The Voidspace Techie Blog

Blog on Blogging: Inside the Blogosphere Questionnaire

Interesting that this should come up at the same time as the last entry. I recently got asked to take part in the Inside the Blogosphere: Blogger Questionnaire. Not to waste the answers, and being a while since I've blogged about blogging - here they are...

• Please enter your blog(s) url with a short description below:

  • The Techie Blog

    My technical blog that documents the Python programming world, my work at Resolver Systems where we are developing a revolutionary new kind of spreadsheet and my writing activities.

  • IronPython URLs

    Keeping track of new and interesting things happening in the world of IronPython and the Dynamic Language Runtime.

  • My Personal Blog

    My personal (and oldest) blog, with an archive of my original blog started over five years ago. In the past year I have been busy writing a book (IronPython in Action) and so this blog has been neglected with a backlog of posts I need to find time for.

• Why did you start blogging?

It seemed an interesting creative outlet. I'm opinionated, so blogging was a natural platform to express my opinions and rants.

As I learned to program it also seemed a great way to document my learning for others and publicise the tools and libraries that I was creating. (Even though the early ones weren't much good.)

I first started blogging in early 2003, as I was renewing my interests in computers. My first blog started at the same time as I started to develop my own website (remnants of which remain - not good!). As I learned to program I developed a writing style and online persona - and most of my blogging became technical.

I also gained an audience, which is a great motivator. The Python (programming) community is very friendly and I was surprised by how ready people were to read what I wrote! Blogging without readers is pointless.

• What motivates you to blog?

I have become a well known member of the Python community almost entirely due to my blog. I want to promote the Python programming language, and I enjoy writing and teaching.

Individual posts may have very different motivations. It could be something I think is important to the communities I'm part of, something I want to promote to those communities, something I've done or simply something that I find interesting. It's also nice to be able to post news before anyone else does.

Some posts (often the more controversial or interesting ones) are simply me exploring a subject and trying to express something about it.

• What is your long term goal of your blog(s)?

I see my blog as a way of teaching and promoting the Python programming language, something I feel passionately about. I would like to develop my writing skills and explore issues that interest me. Particularly software quality, usability, agile development processes, testing techniques and related topics. Some of these are things I haven't really begun to explore yet in my writing.

In the long run I would like to be a freelance programmer and writer, and I definitely see the blog as a big part of achieving that goal.

I also want to make a difference in the software community - furthering my craft. My blog is an excellent platform for communicating and exploring those issues.

I'm also a member of several different 'communities' around programming. A lot of the conversation around those communities happens on blogs and I want to strengthen this.

Towards all those goals I would like to write longer articles. It is sometimes hard to see how those fit in as blog posts though, as they become articles in their own right. In a way I don't draw much distinction between writing on my blog and developing my website - although the style of writing can be very different. Blogging can be a very 'free-form' way of writing which is refreshing.

• What is the biggest mistake that advertisers make in the blogosphere?

Not making their adverts relevant and interesting. Advertising is easy to screen out - it needs to be engaging and part of the 'content'.

• If you could start over what changes would you make in regards to blogging?

I'm not sure I would make changes. Blogging is a personal and creative outlet for me and I feel free to write what I want.

I would probably have maintained my personal blog a bit better during the last year, despite being bogged down in a writing project.

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How Did I Get Started In Software Development?

Scott Cowan, of the appropriately named Sleep Overrated blog, has tagged me, asking how I got started in software development. I say appropriately named, because it's now 3am and I'm facing a second night without sleep. sigh

Oh well, at least it means I have time to answer this.

• How old were you when you first started in programming?

Like Scott I started programming when I was very young. My father brought home a BBC Micro Model B (32kb RAM with a 2MHz 6502 processor) when I was around 8 or so. It wasn't long before I started programming with the builtin language BBC Basic which was a sophisticated version of Basic allowing structured programming with named procedures (at a time when MS basic was limited to effectively two character variable names).

After the BBC I moved onto the Amiga, a machine of beauty and elegance. I started with a dialect of basic called Amos, from which I learned to make operating system calls. The Amiga operating system was a joy to program with and I moved on to Motorola 68000 assembly language programming, building up the C structures required to make OS calls.

This occupied me until I went to university, where I started a law degree. I completed the first year, but dropped out in the second due to personal difficulties. I eventually settled down with a job in an independent builders merchant where I stayed for ten years becoming sales manager at one of the branches.

