Reading about David Woodhouse’s painful adventures in laptop purchasing (and others’) left a sour taste in my mouth. I don’t want to subject my parents to a similar experience. That is, I have no interest in advising them to buy a laptop with Windows installed on it, only to tell them they’ll have to contact one or more companies to request a refund, forensically and photographically document the removal of Windows from the hard disk, threaten legal action when said refund doesn’t materialise and jump through the other flaming hoops involved in buying a laptop without paying for an unused copy of Windows.

The fact that my parents want Ubuntu does not necessarily mean that they want it preinstalled; it simply means that they do not want to have to pay for Windows in the first instance. Focus on that small-but-important detail.

So, laptop vendors of the UK, you have until next year to offer my parents a good customer experience.

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This is in reply to Scott’s drabble meme blog entry. I’m not sure I completely understand the rules but the ones I’ve read so far have been good reads so I thought I’d have a go, too.

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Twyt 0.9.1 has been released and is available to download from the usual place.

This release cycle has been pushed along by suggestions, patches and testing from users of the twyt command line client, so the twyt Twitter API module has only undergone some tweaks and just a few additions to the set of supported API methods.

Changes to the twyt client include:

• A ’namecache’ subcommand, intended for making tab completion scripts more useful
• Better support for using twyt in pipelines (you can now pipe messages into ’twyt tweet’)
• Now prints screen names instead of real names (by popular demand)
• A ’sing’ subcommand (it’s silly, but it gets used)
• Better non-ASCII character handling

The #twyt hashtag is getting used quite regularly now, but for bug reports and patches please stick to good, old-fashioned email.

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$ git checkout HEAD -- path/to/removed/file

This tip was brought to you by Andy’s determination to remember how to do it next time, in cooperation with wasted moments spent reading the wrong man page (git reset). Sigh.

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Twyt 0.9.0 has been released and is available to download from the usual place. The python-twyt packages in Debian and Fedora will be updated shortly.

This release incorporates lots of little fixes, and updates which were required to keep up with changes to the Twitter API. Scripts which import previous versions of twyt may need updating.

The accompanying command line client, twyt, has also been improved. In particular it has better support for multiple Twitter accounts and allows you to flag one username as the default. It also now uses simplejson to store user configuration so the .ini-style config files generated with older versions of twyt will be ignored (apologies for the inconvenience, to the three people who use it).

Note that the number of Twitter API methods which twyt supports has not increased - I’ll get around to adding support for more of them next time I’m in the mood. Meanwhile, if you’re a Python coder and you’ve got nothing better to do, feel free to read the APITODO file to see what’s missing and email me a patch, or the URL of your bzr branch. It’s easy-peasy stuff.

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