1. Craigslist and Gumtree - hives of scum and villainy. Worthless for anyone that's not a scammer or looking to be scammed. I responded to 5 ads before giving up. All five were scammers. I don't have the time or inclination to be a fraud filter.
   
2. Looking through search results on various property websites. Search results were horribly polluted: Why on earth would I be interested in parking spaces when I've specified 1 bedroom? A 1 bed parking space? What's the living space like? On some sites it was impossible to specify that I don't want to share a house. Others just ignored that I had. All requests for viewings were ignored. When I see a situation like this, I wonder if there's a business to be made doing it better or if there are constraints that I'm not aware of. Does anyone out there know if horrible, useless property web sites are a necessary result of something inherent in the property market or just that nobody has made one yet? Alternatively, does anyone know of a property web site that made you think "Wow! That's a great site"?
3. Found a site that allowed you to provide a description of what you're looking for and send an email to a number of agents (limit 20). So far, this looks like the best bet. Even though I've received a bunch of responses from people that had clearly not read the spec (asking for details that I'd already provided or sending me properties that clearly didn't fit), I did get a few responses that look promising (including one smart one that offered a property that was over my budget, but included council tax). I'm almost thinking of writing my own bot to scrape property sites for email addresses and mail my spec to them.

this is particularly selfish in my view, he seems to only be thinking of how piracy effects him. What about the guys that work in the studio and the kids that run around town putting his posters up,the people that designed his artwork, the people that run his website. Is he giving them a cut of his live fee?

I think artists should be paid for their work (I shouldn't need to point this out, but the level of debate on this issue is so low that I feel that it's necessary), but I get annoyed when the "content industries" and "creative industries" try to hijack our legal system and other businesses to protect their failing business model. Their business model is failing for a number of reasons:

• there are better ways of selling music than moving little shiny discs around
• they refused to engage with the idea that the Internet was a better way of distributing music so consumers developed the idea that music you download from the Internet is supposed to be free
• the product (manufactured, sanitised music) is less and less interesting
• competition from other, more interesting entertainments - games and interesting bands that are not signed to the big labels spring to mind
• artists have worked out that they no longer need to sell their souls to these guys in order to be successful. They can make music, release it on the Internet and eliminate the shiny disc gatekeepers
  

Let's start with the poorly named '3-strikes' proposal. It would be more accurate to call this the '3 unsubstantiated accusations' proposal. It neatly removes presumed innocence and any need for actual evidence from our legal system (at least where it relates to Big Content). If some big companies fail to make money, breaking our legal system to accommodate them is not the solution. The solution is to leave them to sink or swim on their own merits and ability to innovate.

Another proposal is that ISPs should police the traffic across their networks to detect and block the movement of copyrighted materials. This would be a great idea if it was possible and Big Content was paying for it. Detecting copyrighted material as it travels across a network is, essentially impossible. If Big Content gave every ISP a full corpus of all the material they wanted policed, they could reduce the problem to insanely difficult and very expensive. Anyone want to place bets on that happening? This goes beyond damaging a vibrant and useful industry in favour of a failing one. Combine it with the 3UA rule and you have software that can cut off your Internet access without any oversight.

I don't oppose the machinations of the copyright lobby because I think music should be free, I oppose them because I believe that they are a blight on our society.

Tartley organised a team for the latest PyWeek competition. Our team consisted of some current Resolver employees (me and tartley) and some ex-employees (mjs0 and xtian). The results are in http://www.pyweek.org/9/ratings/

Overall, out of a field of 54, we placed 15th on Fun, 33rd on Innovation and 23rd on Production. I'm delighted with our Fun place and I think our Production place is largely due to tartley's excellent colouring of my crappy wireframe ducks and xtian's brilliant duck sound-effects. I think a not-so-good placing in Innovation is entirely justified for a game that started from the sentence "Let's make a game like Joust"

We all had a great time doing this and I, for one, would love to take part in the next one.

Edit: Forgot to mention the team name - BrokenSpell

My reasoning starts with the thought that there are essentially 3 groups of people that are going to be affected by this:

1. People that work in a profession that requires contact with children
2. People who may work with children as a side-effect of their profession
3. Paedophiles that are hiding in the previous 2 categories

As promised, more on the post import.

Bloog wasn't included in the list of engines supported by Posterous and doesn't support any of the general APIs, either. I looked, in vain, for an 'Import from RSS' option and then decided to write one for myself. Based on feedparser and httplib2, it is absolutely the simplest thing that works. There is no media upload or anything beyond simply copying the contents of the posts.

import feedparser
from base64 import b64encode
import urllib
import httplib2
posterous_email = '####'
posterous_password = '####'
source_url = '####'
post_url = 'http://posterous.com/api/newpost'
def send_post(title, body, date):
    auth = b64encode('%s:%s' % (posterous_email, posterous_password))
    params = urllib.urlencode({
        'title': title,
        'body': body,
        'private': '1',
        'date': date,
        })
    http = httplib2.Http()
    response, content = http.request(post_url, 'POST',
            headers={
                'Content-type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
                'Authorization': auth},
            body=params)
feed = feedparser.parse(source_url)
for entry in feed['entries']:
    send_post(entry.title, entry.content[0].value, entry.published)

The ultimate goal is to create a light-show by having the lasers attached to the ends of your fingers. I'm going to be playing around with the software to provide cool effects while I think about how to make the whole mess robust enough to survive on a dance floor.