Friday was my last day at Zope Corporation. The past two weeks were crazy busy transferring some (hopefully non-zero) subset of all my knowledge on to coworkers. I really feel confident that my former customers will be in good hands, and I wish everyone there the best. They're good folks.

I'm moving on to Socialtext, where I'll be working with some old friends. Today is my first day and I've just been reading reading reading.

Edit: Incidentally, our project just went Open Source.

Onward and upward!

One of the most striking things I noticed was that nearly all of the Whore-your-info-and-register-to-win prizes given away at the booths were Apple iPods of one flavor or another (4Gs, minis, and shuffles).

Anywhere from a quarter to a third of the laptops in use around our (Zope.org) booth (100% in our case) were Apple PowerBooks.

Apple had a small 10'x10' booth with an iMac, Mac mini and Xserve (G5 and RAID) set up.

Got some new tee-shirts from Debian, ActiveState, Apress (the wonderful Apress booth attendant also got me a free review copy of Peter Seibel's forthcoming Practical Common Lisp (available online as well)), HP, and LinuxQuestions.

Attended the "For the Love of Free Software" .org Pavilion party on Wednesday night, and drank beers and ate food with the LinuxQuestions.org crew. Fun guys.

Most of the people who stopped by our booth did so for congratulatory reasons. More than a few of them inquired about the state of Zope 3 (we're still working on it). All in all, the mood was upbeat and people seemed to be excited about us.

No pics, sadly.

Today, I'm off to Boston to attend LinuxWorld Expo and spend the next few days as a booth babe for the Zope.org table. Our CEO is there today, and we'll tag team tomorrow, and I'll be on my own on Thursday. We both use Mac OS X, so it's even more funny.

Still, it's a few days away in a swank hotel, so it'll be good. Perhaps pics will follow.

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unicode

I used to be firmly in the camp of:

"Üñî©Ø∂£ is teh suck! ASCII 4ever!"

But that is mostly because I didn't understand it. A crash course in dealing with Unicode yesterday changed that. I've read what Joel has to say on the matter, so I had the basic understanding of it all, but you never really get it until you're up to your elbows trying to translate a bunch of Windows-1252-encoded web documents into UTF-8, in accordance with the new site's templates, all on the fly, during a huge content migration. How they ever worked in the first place is beyond me, actually. All their existing templates claim to be using iso-8859-1 as their charset. Bizarre.

Besides, it's not like I didn't want to be able to express my admiration of Dürer's work, or thank my friend Jesús for all his advice on stuff. I just couldn't be arsed to figure it out before. Sometimes, work for pay changes that.