I have decided to give my PyEphem astronomy library for Python a public source code repository, an open forum for user questions, and a bug tracker where my users can see the progress of their bug reports out in the open rather than having them scattered across our email inboxes. To accomplish all of this, I simply registered PyEphem with Launchpad, a site built to host software projects that is already used by several projects for which I have great respect.

Because users might become confused now that PyEphem is spread across three web sites — the home page is here at rhodesmill.org, releases are posted over at the Python Package Index, and, again, the development project is now hosted at Launchpad — I have completely redesigned the PyEphem home page with the goal of making the three-site distinction clear, coherent, and easy to navigate. The new home page and documentation are generated by the wonderful Sphinx documentation engine, and I am still thrilled about how pretty my code samples look (check out the one on the PyEphem home page!) now that Sphinx is coloring them in with the renowned Pygments system.

I have simultaneously released a new version of PyEphem that includes the new Sphinx-based documentation, along with several important fixes to the software itself. From now on, rather than cluttering my own blog with every minor version of PyEphem that I might release, fans of the software should visit its News and announcements page on Launchpad and subscribe themselves to its Atom/RSS feed. You will still see the project mentioned here whenever a technical or scientific issue becomes interesting enough for me to write about; but the audience of astronomers and hobbyists who just need to know when the next version is released should not have to wade through my blog to do so!

My users have already begun transferring their questions and problems to Lauchpad, and I look forward to offering much greater accountability through a fully public development process.

What fun! An application has been placed on the Web named Wordle which, given some paragraphs of text as input, produces very striking images by drawing the most important words from your document so that they are largest. The basic idea is a long-standing one on the Web, as exemplified in dozens of sites with busy and ugly tag clouds whose halfhearted attempt to create interest by varying their font size barely makes the idea worthwhile. But viewing Wordle, I am simply startled that word frequency analysis can produce something so beautiful! Here, as an example, someone has submitted the Constitution:

United States Constitution

One can spend several minutes just staring at the words so basic to our national life, and pondering the significance of their relative sizes! To make my own contribution to the burgeoning world of Wordle documents, I created a program to extract the memorial messages from the Marshall Booth Guest Book on legacy.com, and then submitted the result to Wordle. After several tries, and after experimenting with the color options, I came up with something I find quite satisfactory:

Marshall Booth memorial

I am sure that Wordle documents will look rather formulaic once everyone has used them to generate Christmas cards one or two years in a row. But they are without question of much greater visual interest than any other tag cloud I have ever seen, and are therefore a big step forward simply by making word frequency something worth staring at.

It would be fun to submit novels, or theological treatises, or each of the books of Paul, to Wordle and then see whether students of English literature or Biblical exegesis could identify the original document simply by which words appeared the most often. I think there would be interesting surprises! Could people tell apart the five acts of Hamlet?

I have delivered my “Zope 3 Component Architecture” talk to the 2008 North American Plone Symposium meeting here in New Orleans. I want to thank the folks at Enfold Systems both for hosting the Symposium, inviting me to speak, and for generously making it possible for me to attend! Here are my slides:

Download slides as PDF

They had asked me to attend so that I could present the Using Grok to Walk Like a Duck talk that I gave at PyCon 2008 back in March. They changed the title, I suppose, to better highlight why it would be of interest to the Plone community; but the change actually helped me to rethink the presentation. I wound up using only the first half of my PyCon slides. For the second half of the talk, which at PyCon had consisted of a crazy sequence of hints and tips about using adapters in your own applications, I instead did a much more successful series of slides about how adapters are actually used in Zope 3 to suit up objects for presentation on the web. I think this made the idea more concrete, and thus much easier to understand for people seeing adapters for the first time.

The talk was well enough received that I should perhaps think seriously about finding further opportunities to share Zope 3 technologies with the Plone community.