News: Pythonic Articles; HTML-only Beazley Tutorial; more

[Ron Stephens]

Updated Hans Nowak's output file for links to "all" new Pythonic
articles on the web through Jan 13, got really quite a few good ones
since the last update on Jan 6, more than any human could possiblky read
and keep up with ;-))). Someone with a 56 K modem asked, could a file be
linked to that only shows or updates new articles since the last update,
since downloading the current output.html page that contains thousands
of Pythonic articles takes a while. Hopefully Hans, or someone, or me ,
will take a look at this, it would be really nice to have. Meanwhile, I
am playing around with using the bot to search for other topics of
interest. I think once we get this incrementally updated output file
thing, this little baby will be a most useful program that Hans has
created.

Also, Oleg Boyntman. requested an HTML-Only version of jerry c's
Javascript Beazley Indexed Tutorial. Such a beast is now available
courtesy of Bernard Delmée <bdelmee at advalvas.be> who lovingly coded an
elaborate HTML style-sheeted-dynamicly-charged version that as he says
was "more interesting than doing a crossword puzzle".  Thanks, Bernard!

I have a new Jython book that was generously provided me by the
publisher for review (hey, is that legal/ethical/right and I could get
to like this ;-))) so I will review that real soon now.

I am officially switching from Windows to Linux (Mandrake) on my home
machine this weekend. I hope to offer very brief, blow by blow progress
reports on my experiences, under the title The Linux Chronicles. The
only interest, if any, is that this will be a test to see if, at this
time, a totally clueless, brain damaged, loser with a more than full
time day job he is in stark danger of losing, requiring business travel
three weeks out of four, can actually set up and use Linux as his only
home operating system. Personally, I am predicting failure.

I also hope someday soon to do a similar PythonCard Chronicles, but that
is even a bigger stretch as I am even  more hopeless when it comes to
gui programming than I am socially.

Meanwhile, my day job is a disaster and I don't know how I expect to do
any of this, much less all. My boss was fired at Xmas time and although
my "new" boss seems to like me, and he worked for me 15 years ago, my
division of the company is only booking about 20% of what we did a year
ago, and the parent company is doing about the same; leaving us
struggling to get back to break-even and facing significant downsizing.
Selling sophisticated electronic components to OEM's that got rich
selling to dot coms and their telecom suppliers was great in 1999-2000,
but I recall now fondly the days of military business and the staid
industrial electronics markets of the 70''s and 80's.

I may have been a Master of War but now it looks like Dylan will get to
dance on my grave after all these years, after a brief sojourn as a
master of the dot com universe...

c'est la vie...

Ron Stephens,
with the Python-City-blues-ly yours
from
http://www.awaretek.com/plf.html