Python’s creator describes having too much fun with Python on Nokia Phone:

The phone itself, even without Python, is incredibly cool; I spent much of the weekend using it as a camera, and it worked remarkably well considering that it doesn’t have an optical zoom or a flash, and is “only” 1.3 megapixels…

So on to the vast array of APIs available. Nokia has really done an outstanding job here. There are extension modules that handle all of the phone’s devices: dial a call, snap a picture, send/receive SMS, Bluetooth, and Internet (if your service provider offers it of course); as well as the key applications (calendar and address book, and probably more that I haven’t even discovered). You can also play sounds, view images, draw into a canvas, or open any file that the phone understands natively. And of course the GUI library — menus, dialogs, a low-level event loop, etc. Stuff for which standard Python libraries exist generally uses those — the filesystem (ROM, RAM, memory card, flash) of course, but also the Internet — urllib “Just Works” ™, and you can even write a server if you want to.

Zillow is one our sister companies in the Ignition and has just released their public beta.

It’s a cool application to play with even if you aren’t buying a house.

You can see house values and property lines overlaid on the scrollable satellite images, get graphs of your house estimated and sales values over time, find comparable houses, and more. All free, of course.

All of this makes my wonder whether anyone has attempted large scale data mining an analysis in support of real estate investment, similar to what is done on the stock market.

Probably not a good idea for Zillow of course– sounds like a good way to blow through a lot of VC funding!

But for a player with deep pockets and lots of data about the expected and actual selling prices of houses, it seems like it should be possible to beat the rest of the market, which is operating with much less data.

The actually utility of this is debatable, but the geek in me can’t resist reporting the availability of the Linux kernel on the iPod as well as an iPod Python interpreter.

Chris Beasley at Sitepoint is reporting that he has been invited by Amazon to join an Adsense-like affiliate network– this is an advertising network that would display third party, contextual ads, not just Amazon products. Definitely an interesting development worth watching.