. It also does not even assume knowledge of programming - it teaches you right from the basics. ...

At work I’ve written a couple of scripts that send out emails to the appropriate project team when someone checks in a commit to the project subversion repository. Here are the details. Firstly, you will need a subversion hook setup on post-commit. The post-commit hook needs to be located in SVNROOT/YOURPROJECT/hooks where YOURPROJECT is your svn project name, and SVNROOT is the root directory where you are storing the data files for your subversion repository. ...