A number of people have asked me about it and so I finally decided that
it is high time that I give the whole twitter
thing a try. Of course I've gotten into it late enough that my usual
user name, RobinD is already taken,
although that page returns an error. (I suspect that somebody got their
account suspended...) Strangely enough somebody has already registered
the wxPython name, although they haven't
tweeted anything since last July... Anyway, if you'd like to follow me
or send me messages on twitter I am known there as
RobinD42. Bear with me while I take my
first steps in this new environment...
wxPython 2.8.9.2 has just been released. This release adds the
wx.lib.agw package, adds an event watcher to the widget inspection tool,
and fixes a bunch of bugs.
I found out last week at the OSCON
conference that my software is being used at the South Pole by the
IceCube Neutrino Observatory project
currently being constructed about a kilometer from the Pole. They are
using wxPython for the controller user interface
of the machine
that is drilling holes 2.4 kilometers down into the ice. There isn't
anything on their website about that piece of software, but it's real
interesting anyway ;-)
Here is a bit more about
the drill. There are also these
pictures,
videos and
blog from one of the scientists that
gave the presentation I attended where he shows a bit about what life at
the Pole is like. (Where a nice warm summer's day might get up to -31F.
Brr!!)
This news means that I now have reports of wxPython being used from
every continent on this planet. Yay!
Yeah, I know what you're thinking... That headline sounds like something
you might read while standing in the checkout line at the supermarket
next to photos of aliens from the future rescuing some baby porkers from
the path of a Vogon engineered tornado headed for the next trailer park
on their list of sites to demolish to make room for a new highway. Well
if that's what you're thinking (come on, admit it, you know you were)
then you're wrong. Keep reading for some info about another kind of Time
Machine, and another kind of Bacon.
Since a number of folks have expressed interest and concern I thought I
would give a quick update on my working situation. This week I've
started a full-time consulting job with a small software group at the
University of Nebraska Medical Center. If you
attended PyCon a couple years ago then you may have
seen their
talk
about IntúaCare and IntúaDesign. That is the project that I'll be
working with. I'll be working with wxPython a lot, and probably also
working on wxWidgets and wxPython to some extent as well, although not
as much as I did with OSAF.
I'm excited to be working on this project. Not just because of wxPython,
but also because I have previous experience with the subject matter. My
first major job out of college was working on software products that had
a lot of the same goals as the IntúaSolutions products: essentially to
be a highly dynamic and flexible solution for collecting and reporting
medical patient care data in hospitals. The key here is the "highly
dynamic and flexible" part, the intent is to have a set of
domain-specific tools where unskilled (a.k.a non-programmers) but
knowledgeable people can easily tailor the application to the needs of
each hospital, or even each department within the hospital. My former
experience with this was back in the dark days of DOS so the products
had only a textual user interface, but I think we managed to accomplish
a lot with it and it was a very successful product line, and at least as
of a few years ago it was still going strong, although they've
modernized a bunch of things since I worked there.
Obviously a few things have changed in the computer world since then. I
discovered Python a year or so after I left that job and I've always
wondered what it would have been like if we had used Python as the
internal macro/calculation/filtering/query language instead of our
home-grown RDL (for anyone outside of the marketing group and the
customers that acronym stands for Robin Dunn's Language, otherwise it is
Rule Definition Language.) Since that time we've also gone through the
rise of the graphical user interface, the explosion of the World Wide
Web, and my current notebook computer has 7.5 times the number of pixels
on screen and 8 times more RAM than the hard drive space in the brand
new top of the line desktop computer I had when we started that project!
It should be fun to be able to apply modern technology and my new skills
to similar features and issues that I dealt with 14-18 years ago.
I've linked to this video as a way to let you know how big of an effort
this job search seemed to be at times, and also how good it felt when it
was finally complete.
"...Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic
cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers
nauseous."
I think that sentence could win an award if there was a
most-big-words-used-where-small-words-would-do-fine contest. Good thing
that my dictionary is only a
Spotlight
search away... [type][type][type]... Ah so that's what it means. Yes, I
agree. 😉