Whyteboard, a useful application written using wxPython for the GUI, was just noticed over at SourceForge.  Congrats Sproaty!

Tribute to a Dog

The best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man's reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us, may be the first tothrow the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads.

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. A man's dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer. He will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings, and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.

If fortune drives the master forth, an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies. And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by the graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even in death.

George Graham Vest, 1870

On the other hand, the number of commits is really a very poor metric to measure open source projects by.  Much more  impressive is the number of users who would rather be using the software than anything else that could compete with it.

Besides the simple file sharing among your own computers, there are some other nice features there too.  Files are private by default, but there is a Public folder where you can put files you want to share with others, and you can easily get a public URL for them to paste into emails or IM messages.  You can also create a shared folder that you share with other Dropbox users.  Any changes you make in your shared folder are instantly updated to the other users' copy of the shared folder, and their changes are replicated back to you. In addition to all of that, you can easily get back to prior versions of changed files, and you can undelete files that have been deleted.  And as if that wasn't enough, there is another special folder type that is an automatic photo gallery, you just need to drag the photos you want to share to a Photos folder and the rest is automatic.

You get 2GB of space for free, and you can get up to 50GB for $10 per month or $99 per year.  If you sign up with this referal link then you and I will both get an extra 250MB.

Finally, here is the real kicker:  The Dropbox user interface (setup wizard, preferences dialog, task bar icon, etc.) is written in wxPython!  If the user ID I saw when I signed up is related in some way to the number of users (it is just a number so that may be possible) then that means that there are about three quarters of a million users running a wxPython application on their computers and they may not even know it.  Good job guys, I'm impressed!

• Changes in 2.8.9.2
  
• Download (source, Windows and Mac binaries)
• APT (Debian or Ubuntu packages)

This news means that I now have reports of wxPython being used from every continent on this planet. Yay!

• Changes in 2.8.8.1
  
• Download (source, Windows and Mac binaries)
• APT (Debian or Ubuntu packages)

• Changes in 2.8.8.0
  
• Download (source, Windows and Mac binaries)
• APT (Debian or Ubuntu packages)

A brief history of Time Machines

First on the list, of course, is The Time Machine by one of the fathers of Science Fiction himself, H. G. Wells, written in 1895. I suspect that there must have been a few nuggets of truth in this fictional work. How else could he know that the basic themes of his work would continue to appeal to the masses more than a century after he created it? What about the many science fictional technologies that have become science facts over the years? Perhaps this same trans 4th dimensional tool was shared with Jules Verne when he wrote about the world-wide communications network that would be created in the 20th century... I expect that it was then passed on to other Sci-Fi greats down through the generations like Asimov, Heinlein, Bradburry, and others...

Next, because it had an impact on my life that I still remember, I should mention the 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Machine. I remember my Grandfather taking me to this movie when I was but a wee lad sometime in the mid 1970's. I remember having to walk the 10 or 12 city blocks from where we parked to where the "surprise" was located. I thought the surprise was going to be ice cream or something and started complaining (loudly) when we passed a perfectly good ice cream shop along the way. I say "walk" but it was more like "run" because my short little boy legs had to keep up with my Grandpa's long, quick strides. Grandpa's favorite form of exercise was walking, (which is why he parked so far away) and if you couldn't keep up you got left in the dust. When we finally got to the surprise, I actually was surprised that it was a movie instead of ice cream, but disappointed that it wasn't a "kids movie" and probably did a bit more complaining at this point. I'm telling you all this about the trip to the theater to help you see the contrast of the trip back. After emerging from the theater a couple hours later my mind was filled with wonder and excitement, and my imagination was running wild and in top gear. I must have floated all the way back to the car because I don't remember a single step of it, or maybe I time traveled and just skipped ahead 30 minutes. In either case, from that day forward I was a definite Sci-Fi fan.

