Sliding In The Rain

Besides awful weather (well, awful for my neck of the woods - the average Londoner would take it in his stride) and a refreshing set of Xmas decorations at ground level assembled from hundreds of stalled car headlights, there isn't much to go on about today, except that my humble Ethereal patch was accepted (after the usual coding adjustments from one of the maintainers, since I don't entirely grok Ethereal) and that we definetly seem to be in for more iApp Updates.

Oh, and there's yet another possible IE vulnerability, but that's hardly news, now is it?

Back to Python

I've been dabbling with a couple of interesting ideas in Python again, but not quite up to the enthusiasm I had earlier this year. I've found it fiddly to use (maybe because I'm not quite getting it yet, and lack of a proper overview makes most of the built-in modules look like grey featureless splotches to me), not as readable as advertised (the lack of proper block closure is a right pain in the posterior when you're reading someone else's code) and not that useful for Web apps as I had originally thought (PHP feels much faster and streamlined, and I have a large(ish) class library that makes it totally painless for me).

Nevertheless, I've found some interesting Mac OS X bindings for Python in Panther - watch this space...

InfoSync has a nice review of the Nokia 3200, which doesn't say whether or not it took them as long to find the flashlight as we did. Nevertheless, it's a great little phone for normal (i.e., non-Bluetooth-enabled) folk, and the dinky little XHTML browser it has is very quick. Definetly a nice Xmas present.

There's also an interesting essay on why Dell dumped the Microsoft SmartPhone (mostly due to it not really being their field), and a whole slew of news (kicked off by BBC) regarding Vodafone 3G "soft" launches across Europe. Multinationals do it better, indeed...

And since we're talking 3G, here's the juiciest news item of the day: The UMTS Forum figured out (apparently on its own) that downstream traffic will exceed upstream traffic by more than two to one. Duh. Like... Don't these people ever use a web browser? My personal bet is that it's going to be around 30 to one, especially when the newfangled multimedia services we've been hearing about for the past five years start getting some real-life use...