Rui CarmoUpdate: The Kanguru hunting season is now officially open. And yes, it has made for a somewhat interesting vacation.
Went off and took more photos (will be up soon), spent most of the day offline and enjoying that particular state of existence called "real life".
The last couple of hours were spent poring over a couple of Rails applications, and arriving at the (predictable) conclusion that Ruby can be just as incomprehensible as Perl when written by squirrels on the same kind of crack.
Clean and elegant? Sure, but as with all languages, that depends a lot on the programmer.
In the meantime, I came across Locomotive, which seems to be a nice self-contained Rails environment for Mac OS X (using SQLite and lighttpd) - its biggest plus is that it does not have any external dependencies, which is great if you want a development environment that doesn't mess with your system userland (sadly, it's too late for me, I already have a patched Ruby install).
On the Python front, I decided to have a go at building a web-based photo tagging application (under Snakelets). Collecting data from oodles of photos and generating thumbnails is the easy bit (it's whizzing through a sample set of 1GB of photos as I type this), but figuring out a simple interface to edit the data is another thing altogether.
I decided to go with IPTC tags rather than EXIF, since IPTC has the concept of a "keyword", there are a few Cocoa applications that understand them and there is a readily available library for reading and writing them in Python (and it's fast enough, too).
We'll see if it gets anywhere.