Category: General

I am privileged to be a part of a new website dedicated to helping people who love Morocco to discuss issues important to that country and society. The first set of articles on Talk Morocco revolve around freedom of the press, and I am among the contributers.

A little while ago I allowed a chapter from one of my books to be reposted in the most recent edition of an independent art and culture ‘zine from Tucson called Dove & Snake.

As a thank you, I have been allowed to offer a free copy of the issue to one of you, my blog readers. I’m not good at contest creation, so I’ll keep this simple. The person whose comment I deem the wittiest will receive a free copy. The comment must be made directly on this blog, not on a site that syndicates my posts like Facebook or LinkedIn or something else, and must be made no later than Wednesday, December 9th at the totally random time of 12 noon my local time. I will choose my favorite and will contact that person directly to get mailing address details (so be sure to use a real email address when you comment if you want to be considered).

So, have at it. The funnier the better. You may post an anecdote, a joke, an observation, or whatever comes to mind as long as it is family/work safe.

I’ve volunteered to give our friend Bryce a hand cleaning up the pages about X in the Ubuntu wiki. One thing we would really like to do is focus these particular pages more directly on power users, testers, packagers and bug triagers. However, there are other end users who sometimes browse these pages and we don’t want to leave them high and dry. Ultimately, we would like to link them to appropriate documentation on help.ubuntu.com. Could the person responsible for the X documentation there please contact me? I have a few things I would like to discuss with you and see if we can coordinate.

Daniel Holbach just posted this on his blog. As a member of the Ubuntu Regional Membership Board for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, I thought I would share his comments and help him out a bit.

One thing I really like about Ubuntu is that all kinds of contributions to Ubuntu are valued and recognised through Ubuntu membership. We have several hundreds of Ubuntu members already who have all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of different areas of expertise. They are united by having made significant and sustained contributions to Ubuntu. There are a number of myths about Ubuntu membership that we want to debunk.

If you come across somebody who’s uncertain about Ubuntu membership, tell them:

• ALL kinds of contributions are welcome, not only technical contributions.
• Launchpad Karma, number of uploads, etc. CAN be a determining factor, but they don’t need to be.
• There is no strict time limit for “having been around years before being able to apply”.
• Apart from the Regional Membership Boards, the Edubuntu Council, MOTU Council and Kubuntu Council approve membership too.
• Endorsements of fellow team members are important. Be a team player.
• If you’re unsure if your contributions are significant and sustained, ask your team mates.
• Read the Membership documentation. Together with the RMBs the CC just did a number of changes to the Membership document, I hope it’s much clearer now.

As far as I am concerned, the most important factors for applicants are these:

• Follow directions when creating your wiki page and put all the requested information on it to make it as easy as possible for the membership board to know what you have been doing, how, and with whom.
• Get as many testimonials from others involved in those activities. If you have few or no testimonials, or if they are only marginally positive, this will hurt your application. We want to hear from people who are involved in the same project because we know they are best able to judge the quality of your contributions. If no one knows you, at least by name or nickname, then you haven’t been involved long enough or done enough for official membership in the community to be granted reasonably–give it a little more time and keep up the good work.

Reviews have begun to appear for VMware Cookbook, written by Ryan Troy with some assistance from me. The comments I am seeing have been positive.

Comments have appeared today from Meera Subbarao’s Java Blog, Learnxpress, and Amazon.com.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit ended last night and I’m on my way home. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is going to be an incredible release and I’m proud to have participated a little bit in the process. I’ll be writing more about it as time passes. For now, enjoy the group photo (I’m in the second row, just behind the guy holding the right end of the Ubuntu banner. Click the photo to go to the Flickr page where it was uploaded and where you will find a larger version available.

I had one of my European colleagues say to me last night that he feels like he has picked up many aspects of the American accent while here in Dallas. I have spent a large amount of time with my British, Irish, Australian and other European friends and it seems I have picked up a few of their vocal mannerisms and accent quirks. That’s kind of how community works, isn’t it? We each give to and take from one another, ending up with a conglomeration that is mutually comprehensible and beneficial.

I am sitting at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas and I had a sudden realization. No one knows the “correct” way to pronounce “Ubuntu.” Everyone, community members, developers, Canonical employees, Mark Shuttleworth, Jono Bacon, we all pronounce it a little bit differently. I’ve heard eww-boon-too, eww-bun-too, yoo-boon-too, yoo-bun-too, oo-bun-too, oo-boon-too and a few more that I can’t figure out how to phoneticize.

