The Voidspace Techie Blog

Most Popular Blog Entries

Feedburner allows me to monitor my RSS feed and see how many people are clicking through from my blog entry summaries to read the full entry [1]. Feedburner reports that I have a current average of about 830 subscribers. I have no idea whether this reflects the extent of my readership, as I've always assumed that the majority of the people who read this blog through Planet Python [2].

I can track the number of people who click through from each item, which does show the number of people who are interested enough in the title / summary to read the full entry. Here's a list of the most popular entries (everything with more than 500 clicks). It isn't completely representative as I only switched my feed fully over to Feedburner in December 2008, and I sometimes have several entries on the same page - so people can click through to one and then read several. Still, I find it interesting.

• On Testing: Some Programmers Refuse to Get It - 770 clicks 14th April 2008
• Python Properties and New Language Features in C# 3.0 - 754 clicks 11th November 2007
• Everyone's First Vi Session - 731 clicks August 19th 2007
• Chasing Memory Leaks in Python Applications - 723 clicks 9th January 2008
• Silly Snippets - 704 clicks 18th February 2008
• Apples, Django is Wired and Faster Python - 703 clicks 25th March 2008
• IronPython and Kamaelia (and a new web framework...) - 639 clicks 9th September 2007
• 2D Graphics with Pyglet and OpenGL - 590 clicks February 8th 2008
• Does Django Have Rails Envy? - 590 clicks September 10th 2007
• Shiny New Asus Eee PC - 584 clicks January 4th 2008
• A Year with Python, IronPython and Ruby - 579 clicks January 9th 2008
• Release: ConfigObj 4.5.2 and validate 0.3.2 - 570 clicks February 27th 2008
• Tail Call Optimisation - 568 clicks September 24th 2007
• Resolver One 1.0.1 Released - 561 clicks March 1st 2008
• Today at Work: Assembly, C/C++, C#, IronPython and Python - 536 clicks January 16th 2008
• Resolverforge: Download Modules on Demand for IronPython and Resolver One - 523 clicks February 11th 2008
• IronPython in Action Available for Pre-Order - 520 clicks February 23rd 2008
• Resolver Hacks Updates - 520 clicks February 11th 2008
• Squeak on PyPy - 510 clicks October 23rd 2007
• Test Driven Development: New References - 508 clicks January 27th 2008
• Ordered Dictionary - 505 clicks October 21st 2007
• Python 3, Bytes and Source File Encoding - 504 clicks March 23rd 2008

As this list in some way reflects the interests of the Python community [3], it's nice to see some IronPython and Resolver related entries amongst the popular ones.

Also interesting that the most popular entry is the recent (controversial) one I wrote on testing...

[1]	I realise that many people would prefer a full feed rather than a partial feed. That would mean hacking on my Desktop Blog Client Tool: Firedrop2. I really like this program and am not willing to switch away - at some point I will experiment with enabling full feeds, but not yet.

[2]	Or the Unofficial Planet Python.

[3]	Or the part of the Python community that reads Planet Python anyway, which almost certainly doesn't include the 'silent majority' of Python users and programmers.

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New Computer Musings and Other Random Hardware Stuff

I've just bought a new mouse, a Logitech LX7. I've had bad experiences with wireless mice and keyboards in the past, but we use Logitech gear at Resolver and they have served us well. Unfortunately the USB receiver with this mouse doesn't work (secondhand from ebay), but it does work with my office receiver - and I really like the mouse. Very high resolution, smooth and a lovely feel. Whether or not I sort this one out I'll be going for the same model again.

I've also just bought a new monitor (yes another one). I'm still only using three monitors, but my main one is now a 24" Acer AL2416WB Widescreen monitor with a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels. This thing is awesome, it makes my 22" widescreen look small. It is wide enough to show two pages of a word document side by side at a decent font size, and it only cost £200. My colleague Kamil also bought one, and although he doesn't exactly say so in his review - he likes it!

I mentioned this to my colleague Jonathan, who is an old-school gamer. He is looking for a big gaming monitor and would prefer a CRT to an LCD. He says the black is blacker and the colours are brighter. This gives a superior 'immersive effect' when gaming with the lights off! For gaming the refresh rate is also important, and at least the last generation of LCDs used to show trails when viewed in the dark with lots of movement on screen. Additionally, CRTs are capable of displaying different resolutions natively, whereas LCD panels have only one 'real' resolution. Big(-ish) quality CRTs must cost more than LCD panels, just because less people want them now - which sounds like buying a valve amplifier.

