Noel Rappin Writes Here

To continue on the fame and fortune theme, I just got the first part of the statement wrapping up the first year of the wxPython book. (Since the book came out at the end of March, we got a first quarter statement which covered the first 10 days of the release). Anyway, I’m pleased. The fourth quarter statement was only about 5% down from the third quarter (I don’t have the exact numbers).

Well, the Jython Book celebrated it’s fifth anniversary with a royalty statement showing that it had sold the grand total of two copies over the previous quarter. I think it might be played out. O’Reilly’s statements don’t give total accumulated sales count, just total accumulated royalties. I think it sold just on the low side of 6,000 copies, and is something like 500 short of earning out. Meantime the wxPython book still seems to be holding it’s Amazon rank, so I’m very curious what the next sales total is going to be.

TextMate has what seems to be a very nice blogging bundle for programmatically sending posts to your blogging engine of choice. Except that it doesn’t work for the new Blogger API. Or at least it didn’t the last time I checked. Mostly I just wanted to see if I could write my own script to send to Blogger. This is a Ruby script based on the Python script located at http://djcraven.

Now two of the big Java IDE’s are promoting Ruby language tools as a big thing. IntelliJ has a plugin in early beta, and NetBeans is also making a big deal of their new early beta support. Eclipse has had a Ruby/Rails plugin for about a year or so. This is weird, weird, weird, that suddenly all the Java tools would feel the need to grow into somewhat ill-fitting Ruby IDE’s (Eclipse has always styled itself as more of a meta-IDE, so that’s a little less strange).

It’s true – the way to get comments on your blog is to mention Apple… I do something like one substantive post in three months, and then two apple posts in 48 hours, and bang! Four comments within a day. I’m surprised, not least because I really wasn’t sure anybody was out there. Anyway, interesting points have been made, and I thought I’d pull them up to either agree, or whine defensively.

What is it about us tech fanboys and Apple… I’ve always found them interesting, even when I wasn’t a regular Mac user. Infuriating, sometimes. But interesting. So here’s another thing about Apple, circa 1995… That was right about the end of something like a two-year period where Apple was way ahead on internet integration and didn’t really make anything out of it. By the time the internet really started to escape out of academia, the Windows world was well on it’s way to catching up, and by the time it all really went mainstream, Macs would be a fading memory.

As I may have mentioned here, back in 1995 I spent three months as a summer intern at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I was buried deep in the educational technology research group so, trust me, I didn’t work on anything you’ve heard of. It was a fun summer, though. They stuffed about 15 of us, a mix of grad students and contractors, in a room that was really long and narrow.

Sorry for not mentioning this earlier, but part three of the GWT series is now up on the IBM site at: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ad-gwt3/ This one is about remote procedure calls, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. I just got the proofs for the fourth and final article in this series, about deployment. I expect it to be online Tuesday, Feb 27th at: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ad-gwt4/

A collection of small things, half-finished posts, and pure whatnot that hopefully will lead to more posts in the future: Got my first Amazon affiliate statement with no less than $1.55 heading my way. Thanks to the person who clicked through… There’s a new sidebar, for small links, via del.icio.us. The sidebar has it’s own RSS feed, on the off chance somebody is interested. UPDATE: It doesn’t appear to work on Safari, which is a problem… Weird, because I did the preview using Safari, and it showed up fine, but not in the actual blog.

The second part of my IBM Developerworks series on Google Web Toolkit is now online at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ad-gwt2/. This one focuses mostly on the Derby database, and features a really quick and dirty database-to-Java conversion tool. Enjoy.