In early 2003 my interest in computers was rekindled and I started learning HTML and blogging.

• What was the first real program you wrote?

I started programming again as a hobby. A bunch of us were playing an online email game called Atlantis [1]. We figured that we could write a small program that consolidated our reports and helped us make decisions. At the time none of us had programmed for a while, and the only computer I had at the time (except for at work) was a PocketPC device.

So the only constraint on choosing a programming language was that it had a version that ran on the PocketPC. We had decided on Squeak when at the last minute someone suggested Python.

We started the project which we called Atlantibots. One of the guys (Rob McNuir I think he was called) created a parser that read in Atlantis reports and built a datastructure. I built various things on top of this, including maintaining a full map of all the explored area, and consolidating group reports.

My proudest part of the project was a simple implementation of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm that would generate movement orders for your units - calculating the quickest route to a destination.

The Atlantibots program is still available and still gets downloaded a few times a day. I loved programming in Python, and spent more time on that as my interest in Atlantis faded.

• What languages have you used since you started programming?

I've already mentioned Basic and 68k assembly language.

The language that I have overwhelmingly the most experience in is Python of course.

I've also dabbled in Javascript at various times. It's slightly odd, but if you ignore the indignities that browser's force upon you, it is quite a nice dynamic programming language.

In the last two years of working with IronPython on the .NET framework I've used C# quite a bit. I've had to read it a lot more than I've written it, but in writing the examples for IronPython in Action I've ended up writing quite a bit of C# and VB.NET. I quite like C#. It's no Python, but it is generally unsurprising and easy to learn.

• What was your first professional programming gig?

After programming in Python for a couple of years as a hobby, I decided I'd rather be programming than selling bricks. I expected to have to get a code monkey job programming in PHP or some other abomination for a couple of years in order to build up a career.

As it happened I was lucky. Resolver Systems were hiring, having started work on a .NET spreadsheet development application in around November 2005. They had chosen IronPython as the development language because as well as being suited to the application it fitted very well with the agile development processes they were using.

I was the fourth developer to join the team (in June 2006), and the first one with any experience of Python.

• If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Definitely. I really enjoy programming. I would probably have done a computer science degree had I known I enjoyed it so much, but then I probably wouldn't be programming in Python now.

• If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

How much of a difference Test Driven Development made to the way I think about and approach programming. I can't imagine developing anything of any complexity without an automated test framework, and I find TDD to be an ideal way to handle the micro-design of any project.

It takes a bit of discipline, but it pays off so quickly.

• What's the most fun you've ever had programming?

I'm still really enjoying working at Resolver Systems. I think Resolver One is a great product and I have some really good colleagues.

• Who am I calling out?

  • Craig Murphy
  • Jack Diederich
  • Andrzej Krzywda
  • Simon Brunning

[1]	Anthony Briggs maintains a Python version of Atlantis called PyBEM.

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London Geek Knight on IronPython

The London Geek Knights hold regular geek meetings on a range of subjects in the London Thoughtworks offices. They're open to all, and on 24th July I'll be presenting on IronPython and Silverlight.

According to the upcoming page, I will be will be giving a talk about how to bring IronPython and Silverlight together in a marriage of awesomeness.

See you there at 6pm on the 24th.

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PyCon UK: The Preparations Advance

PyCon UK is on 12th-14th September in Birmingham. This year I'm part of the planning committee, and the preparations are making good progress.

This will be the second PyCon UK conference. The first was a great success, with around 250 people attending (about 100 more than expected). This year we're expecting even more!

This year we will be doing several new things. The conference will start with a day of tutorials. We have several good tutorial proposals submitted already:

• Using ReportLab
• Developing with IronPython
• Working with generators
• Testing
• Beginning Python
• Django

Each tutorial is a half day session, except for 'Beginning Python' which will be a whole day (although possibly packaged in two sessions).

There are possibly more I don't know about, and we're still looking for more proposals.

We will also have sprints after the conference. We're trying to arrange the sprints now, and they'll be a great opportunity to learn about and contribute to some popular Python frameworks and applications (and possibly to Python itself). We also hope to have at least one sprinting tutorial on the tutorial day to provide a gentle introduction.

The call for talks has already gone out, and it's a nice friendly audience so submit your talk proposals soon!

Unfortunately I won't be at EuroPython this year. I was really hoping to go (I've never been yet), but I'm not committing to anything else until the book is finished! Next year I won't have any conflict as PyCon UK will be hosting EuroPython (which is kind of a shame as I'd love to go to Vilnius).