I will also be replacing my computer at some point in the next year. My current one has reached the ripe old age of eighteen months old, and in the next few months will gracefully retire as a media-centre for the new living room of the house we hopefully move into later this month. I have quite a bit of money burning a hole in my gadget fund, and would like a nice specced computer (I'll tell you about my gadget fund in a later blog post if I have the time, but the summary is that I have to spend it on essential computer gear or pay tax on it).

As always with computers for the geek, I have the choice between building and buying. The last few times I have priced up building I have always found pre-built computers available for the same (or even less) and buying has obvious advantages. This time however, there aren't many manufacturers making computers with the sort of spec I would like - twin quad core processors with as fast memory as possible.

My boss has given me the sage advice that the sweet-spot for processors is at about the £200 mark. In fact this seems to hold. Looking at average UK processor prices (for the Intel Core 2 or Xeon quad-core range which seem to be the best at the moment):

• Q6600 2.4GHz Quad Core 8MB Cache - £160
• Q6700 2.67 GHz Quad Core 8MB Cache - £340
• QX6850 3.0 GHz Quad Core 8MB Cache - 600

So there is a big jump in price from 2.4 to 2.67 and from 2.67 to 3.0. Even if it's irrational, it seems wrong to spend a lot of money and not get a system with a faster processor than my current 2.4GHz AMD dual core.

Important factors in overall computer speed seem to be (in no particular order):

• Processor clock speed
• Total number of cores
• Amount of memory (the cheapest way to improve performance is to add memory - page faults are very slow!)
• Processor cache size
• Front Side Bus (FSB) speed
• Memory speed
• Speed of the hard drive that the OS and virtual memory live on makes a lot of difference (15000 rpm drives are available relatively easily now)
• Possibly, whether you are running a 64bit OS or a 32bit OS

For gaming (which I do a bit of - Team Fortress 2 rocks), and some applications, the graphics card matters a lot too. The latest Edge magazine review for Crysis states that "to get visually the best from this game you need two of the latest graphics card strapped together" - which of course is ridiculous. It does look good though.

This is all fine, but as soon as you move to a twin-processor and quad core spec, you are seriously reducing the number of motherboards available to choose from.

There are also a few questions that I don't know the answer to.

• Memory type - is there a massive speed advantage to be had by using DDR3 or dual channel RAM (and are there any retail motherboards that support them for twin Socket LGA771 processors)
• Is there any advantage to be gained using 'ECC' ram (with an extra byte on the bus for checksum), and the same question as above about the motherboards
• 800Mhz DDR2 RAM seems to be the fastest that I can find. In which case does it matter whether you have an FSB speed of 1066MHZ or 1333MHZ if your data can only ever clock 800MHZ? (In fact what is the difference between FSB speed on the motherboard/processor and the speed your RAM can run at - I assume that in practise they will both run at whichever is slowest out of these two numbers)

The only two hardware supplies I have found (but I haven't looked too hard) that will offer computers at this spec are Dell and Apple. Apple offer the Mac Pro with two quad-core processors for £2700. This is with a meagre 1gig of RAM, but can be upgraded much more cheaply than buying the RAM from Apple. I don't have this amount of money yet, but am not massively far off (and it would come with a slower hard drive and of course only 667MHz RAM, but does have a reasonable video card).

Buying from Dell gives me much more choice in configuration. For a fair way south of two grand I can get a computer shell with:

• A motherboard that will take two quad-core Xeon processors
• One 3.0GHZ Xeon Quad-core with 8MB L2 cache
• One GB of DDR 2 at 667MHZ, with 4GB from Crucial for about £180
• A 73gig 15000rpm Hard drive for the OS
• A 160gig second drive which is a little meagre but comes included anyway

This would give me a pretty good system that I can build on. I'd need to choose a gfx card of course, which is another minefield...

As to the question of whether running eight cores will give me much improvement, it will be interesting to see. Given that most of the time I have many applications open at the same time, it ought to help.

Whilst we're on about processor cores, I've found something to do with some of my current spare cycles. I often leave my computer on overnight, stress testing my network connection of course, and the World Community Grid seems like an excellent use to put those cycles to. Unlike similar grid computing projects, they have a whole range of different tasks you can donate your computer time to - like climate change prediction and finding dengue and malaria drugs.

