Ayman Hourieh

The main news piece for day 2 in the Firefox Summit 2008 is that everyone is now trapped in the small town of Whistler after that a rock slide cut off the highway that connects Whistler with Vancouver. Fortunately, nobody was injured because of this. However, clearing the massive boulders that are blocking the highway will take 5 days according to official sources. Since the summit ends this Thursday, most attendants need to go to the Vancouver Airport on Friday to catch flights to their home countries. The cause of this rock slide is unclear at the moment, but there are people in the summit who are speculating whether a company whose name starts with an 'M' is behind all of this. A bug was filed in Bugzilla to track the issue, and some of the currently-proposed solutions involve riding bears, taking boats, or taking helicopters. In reality however, we will most likely end up going through a different route that takes around 8 hours in a bus.

The Firefox Summit 2008 started today in the city of Whistler, BC, Canada. Around 400 contributors to the Mozilla project gathered to meet, share thoughts and discuss the 3.0 release of Firefox and plan for the next releases. I'm attending the summit as the Arabic localizer. I will post a daily highlight of the summit on my blog, so let's start with day one.

Those interested in web development may have heard about the Model-View-Controller software pattern by now. This pattern emphasizes on separation of application's data model, UI (view), and control logic. The concept itself isn't new and has been around since 1979, but recently there have been many successful implementations of the pattern in the domain of web development.

While exploring the available MVC frameworks, I decided to learn TurboGears, which is a Python framework. I viewed many webcasts and documents, then decided to practice my newly-gained knowledge by writing a basic del.icio.us-like social bookmarking application in TurboGears. Now I'm documenting my work as a tutorial, hoping that other TurboGears newcomers would find something useful in it.

A while ago I came across the Python Challenge. It is a series of programming challenges that require writing short programs in order to advance through levels. The creator(s) of the site put a lot of effort into it. The challenges are a lot of fun to solve, and the whole thing is very addictive.

If you are interested in learning the Python programming language, I suggest that you read the tutorial and start solving the challenges. It will be a great learning experience. If you do know Python, the challenges still have a lot to offer on the educational and fun fronts. It will make you explore a variety of libraries and programming domains.

Most of the levels can be solved with other programming languages as well. However, solving them in Python makes the programmer experience the beauty of Python, its power, and ease of use.

To sum up, if you enjoy programming, the Python Challenge is for you. I don't remember having so much fun on a website in a long time.

If you have a Linux workstation with a direct connection to the Internet, you need to take certain measures in order to protect it from attacks. This article contains configuration information and tips on how to protect your machine. The article is applicable to all popular Linux distributions.