Next stop on our mini time machine tour is Doc Brown's stainless steel De Lorian with its Flux Capacitor in Back to the Future. What kid in the '80s (or half the adults for that matter) didn't dream of being Marty McFly and of the adventures that would be possible with access to a time machine?

Also on the list are Captains Kirk, Picard, Janeway and Archer who often seemed to be dealing with cleaning up one mess or another related to paradoxes spawned from fooling around with the space-time continuum. (You may notice that a name is missing from that list, but personally I don't consider DS9 to be part of the Star Trek family. It's like the Sesame Street game "Which of these things is not like the others?")

The next time machine that I have personal experience with is Guido's Time Machine which is a well known phenomenon in the Python developer community. Here's how it works: In the early days of Python development some Joe Programmer pines for Python FizzlePops in the newsgroup saying something like "FizzlePops are a cool new thing in the furglebergle language. Wouldn't it be great if Python could do that?" Quite often there would be a response five minutes later from Guido saying something like "That's a great idea. I implemented it last week." After it became common knowledge that Guido owns a time machine we can often find references to it being used over much greater lengths of time, for example when a newly requested feature suddenly appears in prior releases of the software, even in releases as much as a few years old! PJE describes it this way:

Pretend that Python is a magic wand that will miraculously do whatever you want without you needing to lifting a finger. Ask, "how does Python already solve my problem?" and "What Python language feature most resembles my problem?" You will be absolutely astonished at how often it happens that thing you need is already there in some form. In fact, this phenomenon is so common, even among experienced Python programmers, that the Python community has a name for it. We call it "Guido's time machine", because sometimes it seems as though that's the only way he could've known what we needed, before we knew it ourselves.

I've had the opportunity now and then to borrow Guido's time machine in my work on wxPython and I have to admit that it is an utterly exhilarating experience! The wxPython users really appreciate it too, and it is the little things like time travel that can really help to build a loyal community around a software development tool and build strength for the future.

What about saving the bacon?

So, if you're still reading along at this point and haven't wandered off into the space-time continuum yourself, you're probably wondering what all this has to do with saving bacon... Well the time machine that is affecting my life today is Apple's Time Machine and the bacon in question is mine. Here's the story: Several days ago the Software Update tool popped up telling me that there is an update to OS X 10.5.3 available. Since I was in the middle of work and I knew that this update would require a reboot I decided that I would deal with it later and just hid the update window and went back to work, where I promptly forgot about the update notice. Fast forward several days to this morning and I need to go out to run some errands. Just before I leave I notice the Software Update icon in the dock and realize that this would be a good time to let the update run since I wont be at my desk for an hour or so anyway. When I get back there's bad news on the screen. The update file was corrupted and so it won't be able to complete the install. I let it reboot expecting (with fingers crossed!) that it will boot back into the non-updated OS X. Nope. The boot hangs and eventually the machine shuts itself off. So then I boot up from an external drive and jump into the Disk Utility app and select the internal hard drive and get more bad news, something like "The file system is corrupted and can not be repaired by this utility. Copy your important data and reinitialize the hard drive as soon as possible." Despair! Anguish! Then my eyes fall on the other external hard drive on my desk, and a smile begins to curl the corners of my mouth and the twinkle returns to my eyes. Time Machine to the rescue! I plug in the time machine disk and check when the last backup was run and find it was only about 40 minutes before the failure. YAY!

So after copying the few things from the internal drive that I know that time machine wasn't backing up (because I told it not to) and then erasing and reformatting the drive, I booted from the Leopard DVD and told it to restore from my time machine backup. And it has been doing exactly that as I've been writing this post from another machine, all 140GB worth of data, music, projects, source code, tools, applications, and everything else chugging along from the time machine back into the Mac. If you've ever had disk failures before and no recent or adequate backups then this is truly a beautiful sight.

Thanks Apple, your Time Machine has just saved my bacon!

The question remains however, do I dare attempt to do the update again?