One of the nice answers to various doubts about scalability of Ruby powered web solutions is the Thin web server, that glues together Mongrel parser, EventMachine I/O library and Rack for the interface.

I guess not many Ruby and ROR pro’s use Windows, thus if you have Ruby installation on Windows, occasionally you stumble upon something that doesn’t run on your computer right away, as was the case with Thin.

Well it turns out that at the time of writing this post, you have to install an old version of the EventMachine library, namely the latest binary version, and Thin must be installed from source depository and not from the gem server:


gem install eventmachine -v0.8.1
gem install thin --source http://code.macournoyer.com


Unsatisfied by the spam filtering results of the buit-in functionality of my current email client, I decided to use third party program. It narrowed down to making a choice from the trio of SpamBayes, POPfile and K9. Used K9 in the past and it worked great, and I don’t mind it wasn’t being developed in last two years or so, however it would require more tweaking to my current email program than the other two. That left only two to choose from.
And why did I end up choosing SpamBayes?  You guessed right. Because it is written in Python.

I liked how more universal POPfile seems to be, moreover it has better support for my current email client (Pocomail). But…it is written in Perl. SpamBayes in Python. Which means, if I will find a desire, I could write some little scriptie for SpamBayes in Python, or maybe even learn from its sources one day.
Scary how that programming language bias works.

Spent few hours rewriting the four years old csv plugin for PDesk. (Few more hours to go to move more towards the goal of how it shall be looking in the final stage, which means it will be filling my free time for next one or two weeks.)
What really bothers me, is how such an easy format as CSV (comma separated values) can be non-standard. Just about anybody out there has a different implementation. I can live with some using semicolon for delimiter and others comma, but I used to believe that enclosing all fields in quotation marks (example line: “1st field”;”2nd field”;”3rd field”)  was pretty much standard. Not Microsoft with their Excel. They always have to have some extra. Or maybe it’s just that things changed, Wikipedia article supports the same implementation as MSExcel. Excel being widely used, I have to go mainstream of course, which means rewrite of the plugin format.
At least Excel dialect is supported in the Python CSV library.

After some massive headscratching, I have chosen Beginning Python - from novice to professional from Magnus Lie Hetland as the book to start from. Still keeping other resources at hand, to name just a few: Alan Gauld pages, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, and beginners guides on Python wiki.

Why Beginning Python? The style is fine and readable. It includes good beginners reference, but it also goes a bit deeper. Ten various projects are included, the most comprehensive ones being designing your own game in Python or writing own bulletin board or filesharing application. It seems to be well balanced on theoretical and practical sides, and it doesn’t neglect any particular area, it’s all there, from command line over to GUI and web apps. And still for beginners! What could one wish more for?

On Python tutor list, someone quoted Saint Thomas Aquinas for a response to a question, which ONE book shall one get to start with Python: “Beware of the man of one book.” I have chosen ONE book to start with, and proud of it. Why buy three? My attention would slip away and sooner or later, I will end in lesson 5, as usually happens. If one has attention deficit problems, acquiring just one book helps to stay on track by not diverting attention. As the real question is not whether one or three books are better to start learning from, the real question is, “how to persist”?

While I know about plenty of CMS apps, I have chosen Wordpress over all the others just because it is easy to setup, has plenty of plugins available and allows for comfortable blogging while at the same time allowing for a static website structure. I will only have a handful of static pages here, rest will be blog, so there is no need for a full-fledged CMS capabilities. I could go with Drupal that I like very much, but it lacks on certain blogging features. Wordpress also has much more themes to choose from.