David Czarnecki proposes the same solution as Wari did for multiple categorization in a *blos*xom. I can see how this would work, but it seems ugly. Part of the the blosxom way is to use the filesystem hierarchy for categorization. So now the proposal is to have category information in two places, partially in the filesystem hierarchy and partion in the meta-data for the entry. I could live with this if we stopped using the filesystem for categorization and just looked at the meta-data, but then you're kind of not really a blosxom anymore.

It's Article URLs week at Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman's blog. I'm just finding it at the end, but this is a good series of posts critiquing URLs at various sites. It's good food for thought for weblog and microcontent software developers.

Patrick Logan weighed in with another Richard Kelsey paper (I started on Wednesday). Not only that, he called into question the use of virtual machines at all.

Virtual machines get you portability, the ability to do JIT compilation (although this could be done in native code apps), and security (via sandboxes, etc). It seems to me that the portability argument is getting weaker. I'm interested in a open source modern language (define that however you want). If I have to generate native code then it seems to me that for the environments that I care about the only ISA's that matter are x86, debatably Power/PowerPC, Itanium, and ARM (PDA's and phones). Do we still need virtual machines? It's an interesting question.

Fredrik Lundh posted a list of the various modules that were added between the last few releases of Python. By the length of the lists, it looks like Python 2.3 is a pretty major upgrade in the library arena. For someone like me, this is a great help to understanding what's in what version. I keep putting 2.2 stuff in to pyblosxom and Wari has to keep cleaning it up so it runs on 2.1. He's really going to be upset once I get 2.3 installed...

While you're at Fredrik's page, check out his "Stupid element tricks" posts as well.

Wari cut the code for pyblosxom 0.8rc1. It's looking really good. I hope to go back to doing serious work on pyblosxom in a month or so, and this release provides a great base to work from.

Dave Pollard has written a piece on the blogging process that's making its way around. You can tell by the number of folks that have his flowchart diagram embedded in their posts (I'll spare you). More interesting to me was the stuff after that about enriching the communication medium. This is part of the stuff that's left to do, and it's a big space. Together with Julie's experiences with MovableType, it makes me realize how far this new medium can and will go.

A few months ago, Julie, my wife started asking me about getting her own blog. I thought this was a cool idea, but I didn't think that pyblosxom was a great fit for her. My setup is basically cobbled together because I'm hacking on pyblosxom and blogging at the same time. So I said "let me look into some easier blogging packages". In the intervening months, she's periodically dropped small hints about the blog, but I've been too busy with my current project (which I hope to be able to talk about soon) to do a good job of looking at packages. So two weeks ago when she asked me, guilt took over, and I said "let me see what I can do". I went and downloaded Moveable Type, used apt to install a few missing Perl packages, hacked my Apache httpd.conf, and inside of 15 minutes was up and running . Now I *really* felt bad, because it was so easy and I could have done it long ago. I turned over the administration console and said "here you go", and turned back to being a short term workaholic.

Then the posts started coming out. And boy was I proud. She's covering her life as a mom, her reflections on life, and wrestling with the question of what means to live a truly spiritual life. Many of her entries are simple stories of her/our life. I already knew the facts, but her telling has been wonderful. For years and years, Julie has wanted to write, for now it seems that she's found her outlet.

Let me leave you with pointers to some of my favorite posts so far. Most of them are simple tales about our kids, and maybe its just the fatherly instincts in me that make them the favorites. Here they are: "It says WWW....", "My first fish eye", and "WWW continued....". The last post, "I want you", speaks for itself.

I hope you enjoy the blog as much as I have. She's the one who's writing about stuff that counts.

Now the rest of us who have been hearing about the MacOS X Rendezvous Bonanza have a chance to get in on the action. The folks at Swampwolf have produced howl an open source Rendezvous/ZeroConf library that works on Windows and Linux. They've release the source on SourceForge under the BSD license.