This is the first blog entry using the new tagging feature of Firedrop2 implemented by Davy Mitchell. There are now tags (as well as categories) at the bottom of each entry, as well as in the RSS. Currently only in SVN, but I'll do a new release soon. This is something I've wanted for ages.

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Blog Action Day: Looking Back from the Future

Today is Blog Action Day, with bloggers from all across the world blogging about the environment. This is me taking part.

This year was the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the UK. In 1807 the trade in slaves from Africa was banned, but it wasn't until 1833 that slavery was abolished completely throughout the British Empire.

It is easy to view the behaviour of our ancestors with disdain. History is bulging with the barbaric treatment of fellow humans by people who considered themselves enlightened and civilized. In the UK we particularly look back at the Victorian era and the way they treated the poor, placing them in workhouses, and also the appalling treatment of the mentally ill (the 'insane') in asylums. Thank goodness that things have changed, and that generally in Western society things aren't so bad.

But to the people of the day, this was the state of the art - reflecting their moral convictions and the capacity of society to provide welfare. The horror of the workhouses was still preferable to previous incarnations of English society that depended entirely on the kindness of strangers for the care of the poor. If this kindness was absent or withheld, then like much of the world today, poverty was brutally terminal.

With a focus on looking back at the brutishness of a bygone age, it is easy to wonder how history will view our society. We have iPhones and space travel, the internet and modern medicine, laws on human rights and a society that supposedly honours diversity - boy are we sophisticated and civilized compared our predecessors. Is it possible that hundreds of years from now, people will read about our actions and inactions; and shudder at our ignorance and barbarity?

In the UK we imprison tens of thousands of people that our own doctors have diagnosed as being mentally ill. We know that prison doesn't work: most people who go into prison will be back again. Yet the prisons are overcrowded and the popular press calls for harsher sentences and the building of more prisons. This is not just inhumane, it is stupid. This situation is rarely the fault of individuals, but the fault of us - society.

In the US, hundreds of thousands of black young men are imprisoned. However remote they may feel that politics is, they are disenfranchised from any possible input. What barbaric society would do this?

Particularly in the UK you might hear the argument that society can't bear the cost of proper care of all the mentally ill who are in prison. The alternatives are prohibitively expensive and it is an extremely difficult problem to solve. This may well be true, but more to the point is that most individuals don't know and don't really care. How will future generations look back on this?

Even more so the current state of the environment. Scientifically it seems beyond doubt that man's (our - your and mine) activity is causing great damage to the earth. If nothing is done to change this then great harm will occur, and it won't necessarily be just our children and their children who suffer the consequences - things are happening now.

So how will future generations see this? Didn't they know? Didn't they care? Did no-one tell them, what did they think was happening? The fools, the selfish idiots... Will this be humanity's epitaph, or merely the way we as a culture are remembered?

I'm afraid that I'm not a very good green activist. I'm trying to find my way forward in doing less harm to the environment, consuming less and being more aware. I care greatly for the earth. All of man's finest achievements still pale into insignificance beside the unimaginable complexity and elegance of fragile life. Let's not be the ones who destroy it.

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First Blog Entry from the Mac

Well, I'm ensconsed in a slightly chilly but otherwise plush hotel room in London waiting for the Mix UK conference to start. I'm not speaking until Wednesday, but the talk went well enough at PyCon that I'm feeling confident.

I've finally got round to setting up my 'usual' Python development environment on the Mac, and am typing my first blog entry on it!

Firedrop2 isn't hard to set-up, but it still needed doing. It isn't the most beautiful app. on the Mac (it uses wxPython) but it isn't too bad:

I'm not going to do a long report on PyCon UK by the way. I've just thought of something fun to try with Silverlight instead. But... it is incredible that things went so smoothly for a first event. It seemed very professional, of course behind the scenes might have been a bit different...

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Blog Action Day

On 15th October, the distributed blogospheres that we all love (and loathe) so much will be alive with a mass action called:

• Blog Action Day

  On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone's mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

  Blog Action Day is about MASS participation. That means we need you!

I'll be taking part. If you blog and care about the environment, then get on board.

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Kamil, Andrzej, PyCon UK, Python 3 and SSL

Our intern Kamil Dworakowski has just started a blog:

• Programmer's Weblog

He is a .NET expert and has been involved in the development of Nemerle, a functional programming language for .NET. His Python is coming along nicely as well.

