about
I'm a Python programmer from Portland, Oregon. I also do web hosting and a bit of work around the house.
I started programming in 1988, working my way through BASIC, Pascal, Tcl, and C before finally settling on Python around 1998. As you might suppose, programming has become fairly pedestrian to me which I suppose is why I haven't had much interest in the latest language fads (Ruby, Erlang, etc). There simply doesn't seem to me to be enough of a leap forward to justify starting out at the bottom of another learning curve. Despite having a few warts and shortcomings, Python does the job fine for most everything I've wanted to do. I suppose one day, when a language like Boo reaches maturity I may leave Python, but I'm not struggling at the leash just yet.
You can often find me hanging out on freenode as cwells.
current projects:
- The Breve Template Engine. The most sublime XML/HTML generation engine around.
- Pentropy, yet another Python blogging engine (unreleased)
- Maintainer and host of the Nginx wiki. When I first discovered Nginx, the only documentation was in Russian and scattered around a few blogs. To remedy this situation, Aleks Lazic and myself, with the help of a couple others, spent a couple weeks translating and assembling the documentation you now see today. Despite not having written a single line of code, I feel that this is my most important contribution to open source. I also designed the logo.
- VZweb. A Pylons-based web interface for managing an OpenVZ server. Unfinished and unreleased for the moment.
- A new wiki/CMS intended primarily to support the Nginx documentation, but also as a somewhat new way of implementing this type of software.
old projects:
- DSV, a CSV parser written in Python. This has been superceded by the Python csv module, which I also helped design. Parts of DSV live on here as csv.Sniffer.
- wx.Throbber, an animated widget included with wxPython. This predated the current Mac-spinner craze, but was intended to accomplish the same thing: indicate work is being done that takes an unknown amount of time.
- Project D.U.. This was a closed-source (and now defunct) themeable RSS aggregator I wrote for a large ISP. Hopefully the last closed-source software I ever write.
future projects
- Bayesian log analysis. Most log analysis software tries to scan for known problems by pattern matching (e.g. regular expressions). The shortcoming to this approach is that it fails to account for the unexpected, which is usually exactly the thing you need to know about.
other stuff
Here are some RPMs I've packaged up. This is not software I've written, merely software I like to use that doesn't seem to be widely available in RPM format. I do not support this software. However, if you find bugs in the packaging (missing dependencies, etc), please let me know.
