Google Sorry

Quite why Google Documents should be giving me this message when Gmail, Blogger, YouTube and various other Google services are all working normally I have no idea. This is particularly frustrating since it's OK for me to look at "documents" and "files", but apparently when it comes to "spreadsheets" I am a botnet and not to be trusted.

Clearly I'm on some sort of blacklist. For how long, who knows? This has been going on for four hours now. And one of the frustrating things about using Google's services is that it's absolutely impossible to get a human being to tell you what the heck is going on, or take some action about it. You can rely too much on automation (but hey, it keeps the margins up).

Going to rethink this one. The document I can't get access to is the PyCon 2010 budget. Google sorry? Google FAIL.

Snakebite.org Announced: Get Bitten by the Python Bug!

Things are looking up! I mentioned Trent Nelson's snakebite.org in my Python Magazine column a while ago, but at that point everything was still in stealth mode, so you couldn't get much information about what was going on from the web site.

That's all over now, because yesterday Trent mailed the python-dev list to announce the forthcoming availability of the network, which far from being "a couple of clunky old boxes off eBay" turns out to be the makings of a comprehensive distributed test and development network, with hardware and software contributions from major companies, that's going to be the envy of the open source world.

I know that Trent has larger plans for snakebite.org, but on behalf of the Python community I would like to thank him (and a cast of many others) not only for his munificence but also for the incredibly hard work that's been done to bring this project to fruition.