Spyced

I separated my right shoulder so that arm is going to be out of commission for a while.  (I am right-handed.)  I'm managing about 25 wpm with one hand, or about 1/4 my normal speed.  This is frustrating.  The Handkey Twiddler has been out of production for a while.  The BAT is not OS X compatible. Anyone tried the Half Qwerty keyboard?  Are there other good options for under, say, $300?  (I found several very niche products for significantly more.) I do plan to try voice recognition for email and IM but I can't see that working very well for code.

I've been getting back into the Jython codebase this last week. The last time I submitted a Jython patch was in the beginning of 2004, so it's been a while. Things have changed... Jython is finally requiring Java 5 for the next release, which means the usual improvements, but especially good use of annotations. Here's some notes from my puttering around (mostly dragging Jython's set module up to compatibility with CPython 2.5's): Expect Eclipse to be slightly confused. (Lots of "errors.") This is normal. Use ant to build. ant regrtest is handy. run it before you start making changes so you know what's already broken in trunk. (At least between releases, jython does not appear to be religious about "no tests shall fail." But as a new developer you should make "no additional tests should fail" your motto.) Subjective impression: Jython re performace is a bit slow. Jython uses its own re implementation predating the Java re...

Currently, Jython ships with the pdb debugger module from Python 2.3. Unfortunately the 2.3 pdb is primitive even by command-line debugger standards. (For instance, if the program you are debugging throws an exception, it will take pdb down with it. Seriously. Did anyone actually use this thing?) Fortunately all you have to do to get a much better experience is grab pdb.py, bdb.py, and cmd.py (for good measure) from a 2.5 CPython installation and run against that instead. I've only tested this with Jython trunk but I think it should Just Work with the 2.2 release, too.

Last night the Utah Python User Group held an editor/IDE smackdown. I'm not going to write an exhaustive summary, but here are some highlights: ViM's OmniComplete is actually pretty decent. Calltip support in the GUI is also good. (GUI? ViM? Yeah, weird.) Emacs completion, from Rope, is also good. Emacs's refusal to make any concession to GUIs though keeps things clunky. Not that it isn't great that Everything Works over plain ssh; that's fine, but going through classic Emacs buffers for docstrings or completion means everything takes more keystrokes than it should while being less useful than having that information Always On. Rope also gives Emacs refactoring support that works surprisingly well. PyDev still sees a big win from the Eclipse platform. Specifically, even though Subclipse and Subversive are a bit weak compared to the gold standard (that would be TortoiseSVN), they are much better than what you get with Komodo or Wing. Now that I am on OS X (...