michael schurter

Just noticed my first post appeared on Unofficial Planet Python.

Hello all!

If you’re really bored, you can learn more about me or read all of my posts.

Suffice it to say I’m a new Python consultant. Monday, October 15th, was my last day at my old job, and I’m very excited to be starting a new web development company, Lo-Fi Art, with my friend Chris Pitzer! (No links because I’m really not trying to shamelessly advertise, I’m just excited!)

At any rate, thanks to Christian Wyglendowski for introducing me to Python and now getting me on the Unoffical Planet Python!

I come from a PHP (with some .NET) background, so I’m sorry if my posts seem simple or mundane to experienced Pythoners. I can’t help it if the beautiful simplicity of Python is exciting to a PHP/.NET refugee.

Contrary to popular belief, Gmail was actually created in 1988.

That’s code by caker, one of the admins over at my favorite hosting provider, Linode. You can see all the “g-mail” code he could find. Unfortunately:

<@caker> there’s more, but that’s all I could find. Pretty sure my 3.5″ floppies labeled “g-mail backup” no longer function

Web Worker Daily’s 7 Rules for Communicating … In E-mail are pretty good, but they miss one of my pet peeves.

Separate important statements or questions into bullet points or at least their own paragraphs. This makes replying much easier.

For example here’s the wrong way to do it:

Thanks for looking into foo. But what about bar? I’d also like you to change oo in foo to more closely resemble the ar in bar. Whats the ETA?

I can’t reply to individual statements easily that way, so write like this:

Foo looks great but make the oo look more like the ar in bar.

How long will that take?

How long until bar is done?

Then I can easily reply inline with clear and concise answers:

> Foo looks great but make the oo look more like the ar in bar.

Great. That shouldn’t be a problem.

> How long will that take?

End of day today.

> How long until bar is done?

After the above changes to foo it should take about another day.

But wait! It gets better! Now the discussion can continue on just one point very easily:

>> How long until bar is done?

> After the above changes to foo it should take about another day.

bar is higher priority than foo. Please do it first.

Tada! Short and sweet communication. Not only that but you can forward that last message to someone else and they can read it from top-to-bottom to catch up.

This same conversation in the usual top-posted-paragraphs format would be an unreadable mess to outsiders by the end.

Now if only I could learn to be less verbose…

I tendered my resignation at Tremont District #702 Schools today.

In 2 weeks I’ll start working full time for the IT consultancy I started with Chris Pitzer, Lo-Fi Art, LLC.* While we mostly specialize in web design and development, I’ll be doing quite a bit of system and network administration at a (different) school at least at first.

Expect lots of posts on this topic in the near future. I haven’t been this excited in a long time, and I’ve never been this excited about work.

So send your RFPs my way! We’d love to help.

* Yeah our own web site isn’t even up yet. But no one pays us to do that.

Amazon just opened their DRM-free MP3 store. While I’m a happy eMusic user, Amazon has somehow managed to convince EMI and Universal to join the DRM-free crowd.

I don’t know if I’ll continue with eMusic, but I do plan on supporting Amazon’s DRM-free mp3s! I hope its successful so the other major music labels get a clue that DRM is anti-consumer.

Too bad The Flaming Lips are on Warner…

Its probably been 10+ years since I’ve touched IRC. In the early days of the public Internet, IRC was IM + MySpace + Filesharing, only a lot geekier.

Then came ICQ and soon after a flood of IM clients that rendered IRC clumsy and antiquated for casual chatting. When I went from High School to College in 2000, I left IRC behind…

Now its 2007, I’m an old man and returning to my old ways. I’m back on IRC except instead of chatting with friends using pIRCh* on Windows 98, I’m lurking in technical channels using irsii centrally located on a Debian Etch server.

If you want to track me down I go by the nick schmichael** and am currently lurking in the following channels.

• #cherrypy on irc.oftc.net
• #linode on irc.oftc.net
• #python-genshi on irc.freenode.net
• #drupal-ecommerce on irc.freenode.net

I also pop in and out of #gnome on gimpnet and #drupal-support on irc.freenode.net.

To experienced free and open source software community members the fact that IRC is new or strange to anyone is probably a bit hard to grasp. As far as I can tell, IRC is simply the de facto method for communicating about FOSS projects. Mailing lists may be more popular for some projects, but I find the instance gratification of IRC much more appealing.

* I remember liking its scripting better then mIRC or some such nonsense… I’ve never been known to use the most popular software available…

** A very unimaginative combination of my first and last names given to me by some friends in college. It works.