Fourth article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. In this chapter, I am to reimplement the simple registration bot described in part II using techniques introduced in part III (Python, Twisted and FICS block mode). This version makes far better foundation for complicated multitask bot, would somebody want to write one.

In fact, you are to see some parts of WatchBot core here.

Firefox3 came with so called awesome bar. When I was young, I was taught: don’t praise yourself, if you are worth it, others will do, if you are not, you may make people laughing (and referred to Luke 14:7–11).

But it inspired me to write about some other bar, which in my opinion really deserves to be called awesome. This one:

Well, I am exaggerating a bit. But …

I am maintaining some small Firefox extension (SmTuning – my bunch of improvements to the SchemingMind web interface). To make things smooth, I tested it on some Firefox3 betas. It was a pain due to the famous insecure updates problem. Resolving it costed some time and effort, but I am glad with the solution.

Then Firefox3 final arrived and … everything stopped to work. My scripts and stylesheets were not loaded anymore, bundled images failed to display. Ups. I resolved this too, the fix was trivial, but here I feel something is terribly wrong. And is scheduled to be a big problem in the future.

Let’s go through both those problems.

I’ve just read an explanation why there is no Django’s blog application. The article is interesting, but – as many monolithic vs component-based comparisons – misses one very important point.

Who is choosing a blog software? Someone, who is starting to blog. Who is picking CMS? Someone, who is starting a website. Who is selecting a shop software? Someone, who wants to create a shop. And so on.

It has two important consequences.