His first entry is about a re-entrance problem with the Windows Forms message box. The example code is (unsurprisingly) in Nemerle, which is pretty readable all things considered.

There is some depressing news from Resolver though. My friend and colleague, Andrzej, is leaving us to return to Poland. He will continue to work with us for one week a month, and there is a strong possibility that he will return in the new year, but it is still sad.

We gave him a sendoff last night, and a special gift:

It seems to have done the trick! (Photo by Konrad who also has a cool blog.)

I guess that by now (due to the umpteen blog entries on Planet Python) you have heard that Python 3 alpha 1 has been released! Exciting stuff. What you might not have paid much attention to on the release page is the innocent sounding:

'SSL support is disabled. This causes test_ssl to be skipped. The new SSL support in the 2.6 trunk (with server-side support and certificate verification) will be ported for 3.0a2.'

If you follow Python-Dev, you will know that Bill Janssen has done a lot of working on adding some exciting new SSL features that will be available in Python 2.6 (and Python 3). This is also great news.

In the last part of this mish-mash of a blog entry, PyCon UK is nearly upon us. There are already 170 delegates signed up, which is cool because it means we beat PyCon Italia! We're really looking forward to PyCon at Resolver. Three of us are talking (and I've finished my Silverlight research - just the talk to write. I haven't spilled all the beans on the blog - there's more!). We may also be doing some subtle recruiting, so watch out.

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Scott Adams, Turds and XML

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert and also has a blog.

He blogs a lot and although I disagree with a lot he says, he is a very funny writer. From reading the blog you can see Scott's obsessions played out in the cartoons, and I enjoy some of the cartoons a bit less on their own terms - but it is a worthwhile trade-off.

Anyway, one of his recent entries included describing your job in a single sentence:

• Rounders vs. Accumulators

My favourite was from someone who works with XML:

I make sure turds are well-formed.

Kind of sums up XML...

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Viruses: a Thing of the Past...

Unfortunately also a thing of the present, but whilst randomly browsing Voidspace I stumbled across this blog entry of mine from 2003. It is an interesting blast from the past about an interesting blast from the past, and still relevant. The BBC article it talks about is also still available:

• BBC - Computer viruses now 20 years old

This article 'celebrates' the twentieth birthday of computer viruses... As usual for a mainstream news article it's partly right... It misses out the entire spectrum of boot sector viruses - particularly the ones that plagued machine like the Amiga, long before the advent of the internet.

Before harddrives were common (at least for your average user) a small piece of code called the 'boot sector' used to be executed whenever you booted up from a floppy disk. The virus writers used to hide viruses here (often malicious ones). The Amiga scene particularly was rife with pirate software so disks used to get swapped around all the time - and if you didn't have a good virus killer it was inevitable you would have live examples of several viruses in your collection. There was also a thriving freeware/shareware scene (well before the term Open Source had been dreamed up) - so there were plenty of virus killers too.

The most disturbing thing now is that the virus and trojan writers have teamed up with the spam merchants and the viagra peddlers to make money from viruses. They use the infected machines as proxy servers - either for the e-mail they force upon thousands of us - or to obscure the location of their fraudulent websites. Particularly the software that obscures the real location of websites is impressive - but none the less unpleasant and a nuisance for its innovation. The trouble is that the extra strain that spam puts on the infrastructure of the net threatens to make life more difficult for those of us who just use it for less morally repugnant uses. Mind you... we could get into another debate about the morals of file sharing (a subject dear to my heart - but at best morally dubious unless you embrace some kind of philosophical software communism... 'information wants to be free')...

Even more of a thorny issue are the kind of networks (like freenet ?) that allow people to store and share files across a distributed, encrypted network. If you open up part of your hard drive to a network like this it's impossible to tell what files are actually being stored there, or who uploaded them. For political dissidents in China - or under other oppressive regimes - this is a boon. They can safely distribute material which would otherwise be banned and traceable to them. It's also a boon to the distributors of such vile material of child pornography, which unfortunately the internet is rife with...

As usual there are plenty of 'grey' areas, and everyone draws the boundaries differently. As soon as a method to circumvent oppressive laws is discovered - it's abused by criminals. As soon as methods of restricting abuse are found - they're used to infringe upon the 'fair use' of people with no criminal intent. It's probably another of those issues to which there are no right or straightforward answers, and it has to be a constant striving to pick out a middle path between competing and irreconcilable needs.