I’m at the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit (UDS). I like how Popey introduces the event, so I won’t bother doing more in this post than linking to his blog, quoting a bit of his post, and then heading out of my hotel room to hang out with people. As with him, Canonical is also sponsoring my attendance.

My friends sometimes ask me what happens at UDS, so I thought I’d write a little summary each day of what’s happened. I’ll try to keep it fairly short, although I appear to have failed so far with this particular post.

Firstly I guess I should explain what UDS is to those who don’t know. Every 6 months the Ubuntu project puts out a new release. We just released Ubuntu 9.10 (code name Karmic Koala) and the next release is due in April next year. It’ll be called Ubuntu 10.04 (code name Lucid Lynx). UDS is the Ubuntu Developer Summit where a couple of hundred people get together and work on plans for what will be in the next release. Some of that is already known, but much of it gets blueprinted in this week.

There is a publicly accessible schedule outlining what specifications will be discussed where and when. There are separate colour coded ‘tracks’ to follow, and I’ll probably spend most of my time in the Community one although others do look interesting too. It’s always a tricky thing to pick and choose which sessions to go to, and so I always miss out on something. I’d rather it was that way than loads of sessions I’m not interested in though!

UDS-L (L for Lucid) takes place from 16th to 20th November 2009 at the Renaissance Hotel, Dallas, Texas. Canonical (who sponsor the Ubuntu project and organise the summit) kindly sponsored my attendance here in Dallas which includes flight, hotel accommodation and food.

Years ago I purchased a copy of the very first edition of Learning Python.It was a small book, about 350 pages, but in 1999 when it came out, it was one of the best introductions to the language that existed. I hadn’t picked up my copy for some time, but I remember well how useful it was when I first bought it. When O’Reilly offered me a free review copy of Learning Python, fourth edition, I figured the differences between the two editions would primarily consist of updates to the content based on the differences in Python release versions, and that I wouldn’t likely learn much more from the new edition. I was wrong, and I will explain how and why below.

This book is HUGE. It weighs in at over 1100 pages and is filled with clear explanations, interesting history, and the most useful description of the foundations of the Python programming language that I have seen. The material was developed by the author, Mark Lutz, over the last decade, during which he has taught hundreds of seminars introducing Python. Lutz compiled the new edition based on the materials taught in a three day training class, complete with quizzes and meaningful exercises. While Lutz was one of the two original authors of the first edition, he is now the sole author of the book and it is obvious that his extensive experience teaching seminars has refined his presentation of Python in ways that will benefit readers of this book. The understanding of student needs shows clearly in the text, which focuses on the core of the language.

Learning Python is based on the new 3.x series of the Python language, but points out the differences between it and the still-supported and sometimes incompatible earlier 2.6 edition, so whichever version of the language you are learning or require you will find the information you need to begin here. Some may ask why cover the old version when the new one has so many improvements, but the answer is simply that there is a lot of legacy code that is not going to be updated soon and so people will need to support that code, which is often incompatible with Python 3.x without some changes.

The book covers many topics, none of which seem unimportant or superfluous. While the page counts seems quite daunting, a closer examination shows there is no need to be intimidated. The page count does not add complexity or difficulty, but actually gives room for clearer and more complete descriptions and definitions alongside practice questions that students will find very useful. The topics include all of the obvious foundational needs starting with history, how to run programs and use some common editors. It moves to core data types and operations, spending several pages clearly defining and describing each and how they are used, before introducing statements and syntax on page 261. I like how the differences between 2.6 and 3.x are clearly shown, such as the change from a print statement in 2.6 to a print function in 3.x and how either is implemented and used as well as the reasoning behind the change. Functions are introduced and discussed, as are modules, classes, object oriented programming, exceptions, and several advanced topics. There are two appendices covering installation and configuration and giving the solutions to the exercises in the book

It has been a long time since I did any programming. My life took a different path. This book has reminded me of how fun it is to write and read code in Python and made me wonder how I might find or create opportunities to return programming to my busy life (but this time around, if I make the time to write anything, it will be in Python 3.x). This book is why.

Lutz has also authored O’Reilly’s Programming Python, which was explicitly designed to be a follow up text to this one, which I have read and which also sits on my bookshelf, but which I have not reviewed (I bought that one a couple years ago and at the time was not writing book reviews.–if there is interest, I’ll review it at a later time).

Disclosures: I bought the first edition, but was given this fourth edition free by O’Reilly as a review copy, I also write for O’Reilly.