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Dabs.com and Trying to Get My Laptop Fixed

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about trying to get Fujitsu-Siemens to honour the warranty on my laptop. The laptop DVD drive fell out and (then later!) stopped working altogether. Unfortunately I reported the problem two days after the warranty expired and Fujitsu stated that they no longer had any obligation to help me and referred me back to Dabs.com where I purchased the laptop from.

Under UK consumer law (which I believe is stronger than in the US), good have to be fit for purpose and be free from manufacturing defects. If an item doesn't meet this standard then you have recourse to the small claims court for redress; against the person who sold you the item (Dabs in my case rather than Fujitsu). Reasonable wear and tear do not give you cause for redress, but offering a time limited warranty does not remove these obligations - whether or not they are discovered or reported within the warranty period.

I went back to Dabs.com and explained the situation. At first they said they would arrange for the laptop to be fixed and gave me a number to ring. This turned out to be the number for Fujitsu-Siemens - who still refused to help. I guess that Dabs hadn't actually read what I'd told them in the first place, because on 'discovering' that Fujitsu weren't going to fix the laptop they claimed that I was responsible for the damage:

Please be advised that the warranty agreement is now void due to physical damage which has been caused to the goods in question - whilst under your duty of care. We are unable to draw any other conclusions from the information that has been presented to us. If you have any further information that you can offer regarding this matter, then please do email it to us and we will investigate the matter further.

My reply went last week, along with copies of the letters to Fujitsu:

Please note that there are no external signs of any 'physical damage' that could possibly have caused this. The likely cause is inadequate fixing internally.

I have owned several laptops that have been subjected to heavier use (this laptop is almost entirely used by my wife in the house - (a fact she will readily attest to) and none of them have suffered any major faults - let alone the CD drive falling out!

So far I've had no response and it looks like I will have to take this to court. Fortunately I have friends who are solicitors and can give me free legal advice.

I'm a bit disappointed that Dabs are letting it go this far though.

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Report from the Expert Zone Conference

I've just returned home after a week away attending and speaking at the Expert Zone and RuPy conferences. I'm beginning to get sick of hotel rooms (poor me) and it will even be nice to return to work.

Whilst at Expert Zone I met Roy Singham, one of the founders and the chairman of Thoughtworks. We talked about Python and Thoughtworks in London. Roy is concerned that Thoughtworks has recently acquired a reputation as a Ruby shop. In fact Thoughtworks still make about 70% of their income from Java and .NET projects, and whilst they have a very strong Ruby team in the US they also have a strong Python team in the UK (and many developers who like both - which is as it should be).

Roy wants to emphasise that Thoughtworks likes Python and prefer dynamic languages in general - not just Ruby. To this end he has appointed Simon Brunning [1] as the officially unofficial 'Python representative' at Thoughtworks. In this vein he has also agreed to be one of the sponsors for PyCon UK which is great.

Expert Zone is a community developers conference in Sweden, hosted by Cornerstone. The conference covers a broad range of topics, but the attendees (~250 this year) reflect the fact that Microsoft has a strong presence in Sweden.

Many of the talks were in Swedish, but I attended Joe Armstrong's talk on Erlang (for the third time in two months - poor me again!) and Ola Bini talking about JRuby. It was interesting to note how similar Ola's talk on JRuby was to mine on IronPython. His JRuby and Swing demo was virtually identical to my IronPython and Windows Forms demo. The same was true of his example of embedding JRuby in Java and mine on embedding IronPython in C#. Particularly gratifying was to note that his definition of a pure object oriented language fitted Python without exception. (Unlike languages like C# and Java where types, functions and methods may not be first class objects and there are primitives that aren't objects either.)

My talk ("IronPython and Dynamic Languages on .NET" - a cut down version of my ACCU Talk) went ok. Unfortunately the room was changed at the last minute, meaning at least a couple of people who wanted to attend the talk missed it. There were about thirty people present and they were a very different audience to the ACCU crowd. At ACCU the audience was split roughly fifty-fifty between Python and .NET programmers, at Expert Zone only one of my listeners had used Python. Although they seemed to be largely listening intently, they were much quieter than the ACCU rabble. This could be a cultural thing, but is more likely to be the fact that English wasn't their first language. Unfortunately I 'optimised' my talk for an hour when I actually had fifty minutes (my fault). This meant that I had to speak fast (bad) and although I could show embedding IronPython I had to skip showing them Silverlight.

