Hacker spaces

I just found out about hacker spaces. For a nice example of a hack space, see The Metalab. Such places seem quite suitable for work on individual public projects and for growing teams by sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

It's a pity there are no hacker spaces east of Vienna. I wonder if one could be set up in Vilnius. There probably are enough people around. but quite a bit of organising work (see Hackerspace Design Patterns [PDF]) needs to be done to establish a hacker space. I would do it, but I am overbooked as it is. Any takers?

Python 3.0

Python 3.0 (also known as Python 3000) has been released yesterday, so I thought I'd give it a try. It turns out that a recent release candidate is in official Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) repositories, so I did not even need to compile anything: apt-get install python3.0 and we're done. You may want to read the summary of changes from Python 2 beforehand.

Here's a quick demo of unicode identifiers:

>>> 二 = 2
>>> 四 = 二 + 二
>>> 四
4
>>> import math
>>> π = math.pi
>>> α = π/3
>>> math.sin(α)
0.8660254037844386

This isn't quite APL yet, but we are getting closer!