Ministry of Intrigue

On recommendation of far too many people to mention, I’m checking out Google Reader again.

I remember peeking at it when it was first released, when I was stubbornly intent on sticking with browser/desktop based reader, and I remember being less than impressed. In typical Google fashion the initial interface was so sparse and ultimately gave me the initial impression of it being a fairly weak client. In fact, I was so turned off by it, that I never gave it a chance beyond feeding it a few test subscriptions before going back to using Sage.

Ultimately, it would be Bloglines that converted me to web-based feed reading. I fell in love with its simple interface and powerful key commands, as well as the convenience of accessing my feeds everywhere. As I began to imbibe more and more of the Web 2.0 kool-aid, I began to manage more and more of my life on the web. I’ve been using Bloglines for at least nine months now, and I’ve been quite happy with it. The Bloglines notifier held a place of honor in my Firefox status bar, right next to theGmail manager extension.

Now, when I started hearing people recommending Google Reader to me again, I was suspicious that the Google fanboy virus was to blame. However, upon reflecting on the wonder that is Gmail, not to mention Google Calendar and the fantastic overhaul of Google Groups I decided that I’d give Reader another try.

All I have to say is, “Wow.” I’m really impressed with the new interface, it seems to blend the best features of Bloglines, Gmail and more tag-based service like Rojo. The key-commands are similar to Gmail, and uses tags/labels just like Gmail as well. The interface is really nice and I find the interface far more visually pleasing than Bloglines, and not nearly as cluttered as Rojo. I like that when I start reading a feed that items are marked as read when I scroll past them, as opposed to Bloglines which marks every item as read as soon as I open the feed. Also, while I don’t make use of this feature as much, I really like the way Google integrates their feed sharing features into the service. Every feed has the option to be shared, as does each feed item, and each feed item can be emailed with a single click. Very slick.

Those sharing features are also available in Bloglines, but they seem more prominent in Google Reader. On the whole, GR seems more polished, although I do enjoy the simplicity of Bloglines. It remains to be seen if I’m going to switch for good, but I think I’ll run them both parallel for a while and let you all know about the experience.

Incidentally, if you want to try out Google Reader, I’d recommend checking out the Google Reader Notifier extension for Firefox, by Mark D.B.D. It rocks.

My Lameness:

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 65% Green Lantern 65% Supergirl 63% Wonder Woman 58% Hulk 55% Superman 55% Robin 50% Catwoman 45% Iron Man 40% The Flash 35% Batman 35%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz…

Come on, no matter who you are you have to admit that Spider-man was a whiny little bitch. Sure, I read him as a kid, but only when I didn’t have a Batman story handy.

My Insanity:

Your results:
You are The Joker

The Joker 65% Dr. Doom 64% Venom 63% Magneto 58% Lex Luthor 58% Mr. Freeze 58% Apocalypse 56% Riddler 55% Dark Phoenix 53% Poison Ivy 53% Kingpin 46% Mystique 44% Juggernaut 44% Green Goblin 40% Catwoman 34% Two-Face 28%

The Clown Prince of Crime. You are a brilliant mastermind but are criminally insane. You love to joke around while accomplishing the task at hand.

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

Okay, so the Joker may be homicidally insane, but he is a pretty freaking cool villain. I can deal with this one, which means that if I’d probably make a cooler bad guy than a super hero. So if I ever go batshit crazy I’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Meaningful content coming soon, I promise.

I was just perusing some of my Statcounter data when I came across this search string a Canadian used to find my site. It’s far from the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in my search results, but it is notable for its specificity.

The search finds my site due to a humorous comment a reader left on the indicated post. I’m curious though, if you run a website and check your statistics, what is the strangest search term someone has used to find your site?

Via Boing Boing:

Just a quick post, but if you are at all into comics you will get a kick out of blogger Kevin Church’s hilarious reimagining of Alan Moore’s Watchmen as if it was written by Stan Lee. It really captures the over-the-top ridiculousness of Lee’s style, which fills me with nostalgia even as I recognize how terrible it really is.

Read the parody here.

So as I mentioned before I’ve been learning Python, and it has been a lot of fun. It says something that I can spend all day at work writing code, only getting up from the computer to scavenge the vending machines, but when the end of the day comes I find myself rushing home so that I can pick up where I left off in my Python lesson plan. I finished working my way through Dive Into Python a few days ago, which is an excellent introductory text if you already have a background in programming. If you are interested in Python, but new to programming, you might be better off with the text How To Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. Both books are “open source” and available for free online reading.

There are a lot of things I really love about Python, dynamic yet strong typing, its capacity for introspection, the interactive interpreter, I could go on. Really what it comes down to is that Python is fun! It strips away unnecessary complexity and lets you dive right into the good stuff. I don’t know why it isn’t used more for instruction. I value the background my early training in Java and C++ gave me, but to be totally honest I rarely use either language anymore as their dynamic scripting language counterparts do everything I need and more. Maybe that makes me less of a programmer, but I don’t really care, because I can produce programs that work and perform just as well (or better) with less headache. I’ll take that any day.

So, since I was looking for a way to practice some of my Python I decided to take a look at the Django framework, which is a rapid development framework for Python powered web applications. My attention was drawn to it as there has been a lot of buzz about it of late, with Python users galore crying out that the framework is a “Rails killer”. Then the fires of fanboy love were fanned to a roaring blaze after a recent benchmark comparison between Django (Python), Rails (Ruby) and Symfony (PHP) frameworks, and Django came out in the lead by a lot. (Incidentally, due to some quirk of the wiki over at Ruby on Rails, you’ll need to go to their wiki first and then try to enter the URL or you’ll get error messages. Go figure.) It certainly got my attention however, so I decided to postpone my Ruby on Rails explorations while I checked out Django.

All I have to say is: Wow.

Django makes database-driven development so easy I almost feel dirty getting away with it. You define your database model in Python terms and run Django’s syncdb utility to automatically generate/modify database tables for all applications you want to set up in the current project. Afterwards, you can access your database records in you code as if they were Python objects, and the framework will do all the caching and querying the database for you via the object’s inherited methods. You can also write raw SQL if you need it, but to be honest I think most people will only require that in the most rare of cases. The database API is really powerful and dead simple to use as well.

One of the other great perks is that Django gives you a project administration interface for free! Uncomment one line of code and you have a customizable web interface for administration fully formed and ready for you. By default it allows you to manage users, sites, and application data. You can add records, edit them, view their relationships, search and filter, with form validation built in. It is quite impressive.

As I’ve be learning Django, I’ve been impressed with how easy their templating engine is, and how quickly you can put together a public interface for your applications. It really is very simple to write methods for each view which can then be called by their template. I can’t speak to real world performance yet, but in testing it has been quite snappy, and if the aforementioned benchmark is any indication I can probably expect this trend to continue.

In case you can’t tell, I’m pretty excited about this. I’ve only been playing with Django for a couple days, but I think I may be falling in love.

As far as referring to Django as a “Rails killer”, I’m not qualified to make that judgment as I haven’t worked with RoR yet. I will say that I find the tech community’s tendency to refer to every new product as the “[currently_most_popular_product] killer”* really annoying and particularly foolish. There’s room for all of them, and personally I just think that with all these amazing frameworks coming into being it is a great time to be a web developer. Our toolbox runneth over!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear the siren song of Django calling me back to my text editor.

*Since I’m learning Python, I guess I should have written that as: “%s killer” % currently_most_popular_product.

The World Wide Web turned 15 yesterday. Still one more year before it can get a driver’s license.

Wikipedia Entry on the World Wide Web