For those who attended, or are just interested, here are some links:

• IronPython and Dynamic Languages on .NET
• IronPython in Action Homepage
• Embedding IronPython 2 in .NET Applications: Examples with Downloads
• IronPython and Silverlight 2 Articles and Examples
• IronPython Articles
• The IronPython Cookbook

Whilst at Expert Zone I was fortunate to meet some great people - like Julie Lerman (independent writer and expert on the Entity Framework), Christian Weyer (who will also be at DDD Ireland) and Dan North from Thoughtworks.

Thanks to the organisers, particularly Mats Rydin and Niclas Nilsson - organiser and chair of the dynamic languages track respectively.

[1]	The eponymous leader and organiser of the London Python group.

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What Fujitsu-Siemens Think 'Customer Service' Means

Executive summary: don't buy a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop if you anticipate the possibility of ever having to use the warranty. In January 2007 I bought an Amilo Pa1510 laptop to replace an ageing IBM Thinkpad T30 - a move that was a mistake in any case as the Thinkpad was the better machine...

After about six months the DVD drive started to fall out of the laptop. As it always worked fine when slotted back in I wasn't too worried. Soon after that I switched to a Macbook Pro anyway and the Amilo became my wife's laptop. As she didn't use the CD drive it wasn't a problem - until December when I was away and the drive now doesn't work at all.

Straight after that we moved house, and I finally contacted the Fujitsu help desk on January 22nd, which turned out to be two days after the one year 'limited warranty' expired. The 'customer service' man on the phone told me I would have to write in. Which I duly did. On the 3rd of March I received a reply to my letter of the 24th of January. Here is the salient part of the reply from Sue Young on their 'help' desk:

I do occasionally hear from customers who like yourself are outside the warranty period - be it a day, a week a month or even longer - and have experienced a failure that they would like us to fix free of charge. We would dearly like to assist these customers as we are no unsympathetic (sic) but as a business we have to question the practicality of this.

They may not be unsympathetic, but they are bloody useless. The laptop failed in a serious way inside the warranty period, but I reported it two days late and they refuse to honour the warranty. I wrote another letter surprised that they didn't feel a moral obligation to repair their failed laptop and reminding them of the UK consumer law. It ended:

As I'm sure you can understand, for an item that cost so much I can't let Fujitsu get away without living up to its obligations. I will be eagerly awaiting your response and documenting this conversation on my blog. I have to say that so far I am disappointed with the level of 'customer service' offered and couldn't recommend in good faith anyone purchasing a Fujitsu Siemens laptop if this apparently simple problem can't be resolved.

I will be taking this up with Dabs.com, where I bought the laptop from. In the past I have found their customer service very good but have never had to resolve a problem like this with them.

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Twittering and Aggregating RSS Streams

I've finally succumbed: http://www.twitter.com/voidspace

I played around with Pownce, and I really liked the Adobe Air client, but I don't think anyone was listening to me. There are several people I know using twitter.

I'm using the Windows Twiteroo client and it's pretty good.

What I'd really like to do is combine onto this website [1] (with a single feed of course) my RSS feeds from places like Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, my Google Reader Shared Items and so on. I could just use the Planet aggregator with a template, but a UI to add notes would be nice. (Even with all these feeds combined it would still only be a few items a day.) Feedparser is so easy to use that it would be a nice simple project, but I keep getting distracted by having to write a book...

I blogged about Onaswarm recently, which does aggregate these 'social feeds' into a single 'lifestream'. It even does Facebok feeds and uses OpenID - both of which are cool. I want it on my website and looking like my website though...

[1]	Actually I'd like to create a separate 'link blog' which would include my Twitter feed and any del.icio.us bookmarks I mark with a 'shared' tag.

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More Interesting Snippets

There has been a rash of great blog entries recently. In lieu of doing a real blog entry myself, here are some quotes from a few that caught my attention:

Jeff Attwood (summarising Steve Yegge), with Size is the Enemy:

Lines of code are, and always have been, the enemy. More lines of code means more to read, more to understand, more to troubleshoot, more to debug.

He cites Martin Fowler and Bruce Eckel as examples of people who have made the switch to dynamic languages as part of the solution to this problem:

A lot of incredibly smart people like Steve present a compelling case that the grass really is greener on the dynamic side.

