July 8-10 Course Purchases

Please note: if you have attempted to purchase a place on our class on July 8-10, the purchase button was taking you to a page that showed the original (June) dates for the class. We have now changed this to agree with the current schedule, so you will see the correct dates on the purchase page. Please accept our apologies for any confusion.

No matter which button you used, if you have purchased a place on the class you should shortly receive a confirmation letter for your place on the class.

Help Shoot Down New Telco Immunity Threat

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation [italics added here]

ACTION ALERT: THE SHAM TELECOM IMMUNITY "COMPROMISE" IS LURKING IN THE WINGS, awaiting the signal for showtime. Though some members of Congress are guilty of selling the [rumored] bill's telecom immunity provision as a "compromise," there is still time to expose the telecom immunity proposal as a sham and to halt the bill before its too late. Already, some Congressional leaders have expressed concerns, and other influential members have expressed resistance to the scheme. Please join in and make your voice heard to all the members of Congress -- no false compromises for lawbreaking telecoms!
http://www.eff.org/action/no-false-compromises

I fully expect to see some shameful special-interest pandering by the exiting Bush administration as it breathes its weary last. Corporate America must learn to be responsible for its actions, even when it has broken the law at the President's request. Otherwise it will make foreign nations much more reluctant to house American enterprises. I seem to remember a time when "I was just obeying orders" wasn't accepted as an excuse for any kind of wrongdoing.

Why Twisted? - July 11, Washington, DC

Duncan McGreggor recently announced Holden Web's first public joint venture with Divmod but it struck me that our readerships may be quite disjoint, and so I should mention it too.

I know from Teach Me Twisted that there is a thirst for knowledge about this fascinating system and so I agreed to do something else about that, for a wider audience than PyCon. Consequently Duncan, Glyph and I agreed to follow our next public Introduction to Python class with a half-day seminar on how Twisted can create scalable networking solutions to real problems.

My own contribution will be inspired by Duncan's recent Mantissa: An Alternative to LAMP post, and will attempt to position Twisted in the marketplace. Glyph will be offering some really neat canned demonstrations of what Twisted can do [with a CD for managers to take back to their techies], and I am hoping that Duncan will be able to play the visionary role, taking us all into a future where networking is an essential component of all systems.

So, if you have a need to know about Twisted, and especially if you have budget, reserve a place now. There are only twelve places, and some are already taken.

We will give you two hours of presentations and follow that with a lunch where you can ask the speakers questions at leisure before departing to the remainder of your Friday afternoon. Sign up now!

Seth Excels Himself

Mostly this is a technical blog, but I feed a bit of marketing to the geeks now and then. I keep an eye on Seth Godin's blog, and this post caught my eye today. It ends with

The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.

Amen to that. The person who never failed at anything never tried anything worthwhile.

"Introduction to Python" Class: July 8-10

Holden Web is pleased to announce its second public "Introduction to Python" class in the Washington, DC area. Intended for those with some programming background, the class gives you a working knowledge of the Python language reinforced by hands-on practical exercises. The class will be taught by Steve Holden, consultant, trainer and author of Python Web Programming.

If you know anyone who needs to learn Python (and who doesn't?), please point them to the registration page.

Divmod Partnership

Occasional readers may not remember how energized I was after my Teach Me Twisted session at PyCon this year, but I definitely wanted to follow it up with more. Audience members from that session will need no convincing that my ignorance of Twisted was almost total, but I am happy to say that it has now diminished a little. Determined effort on both sides has now yielded a training strategy for teaching other people Twisted too.

Twisted training will benefit from an analysis of the concepts that allows us to present them in the order required for specific understanding by a given client group. Divmod and Holden Web are jointly developing presentations that should make Twisted concepts approachable for a wider audience.

I am really looking forward to getting into some joint projects with the guys at Divmod. They have brains the size of planets. Stay tuned for an announcement about an introductory presentation.