Jabber, Erlang, Debugging. Things I'm playing with at the moment

I’m busy experimenting with various blogging approaches at the moment, hence the short links I’ve been posting recently. Another type of post I thought I’d give a try to was the list of interesting things. I find this sort of thing strangely cathartic – if nothing else by writing down the things I’m thinking about I won’t forget to spend time playing with them.

• I still need to play around some more with Jabber/XMPP. I tried a little time ago to install a server locally on my Mac with only some success. I’ve now got a load of linux virtual images handy which might make that easier. What I would really like to see is a dirt simple XMPP server that you can use for local development. Something like Morbid. I’m just not sure I have the time to build one.
• Which brings me on to virtualisation. I’m more convinced than ever that sand boxing different local environments is a good idea. I now have a stack of VMWare images set up for configuring.
• It turns out Yahoo used Erlang under the hood for some part of the new Delicious I’m still pretty interested in actually doing something with Erlang, though what I’m not yet sure. I’ve been kicking round an idea for ages involving logging which might fit the bill.
• I talked at barcampbrighton recently about debugging tools for django (and more broadly any development environment) that you need once you have a reasonable sized team. I’ve been busy packaging some of the tools I mentioned. I’ll either turn it into an article somewhere, multiple blog posts and/or hopefully get some code released on google code some time soon.
• The Sphinx documentation system used by Django for the 1.0 documentation is pretty nifty. I’m investigating it for use at work at the moment.
• I’ve been a huge fan of Textile since I used Textpattern years ago for an earlier incarnation of this site. But recently I’ve had a few niggling issues around extensibility and slight differences in implementation. So I’m pondering using ReStructuredText for my writing duties. It appears to be more powerful, more flexible and inherently extensible.