Bruce Eckel's entry on why he is not upgrading to Vista includes a point I've not heard before. The End of the Vista Experiment:

I'm still tied to Windows because certain software tools only work on Windows. Although OpenOffice is great, its word processor can't handle documents the size of a book (initially it would crash, now it doesn't but it runs so slowly it's unusable). MS Word is still the only word processor that can produce camera-ready documents that are book-sized (Yes, I do know about all the two-step approaches: "just write it using this one tool, and lay it out using this other one." It's only efficient when you say it like that, not in reality).

I have no axe to grind here, but this is the first time I've heard anyone say that. I've just bought Pages for the Mac and it seems to handle the word documents I use fine, but IronPython in Action is being written with one document per chapter.

Bruce Schneier has a very insightful (and pleasingly short) blog entry on airport security: Airport Security Study

A team at the Harvard School of Public Health could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks. They also found no evidence to suggest that making passengers take off their shoes and confiscating small items prevented any incidents.

""Even without clear evidence of the accuracy of testing, the Transportation Security Administration defended its measures by reporting that more than 13 million prohibited items were intercepted in one year," the researchers added. "Most of these illegal items were lighters."

This is where the TSA has it completely backwards. The goal isn't to confiscate prohibited items. The goal is to prevent terrorism on airplanes. When the TSA confiscates millions of lighters from innocent people, that's a security failure. The TSA is reacting to non-threats. The TSA is reacting to false alarms. Now you can argue that this level of failures is necessary to make people safer, but it's certainly not evidence that people are safer.

Bruce has repeatedly asked whether there is any evidence that these ridiculous security measures are actually doing anything worthwhile. I love his message that we should refuse to be terrorised.

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame and a fantastic blogger, but off his form recently) on why we blog: Work Pleasure

It made me wonder if other people get an actual physical pleasure from doing work, at least the kind where you accomplish something, no matter how unimportant. [...]

You have to believe most bloggers have few if any actual readers. The writers are in it for other reasons. Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn. All you get is the pleasure of a completed task.

And finally... there are some great new things happening 'on the head' with Python. Lawrence Oluyede tracks recent changes in Python SVN: Updates from Python SVN, Part 19. Lots of interesting tidbits there so I won't attempt to summarise.

(That was a week without blogging - over the last three years I have averaged six posts a week!)

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Interesting Stuff

A mixed bag.

You must read this fantastic review of upgrading from Vista to Windows XP:

• Review: Windows XP

It is wonderfully written and ends:

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal.

An interesting quote from the latest blog entry of Resolver developer Jonathan Hartley:

I'm a firm believer that the winners write history, and have on more than one occasion pondered the lofty ideals of the founding fathers as a superb marketing spin to popularise an act of treason.

Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid Test 2! (A fairly stringent web standards compliance test.) Firefox doesn't do that (well not sure about version 3, but version 2 doesn't.):

• IE8 and Acid2: Milestone

Steve Yegge has posted a long blog entry on why code size is a bad thing (and touting Javascript as the 'Next Big Language' again...):

• Code's Worst Enemy

Most of that entry is a very long winded way of saying 'code is a liability' (which I vehemently agree with). In trying to track down the origin of this phrase I came across this blog entry: Code is a Liability. It starts:

I have thought for a long time that code is liability, and that viewing code as a liability has the power to transform our art.

One of his commentors disagrees and replies with a parody:

I have thought for a long time that legs are liability, and that viewing legs as a liability has the power to transform our gait.

It is hilarious: Sadly, most companies have to deal with heaping, shaggy mounds of legs. [...] They have to be reviewed (hopefully in an efficient way like pairing). [...] Having more legs will typically slow development, and will certainly reduce your ability to walk.

Tim answers in the comments with what I think is a great summary:

I didn't say code was bad. I said it is a liability. By that I mean that it costs, and that the costs recur, and that the costs are proportionate to the volume of the code.

Jeff Attwood also has a great blog entry: The Great Browser JavaScript Showdown.

This makes use of the new WebKit JavaScript benchmark: SunSpider. WebKit is the open source rendering engine behind Safari, and using SunSpider we can (apparently) get a good idea of the comparative performance of JavaScript across browsers. Firefox is worse than you might imagine (I only knock it because I love it)...

In the last two iterations (four weeks) at Resolver, we have completed 32 user stories and defects. I'm pretty sure that this is a record for us and is a sign that the core functionality has solidified. I'm working on the find dialog (not really a dialog though) at the moment. There should be a fresh beta, with some great usability improvements, out very soon.

