I know that a lot of my fellow Python developers like a nice whisky. But I wonder if any are big enough whisky geeks to know that on one of the last PyCon 2009 nights, WhiskyFest will be happening in Chicago.

Not only will those of us who decide to attend the sprints happen to be in Chicago on the night of WhiskyFest, it’s in the SAME HOTEL AS PYCON!

There is really no reason for all of you attending the sprints not to pick up a ticket and enjoy some great whisky with me for a few hours on the night of April 1st

Having attended WhiskyFest San Francisco previously I can tell you that the official list of whiskys is only a portion of all the delicious whisky available to try. It’s more than worth the ticket price, I guarantee it. And it’s happening from 6:30 to 9:30 which means it is happening in between code time and bar meetup time.

I used to be really in to public bookmark services like delicious and magnolia. Then Firefox3 was released and the new bookmarks UI combined with the awesomebar was just much easier to use than any of the sharing extensions.

I never took the time to sit down and write a simple sync/push extension because I just figured that someone else would do it

It’s been a year now, it’s time for PushMarks. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10806/

PushMarks is a simple firefox extension that pushes new bookmarks to your delicious account (more services coming). You can also initiate a “sync” which will go through all your local bookmarks and push them to delicious and also make sure any bookmarks you have on delicious are in your local bookmarks.

If you do a big sync, please be patient. It takes a while for all the bookmarks to get up to delicious because I have to throttle the connections for fear of being locked out of the delicious API.

Of course it’s all open source and up on github http://github.com/mikeal/pushmarks/tree/master .

A little while ago I bought a new camera. Unlike my previous still cameras this one was more of a portable point and shoot, which I’ll review in a later post.

When I was shopping around for an SD card I stumbled upon the offerings from EyeFi. EyeFi makes SD cards that have built in wireless and EyeFi provides a web service that the card will upload the photos to and then send to your home computer and to your favorite photo sharing site (picasa, flickr, facebook, etc.).

The newest offering, the Explore, is even more amazing. This card does automatic geotagging of all the pictures you take. The card doesn’t have a GPS in it, all it does is take the signal strength information of all the wireless networks it can find at the time you take a picture. This information is uploaded to their webservice when the photo gets pushed and that information is used to triangulate a fairly accurate geotag.

I was skeptical of the card at first, it just seemed like it was doing too much in such a small package and it had to break somewhere. It doesn’t. It’s amazing.

This card fully automates all the manual tasks that used to come with taking pictures. It automates the geotagging, and it automatically pushes all of my photos public to picasa. And as if that wasn’t enough, it also dumps all my photos to my drobo at home. All I have to do is turn the camera on when I get home and it connects to my local wireless network, or if I’m out and about near an open wireless network I can just turn it on for a while there. Done. No more connecting the USB to my mac mini at home and dumping pictures in to iPhoto and then uploading them to Picasa via some silly plugin. It’s all automated.

This has completely changed the way I take and think about taking pictures. It’s turned taking pictures in to a fun and social activity that requires very little effort. I love it and anyone with a point and shoot should pick one up.

I just can’t wait until the next conference I attend where my Picasa feed can be a nearly realtime photo stream of the conference

I’ll be attending PyCon this year (finally!).

Somehow I haven’t attended the last 3 years that I tentatively planned to do so. 

Windmill will be well represented. Adam and I will be on a “Functional Testing Tools in Python” panel, and Adam will be giving a full blown Windmill talk.

There will also be a Windmill Sprint for anyone interested. If you want some hands on time figuring out how to test crazy webapp stuff we’ll be helping anyone who comes by the first few days of the Sprint. Our plan is to eventually transition the Sprint to working on the windmill2 codebase.

Feel free to stop by the Sprint or grab me during the conference if you want to discuss any of the other projects I work on (mozmill, jsbridge, pouch, etc) or if you want to discuss Mozilla testing and tools in general.

I’m leading an effort with the Mozilla QA team to teach community members introductory Python programming skills. I’m trying out a different approach to teaching using large group code reviews and variable programming assignments that participants can plan based on their own interest.

The lesson starts next monday and is all being organized through a Google Group. It is open to anyone who would like to participate so if you want to learn Python come on over.

I posted about about the project on QMO and you can see the discussion surrounding the lesson outline on the Google Group.