Planet London Python

by Kurt Vonnegut, 1973.

I’ve always loved Vonnegut (who doesn’t?) but I’d avoided this since seeing the painful 1999 movie made of it, proof if ever it were needed that some books are simply unfilmable.

The novel, however, is everything we love about Vonnegut. His clarity, wit, grumpiness and simplicity. The story of ordinary people in a small midwestern town reads like a playful Hemmingway, but forms a therapeutic rumination on the nature of sanity, and the author’s own relationship with it, in the insane world we find ourselves in.

Rating: 7/10 - and so on.

by Paul Graham, 2004.

I’d already stumbled across many of the individual essays that this is comprised of, but it was still hugely entertaining and educational to discover some of Graham’s essays that I hadn’t read yet. He covers a wide variety of topics, and inevitably for such a collection, the components vary in quality, but generally they are extremely engaging. I only regret having to grab them in dead-tree format since I lost my iPhone. Ohdeary.

Rating: 8/10 - a brilliant read

I shave every day and recently I’ve gotten tired of pissing money away on expensive mach3 blades. After dabbling a bit with cheap disposables without much joy I hit the internet for some shaving advice. A bit of research threw up the ‘double edge’ safety razor option and I decided to give it a go, buying a Merkur Hefty Classic (HD) which I understand is a good DE razor for beginners. (voted best safety razor for beginners in some shaving forum or other).

I shave in the shower without a mirror (comfort is more important to me than shave quality) and so was a little tentative after reading about nicks and cuts associated with DE razor shaving. Also my posh shave cream and brush hadn’t arrived yet so I was using baby oil and el-crappo gel-in-a-can.

As it turned out the shave was easy and comfortable which was a bit of a surprise. The heavy razor head and sharp blade means you don’t need to apply pressure, and the top of the razor is rounded so you can vary the cutting angle starting off with it barely touching your stubble and then varying as you get more confident.

So even after one shave I think I can recommend this to other people looking for a decent but much cheaper shave than Mach3. I’m not sure how long the blades last yet but you do get two edges per blade and they can work out really cheap even high-end ones. Maybe I’ll post an update in a few days once I’ve got my cream and brush.

• An Epic Introduction to PyObjC and Cocoa
• Django v1.0 documentation

• Terminal Tips: Disable Dashboard
• IceClean
  IceClean is a powerful System Maintenance and Optimization Tool using only UNIX built-in System Tasks to help your Mac stay healty and to keep it running smoothly.
• Guardianwhacking
  Would using SQL to find them be cheating? ;-)
• Pythoscope: Your way out of The Lack of Testing Death Spiral
  "n easily customizable and extensible open source tool that will automatically, or semi-automatically, generate unit tests for legacy systems written in Python."
• How To Launch Software
  GDN take note.

Welcome to the Guardian, Simon! I only wish I'd still be there when you started, but I'll be gone by then. :-(

I've been freelance for a year and a half now, and it's been a great deal of fun. For me, being freelance meant having the freedom to pursue all sorts of different interests - technical writing, public speaking, Django, OpenID, JavaScript - and the opportunity to work with some really fantastic people.

It was going to take a very special opportunity to pull me back in to full-time employment, but I believe I've found that opportunity at the Guardian. I'll be joining them full time (well, four days a week) in mid-October as a software architect, collaborating with their development team on some ambitious API projects. The Guardian have access to a lot of interesting data and I can't wait to get stuck in to it. Since they're a newspaper, it shouldn't be a surprise that they scooped me to the story.

I'll be particularly sorry to say good-bye to the outstanding team I've been working with at GCap. I'm looking forward to talking about some of the things we've been working together over the next few weeks.

• google-collections - Google Code
  Google Collections Library for Java
• UnicodeDictWriter - write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files
  Excel compatible CSV files from unicode

• Newforms Tutorial
  Useful now that newforms is the Django forms module