I had to blog about this video: Bubble 2.0. I'm sure a lot of you have seen it, but if you haven't it is very funny.

Statlib, a Python stats library that has come out of the phenomenally successful Python Project for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, has changed license. It is now available under the MIT license which means we can (and probably will) use it with Resolver.

Parrot 0.5.1 (the Virtual Machine intended to run Perl 6, but also targeting many other dynamic languages) is now out. The Python for parrot implementation is called 'Pynie' and the release notes include: punie and pynie language implementations using PCT and NQP whatever that means... It sounds like progress but Perl6 is still well behind Python 3...

Speaking of Perl, there was another very interesting post by Jeff Atwood a couple of days ago: Nobody Cares What Your Code Looks Like.

This is a look at the dilemma (and maintenance nightmare) that the Bugzilla team are facing - because their codebase is written in Perl...

Oh and some personal news to finish with. I've just had the mortgage agreement through for my first house. If everything goes well (a big if...) then I will be moving house in January...

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Webfaction, rest2web, Python London and Reportlab

Last night was the London Python meetup. These are still organised by Simon Brunning, but since his transformation into a Thoughtworker [1] they have metamorphosed from piss-ups to proper presentations. Many thanks to Simon for his efforts.

My friend Zi Makki, a refugee from the .NET community who has an interest in Python, was there. His presence made me aware how many less suits there are at Python gatherings than .NET gatherings.

There were several presentations. The main one was by Andy of Reportlab. Many moons ago it was Andy who kickstarted the London Python community meetings, but I don't think I've ever actually been in the same room as him since I started attending. He gave a guided tour through some of the things that Reportlab do as a company, a lot of which you can do yourself with their Open Source PDF Library. They make heavy use of Django, but their 'on-the-fly' creation of bespoke PDF brochures in fraction of a second was extremely impressive.

We'd love to use their charting and report generating packages in Resolver, but we'd have to replace the C dependencies with .NET equivalents.

Remi from Webfaction was there. I only managed to speak to him briefly, but this is an excellent lead into telling you about the new deals from Webfaction. Webfaction are the hosting company I use, and they are extremely reliable and with excellent support for Python. They have just revamped their website and their hosting plans. You can now host unlimited domains and run unlimited numbers of applications on all their hosting plans!!

More importantly, their new website is built using rest2web! This is one of the most impressive rest2web created sites I've seen yet - very nice.

Which leads me to a brief mention of the presentation I did yesterday... on rest2web.

I'm afraid I'm one of the people who overran with my lightning talk. I learned a couple of things though. First of all, it is very hard to summarise what rest2web does in five minutes. Secondly, it is a long time since I have done a clean install of rest2web. Most of the sites I maintain were configured a while ago and I build an updated site by double clicking on a batch file. I did my talk from my Mac (ooh Leopard - shiny!) and so had a bit of a feel of how a newbie might feel.

The result - it's not too bad. Perhaps not as brain-dead straightforward as it should/could be, but not very difficult. The requirement for the macros.py file to exist if specified in the config file might stump someone who just tries to copy the config from the examples and doesn't know what files he needs. There is a great Quick Start Guide though!

Menno also gave a lightning talk, on his excellent looking IMAPClient Module module (which ought to replace imaplib in the standard library). Embarrassingly (and annoyingly), Menno spent about half the time preparing his talk, was much clearer, had better slides and didn't overrun!

Anyway, whilst I'm rambling... I had a great experience with Amazon.com. Living in the UK I rarely order from the US, but they had some Douglas Adams audio books that weren't available here, so back in March I bought two of them. Unfortunately I didn't listen to one of them until last week and CD 6 has a bizarre error (no visual defects) and the first ten minutes are just repeated on a loop through the CD. Their returns system wouldn't let me do anything with it because the order was so old, so I sent a 'complaint' email in. The first response was a form letter - "because the order is older than three months you can post the item back to us for a partial refund". I was really annoyed at this and sent another email to them insisting that as it was faulty I wanted a replacement, not a partial refund. I got a prompt reply saying that the item was discontinued, so they would give me a full refund and as I lived in the UK I could keep it rather than returning it! Now that is good customer service. Disgruntled customer turned into enthused customer.

Oh, and in my Ebay fire sale I made over six hundred and fifty pounds! It must be Christmas shopping madness because someone paid me one hundred and fifty pounds for Vista Ultimate. At that price I might buy a few new and sell those as well...

[1]	He's still coding in Java though.

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