Pi With Proto Plus

Now I can blog straight from my phone I thought I'd post this picture of my Raspberry Pi, in its case with the lid removed and with my new Adafruit Proto Plus board in place.

The add-on board is well-designed, allowing you to easily tap the Pi's signals for use on the breadboard (an optional extra I couldn't resist) or for external circuits.

I have also bought a couple of Adafruit's Pi Cobbler kits, which will let me attach the fully-enclosed Pi to a larger breadboard. I am happy to say my soldering skills are returning despite a thirty-year hiatus.



Note: I am not impressed by the way editing a mobile blog post immediately requires me to insert paragraph separators in what until then appeared to be a well-formatted post.

DjangoCon Triggers National Pony Shortage?

Hasbro Toys today took the unprecedented step of insisting that pony supplies were "absolutely not a concern" in response to persistent rumors that a foreign national had cornered the market  in ponies. A spokesman said "while it is true that there has been an unusual demand for ponies in the Portland area our normal stocking policies were quite adequate to meet demand. Anyone who wants a pony can have one".

The House Committee on Science and Technology is rumored to have directed its Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation to investigate this potential shortage of a strategically important resource in the creation of critical national web site infrastructure. The chairman of the Subcommittee, congressman David Wu of Oregon's first district, was not available for comment. Hasbro could not explain why American pony manufacturing facilities had opened on Labor Day, normally a national holiday.

Python in Brazil

If you want an exotic holiday, fly to Brazil. While you are there, take in the pythonbrasil conference. That's a good web site that makes it look like fun!

PyCon Registration Going Great Guns

With over five weeks still to go until PyCon 2008 in Chicago registrations already number over 180, almost three-quarters of the total registrations for the first PyCon in 2003 in Washington DC. The tutorials, running for the third year, are also popular and many of them already have enough registered students to guarantee that they will run.

I'm delighted to see that my own Python 101 for Programmers is a popular offering—it's intended for people who have had little or no previous exposure to the language, and I am trying to cover all the essentials in three hours! Let's hope that it brings some new members to the Python community.

If you have never been to PyCon, I would like to recommend you try it. It's definitely not a stuffy atmosphere, people go there to have fun as well as do productive work, you can learn huge amounts from both the tutorials and the regular papers, and the sprints are a great way to get into a new project and learn from the developers themselves.

It's a unique event, besides being terrific value for money.