New adventures in Python, well that’s the theory anyway.

I’m experimenting with using Backpack and Nokia’s Lists app for blogging. I’m finding it really useful for both roughing out and finessing posts, and the markup syntax is Textile based which is simple to use. Possibly the best bit is that I can write stuff pretty much anywhere, i.e. if there’s a web browser or my phone to hand I can write.

The only crufty bit currently is publishing the stuff onto my blog, I’m running the pytextile renderer with pyblosxom, so all I’m doing currently is copying and pasting from Backpack to a new file. The next step is to automate this process, so I’ll be lashing up a quick python script which will use the Backpack api to check my Backpack pages for new posts and publish them. That should be straightforward enough, let’s see…

Woah, it’s a flip!

Yes indeed, and perhaps even weirder is that it’s EVDO rather than WCDMA and not even a smartphone, but hey what do I care about subtleties like that. The phone and 6 months worth of calls and swift data are free courtesy of Sprint’s ambassador scheme.

I guess my biggest problem is that I’m about 5000 miles from the nearest EVDO network, so to that end I’ve got Matt Croydon checking it out for me.

Like Paul Stamatiou and Michael Mace, Matt’s pretty impressed with the service but less so with the phone – a Samsung A920. Perhaps this is one of the biggest flaws in the US’s route of diverged phone standards in that the US public only get access to a small subset of the broad range of phones that the rest of the World takes for granted.

However it’s good to see that there are networks willing to let people loose with a free phone and data to get some usage figures on how an uber-geek might use their network. I wonder how many folks in the Ambassador scheme used the Samsung A920 as their primary phone though…