Microsoft and JBoss shake hands

Probably bad news for LAMP and other open source stacks. Complete news is here.

Pyrex

I am currently learning Pyrex, a language designed to take the pain out of writing C-extension modules for Python.

I plan to rewrite performance intensive portions of HarvestMan using Pyrex. These enhancments will be available as part of the next major HarvestMan release, version 1.5.

Cathedral tries to recruit Bazaar!

No kidding :-). Microsoft apparently tried to recruit Eric Raymond. If you don't know who Eric Raymond is, spend your afternoon reading up the excellent Cathedral and Bazaar essays, some of the best essays written on the open source model. He also happens to be one of the co-founders of OSI. Talk about Bush trying to recruit Osama Bin Laden for homeland security!

Read more about Microsoft's Mea Culpa in this article posted on ESR's blog.

Standalone Executables on Windows using py2exe

The latest release of py2exe, namely py2exe 0.6.1 allows to create single executables on Windows. This is an improvement over the earlier versions which used to create a host of files around the main executable. I think the new feature is a welcome one, especially for a project like HarvestMan which has a number of dependencies. If you try to create an executable for HarvestMan with existing versions
of py2exe, you get quite a lot of .pyd files which are well, a bit confusing.

I am looking forward to create standalone executables for HarvestMan using the latest py2exe and provide downloads for them. I think this should boost the popularity of HarvestMan, since many Windows users I know could not be bothered with going through all the steps to install a pure Python package such as HarvestMan. Downloading and installing a single file executable is much easier.

Expect win32 downloads of HarvestMan soon. Three cheers to py2exe and Thomas Heller.