On Monday night Steve, Gary and I went to a Clepy meeting. Clepy is the Cleveland Area Python Interest Group. It was the third or fourth meeting of the group, and the first time we had the chance to attend.

In short, it was pretty awesome and a lot of fun — well, as much fun as sitting in a conference room with a bunch of twenty to forty year old programmers can get, I guess. There were two talks, but the majority of time was spent on open discussion. About fifteen people were there, all very nice. There was free pizza, salad, and soda. The roundtable format made it easy to jump in and out of discussion.

At the next meeting, I'll be giving a talk about how to interact with eBay using Python. eBay recently opened up their Developer APIs so that registration is now free. They have code snippets for a bunch of languages, but unfortunately most of them suck, including the Python code. So I'll be showing how to do it right using a little library I made, or how easy it is to write your own little library to talk to eBay.

I met a KDE developer & maintainer there, Jaison Lee. We chatted about my experience doing a KDE project for Summer of Code. Hopefully I'll be getting back into KDE development very soon!

The latest news in the AIM bot saga is that the Case Phonebook account has been suspended, with the mysterious message that it "violates the Terms of Service agreement." Well, I've read the Terms of Service and I don't see anything wrong. I wonder what the problem is? I read something about AOL offering a bot API for lots of money, so I wonder if they're cracking down on rogue bots? That's too bad — the phonebook bot got about a dozen messages a day and got some good feedback, so at least someone found it useful. I hope AIM dies a slow death in light of Google Talk.

I swear our MovableType interface used to have a Log Out button. Blogging on the same computer as Patty is a real pain because we have to clear cookies to log out of Blog@Case!