So this article has stood the test of three years, which is probably more than can be said for plenty of my recent blog entries. In fact if you search the web, you can still find references to my earliest contributions to the computer scene, in the form of Amiga Compilations for use with AMOS. AMOS was a version of BASIC that could make Operating System calls, and my second programming language (immediately after BBC Basic and before 68000 assembly language).

That all reminds me that although floppy disks were always a pain, they seemed so much more reliable then than they are today. I had boxes of hundreds of them, and failures were only occasional. Of the last few times I've had to resort to floppies, it has almost inevitably resulted in failure. My boss thinks that they the drives and disks are just manufactured so much more cheaply these days. He is probably right.

It also gets me thinking about programming and posterity. For those of us who devote our time to programming, we are pouring our substance into an activity that will inevitably be obsoleted in a few years. How many programs from ten years ago are still in use? Some but not many, how many from twenty years ago, thirty...

Perhaps this doesn't matter though. What proportion of all the writing and text from thirty years ago is still relevant. Sure there is plenty, but as a proportion of everything our society churns out it is a tiny amount that endures in any meaningful way. Key concepts and algorithms from programming are likely to remain just as relevant (and 'timeless') as the key concepts from any other area of human endeavour.

C was one of the earliest programming languages and is still strong today, but will we even recognise programming in twenty years and what about Python? Well, even though programming languages come and go I don't think it is going to change fundamentally. Even though the means of interacting with computers will change (projectors, holograms, virtual reality), the written word (text) remains the most efficient way of conveying precise information - something vital to working with computers - and I don't think that is about to change.

I explored this subject a bit in my article An Object Shaped Future?. I think Object Oriented programming is effective because it is a good analogy for the way we think. Even if the hardware platform changes out of all recognition, Python provides a readable and flexible way of working with objects at a high level.

As processor performance becomes ever less relevant to programming, and code readability becomes more important to program maintenance, Python has a rosy future - so long as it finds its way in a multi-processor world. (Losing the GIL isn't necessarily the only way, fast interprocess communication could also work so long as it is easy and readable.)

Incidentally, I think this business of analogies is one reason why Python could be more enduring than Ruby. A good analogy makes it easier to 'think' in a system, because it corresponds well to your understanding of life the universe and everything. Python inherits its object model from the C++ strain of programming languages. Objects have attributes and methods.

Ruby inherits its object model from Smalltalk, where all interaction is 'sending messages'. You can't access an attribute of an object, you can only send a message to the object. I think that the Python model, although less 'pure' in object orientation terms (although Ruby is not as pure as Smalltalk in this sense), is easier to understand and closer to the way we view the world - it is a better analogy. We can interact with objects by causing them to do things (calling methods), or interact with their attributes where the object itself is much more passively involved (I can look at the colour of a tomato without sending a message to the tomato itself).

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Rupy, Time and 'The Book'

Wow, two weeks since my last blog entry. That's the longest I've gone without blogging for a long time. This is due to a combination of the house we rent being sold, attending the Rupy Conference and the ongoing writing of 'The Book'.

I had nearly finished chapter five when it grew beyond the acceptable length for a single chapter. Before I could refactor it into two chapters, Rupy was upon me. I returned from Poznan (Poland) yesterday, and with a bit of luck I should have two chapters finished within the next couple of days.

Rupy was fun. It was a conference on Ruby and Python, organised by Poznan university. Due to the very cheap rates for students it was mainly, but not exclusively, attended by students. About two-thirds of the attendees were interested in Python, but despite the slow submission of Ruby talks their ended up being about an equal number of Ruby/Python talks.

Andrzej and I attended, and talked about Developing with IronPython and Windows Forms. Our talk was based on the one we gave at PyCon, but instead of half-an-hour we had an hour and forty minutes. This meant that we were able to talk a lot more about IronPython itself. Andrzej also did some live coding; adding a new feature (drag-and-drop) to our example TabbedImages Application, following a test driven development approach. This worked very well, no major screw ups, and there was also time for me to show the C# integration using the example of the Clipboard code in TabbedImages.

For those who attended, the presentation is online at:

• Developing with IronPython and Windows Forms

It was nice to have plenty of time to talk (although it was probably a bit too long), and congratulations to all those who sat through to the end.

