Spyced

I'm running Linux on my desktop at work after a year of OS X, and Gnome as shipped by Ubuntu 8.10 has just been a world of hurt. The panel looks and works like ass when moved to the left side of the screen (the only sane place to put it in today's world of widescreen monitors), network-manager just decided to quit working one day (I got by with wicd after that), alt-tab behavior sucks both ways you can configure it, etc. I installed KDE 4.2 over the weekend to see if I was missing anything there. Wow. It's like daylight after being in a cave for two months. I didn't realize how hard it has been to use a butt-ugly environment until I wasn't anymore. (Yes, I tried all the gnome themes I could find. Even Nimbus which took a bit of work. What's that recently-famous phrase? "Lipstick on a pig?") What is better in KDE? In a word, everything. And put me in the camp that really likes having the desktop turned into a usable area for the first time. ...

I will be giving an Introduction to SQLAlchemy tutorial and Mike Bayer and Jason Kirtland will be teaching Advanced SQLAlchemy , both on Thursday. I'll be covering similar material as last year , updated for 0.5. I'm also trying to see if I can get the emails of the registrants so far to see what else they would like covered. My tutorial style is exercise-heavy, so if you've read the docs or my slides but still find it hard to write SQLA code, coming to the tutorial is a great way to fix that. (Note: the blog link to the 2008 slides is broken since we moved utahpython.org. If you want them, drop me a note.)