Kulik’s blog

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything in the last month (maybe more ). Fortunately I have an excuse. I bought a motorbike! It’s a Kawasaki Er-6F and boy it’s a fun bike I am literaly nowhere to be seen but riding lately (and working to pay for gas).

Kawasaki ER-6F

It’s been a long time since I’ve been playing with the idea of revolutionizing the ancient, simple and exploitable email protocol. And now I see somebody actually beat me to it! And since it’s Google, it’s time to bring down the weapons.

If you are not familiar with Google Wave, head to wave.google.com for a nice presentation (albeit a bit long) or waveprotocol.org for whitepapers and technical details. Briefly said it’s an entirely new concept of online communication.

I must confess that it blew me away, I have been thinking (just for the fun of it, I don’t have the guts – read money – to pull something like this off) about something like that and even though I already played with several similar ideas, they came up with loads more and most of them are quite usable and time saving.

And the fact that it’s all open (both source code and specifications, whitepapers, etc) means that this could seriously be the end of SMTP mailing as we know it.

Features from the presentation:

• almost everything is open specification, the protocol seems to be well thought, loads of room to extend it
• instant live typing – just like UNIX talk, you instantenously see what the other person is typing, no need to stare at User is typing … messages
• they borrowed friends concept from IM protocols, that means the end to easy spamming (hopefully)
• it is much much harder to send messages in disguise (you can register an account with a false name but you can’t disguise as one of friends of your victim)
• all vendors are free to host it and write extensions to the protocol

Impacts on the web

In my opinion, this could really accelerate you on the net without needing anything else than your web browser (and Google Gears for drag from desktop features). It also brings a lot of business opportunities for third parties. Just realize the fact that they did a lot of good work for you, you can just use the API and concentrate on features you want to implement, not on details of how async javascript works and implementing things like xml decoding.

See the presentation for yourself, it’s a bit long, but very inspiring in my opinion.

I got an idea recently that in my life I have never extensively tried to draw something (if I don’t count lame school class attempts at drawing trees that just frustrated and bored me). The reason for that is, that I believed (and still believe I guess) that the ability to draw depends mostly on talent and a little bit on the hard work you put into it (got that from my brother whom I have never seen drawing a bad picture, I just didn’t get where did he learn the thing, even stuff he drowe when he was 6 or so is amazing for the age).

I must confess that I am just curious whether it’s possible to learn to draw without talent (I can prove I haven’t got any in visual arts don’t make me do it! ).

So I started this little experiment 2 weeks ago or so and I must say it is possible to improve by a great margin by just trying and trying again. I discovered that attempting to draw an outline isn’t always the greatest idea, that coloring from the outer side isn’t that great either, et cetera

When I get to a level where my drawing don’t look like creation of a 5 year old I may even post some there Stay tuned!

Even though WSGI has cleaner concepts and is downright faster than mod_python, everybody just seems to be pushing mod_python over WSGI. I can’t understand why? I think WSGI is the way for python to hit mainstream web, it finally allows shared hosting providers to host python applications without security compromises.

So come on, start using WSGI or we won’t get a PHP-free world any time soon