Anyone out there know the best way to deal with broken keycaps on a Thinkpad? A book fell on my X20 today and broke off the ~/` keycap. I hope I don't have to replace the entire keyboard....

From the new Python Owns us:

Two guru-class Python programmers have started weblogging, namely Jeremy Hylton and Barry Warsaw. (Barry's weblog is named aptly "Blogsturbation".) They are both members of the so called PythonLabs at Zope Corporation. PythonLabs is the people working for the core Python at Zope. I think they mostly spend their time on Zope's own projects, but the other significant part of their job is to improve Python, one of the not-so-secret-weapons of Zope. PythonLabs itself is of course another weapon of the Zope Corporation.

I like James:

On the Unix Hater's Handbook:

Heh. Some of us suspect the same thing happens with programming languages in our more cynical moments....

A programming language is a wheel...

On Wiki's:

I think the population of willing posters to a hypothetical gorgeous Wiki would still be small. It's not the presentation that's the issue here. There's something simpler afoot here, and it's something that plagues web software in general. People like rich client software. People tend to not like basic editing tools - which is what Wikis use. Combine a Wiki with decent posting tools, and I bet you would see more collaboration. Combine it with more pleasant layouts, and I bet nothing much would change

I think that this is an important recognition. I think that we are going to see more and more applications that rely on internet connectivity in order to be able to do something useful. Regardless of what you believe about "social software", I think that social software is going to need rich client side apps. Because of this, we need ways to build rich cross platform internet enabled apps. Either that or we need to vastly improve the browser UI experience via things like Lazlo. As far as I can tell, Lazlo uses Flash + ECMAScript to implement rich client side GUI's and uses Flash's XML capabilities to talk to a server. I've done a bit of this (ad hoc) and it has some nice possibilities. The place where it runs into trouble is that it can't talk to the host operating system or applications very well. The Flash apps are still in the jail of the browser window. This will certainly be a huge step up for web only apps, but it's not going to make it possible to do integration with Windows/MacOS/Linux apps, and that's what I'm more interested in.