As usual at these conferences [1], we met some great people. The highlight of the conference for me was the talk on PyPy by Maciej Fijalkowski. Although I've read a lot about it, seeing some of the key features in action is simply mind blowing. Maciej was responsible for the Javascript backend, which translates RPython code into javascript - including translating server method calls into AJAX calls.

Quite a lot of PyPy is 'almost-but-not-quite-useful'. Compiling of RPython to C is already in production use for writing servers at EWT, and the Javascript backend is pretty complete (with some very impressive demos of its capabilities). There are already some Mochikit bindings, and it is just crying out for one of the Python web frameworks to make use of it. The RPython code preserves the Python behaviour even where the corresponding javascript behaviour is different. For example, failed dictionary lookups [2] raise a KeyError rather than returning None.

I attended a couple of Ruby talks. There was one on Ruby tools, which gave me some interesting ideas for testing in Python. I was disappointed that there were no 'introduction to Ruby or Rails' talks. Luckily Jan Szumiec gave a great talk about writing DSLs in Ruby. The technical level was basic enough that I could follow the code and learned a bit about Ruby in the process [3]. Jan's example was cool - the Brownie Recipe DSL. I think the use of domain specific languages is a great way to focus on expressiveness and readability in code. A lot of the principles (creating a DSL and building the framework behind it to support it) are directly applicable to Python and I hope we see more.

There were other good talks, interesting ones on Turbogears [4] and SciPy for example. One of my favourite was a talk by the Grono.net, the largest social networking site in Poland. The site is built with Django, and they have had some serious scalability issues to solve.

All in all I think the conference was a success (and Poznan is a beautiful city to visit) and the organizers are pretty sure they will do it again next year. Oh, the super-fast internet connection in the university hotel helped, I was getting download speeds of 1 MByte a second...

[1]	He says, having now attended three programming conferences in his life...

[2]	Or was that list indexing, can't remember...

[3]	I didn't know there was a way of catching missing constant lookups in Ruby. That is useful for DSLs. You can get close in Python by executing code in a context (dictionary / namespace) and pre-populating with names, but it isn't quite the same.

[4]

After the talk I feel confident enough that I could just start hacking away with Turbogears, which is testimony to both the talk and the project. I don't like XML templating languages though (I don't want to learn a templating specific language for God's sake - just let me use Python in the templates if necessary [5]).

[5]	Which is the approach taken by two extremely successful web development environments - PHP and Rails... Maybe Python doesn't want to be that successful though...

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At PyCon

Well, I'm sitting in the first keynote of PyCon 2007. The OLPC folks are doing some extremely interesting stuff. (Yes I'm blogging - and yes I'm listening and yes there is a lot of Python in OLPC.)

I need to wait until the end of the talk to find out when we're going to be allowed to buy them...

We arrived yesterday. Entry into the US was straightforward (phew). We were very tired (7 or 8 hour time difference) but we still managed to have some very interesting chats with other Pythoneers.

We also did a practise run through of our talk. We're still over time and we want to leave time for questions, so we've cut a few slides.

I have uploaded a copy of the talk to the PyCon site - but this is the 'full' talk (with notes, so hopefully it is a good reference), the actual talk will be a bit shorter.

As soon as I have a semi-stable version, I will upload it to Voidspace and post the URL here.

Now that the talk is over, let me add a few wows to the talk about OLPC. Their vision is incredible, it is about providing a learning tool to millions of children over the next few year. Their hardware is astonishing (lots of revolutions in battery technology, LCD technology, new chips and so on and so on). Their software stack is also amazing. Running on a system with 128mb of RAM and a 512mb NAND flash RAM disk rather than a harddrive. The talk included a rant about how software is growing bigger and slower at a faster rate than computers are getting faster and bigger. Modern computers take longer to boot-up than computers from five years ago.

More scary than any of these facts though is that part of the teaching vision is introducing kids to programming through these devices. There is a 'view source' button which will allow kids to see the source of programs they are running (and change them - that's why using an interpreted language is so important to them). So their vision is to introduce 100 million children to Python over the next few years... comp.lang.python could get pretty crowded.

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Firedrop2: Blog Statistics

Davy Mitchell has made a nice addition to the Firedrop2 blogging tool I use.

It generates a page of statistics about your blog entries, number of words per post, number of posts per category and the like.

• Techie Blog Statistics

Formatting aside, it's a nifty little addition. Unsurprisingly 455 of my 606 blog entries are in the Python category.

The code hasn't yet been checked in, but you can download the changes as a zip file: BlogStats.zip

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