I've read quite a few of articles claiming that blog software is very simple and that one can quickly create his (or her) own blog in a day or two.

To verify this claim (well, building my own blog with - say - Django or Pylons is a tempting idea), I dumped notes of what my current blog software is doing for me.

I recently decided to try GTD (Getting Things Done) to make my life more organized. As I use 3 different computers, web application seemed to be a logical choice. After reading a few reviews, and briefly testing five sites, I finally settled on Nozbe, mainly because it seemed as a place which may help me to learn GTD instead of just making it possible to use it.

It is too early for any conclusions, but in general I like Nozbe while I am collecting my tasks and checking my ToDo's. But since I put noticeable number of tasks there, I find it difficult to do a solid review. No way to see the whole thing (and it is not only a Nozbe problem, other sites also do not seem to offer much help here).

So I wrote a tool which helps me to see all my projects and tasks together and at once.

Fifth article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. In this chapter, I am to discuss different methods a bot may use to communicate with players.

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.

Third article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. In this chapter, I am to discuss the proper way of issuing FICS commands and analyzing the replies obtained from FICS. I will also introduce my preferred framework.

I needed to link some page explaining what inlineCallbacks and deferredGenerator are, and ... failed to find one. So here is a short explanation and the example code (working scripts).

Code size comparison: raw deferreds - 29 lines, deferredGenerator - 26 lines, inlineCallbacks - 17 lines (non-empty lines, lookup function measured).

It turns out amazingly uneasy to make a screenshot on which the mouse cursor (pointer) is visible. No one of the typical Linux/Ubuntu screen capture programs does that. I even saw suggestions to run the application inside vmware or virtualbox to make such a screenshot!

There is a better alternative.