In the last few years, I've been making a very conscious effort to attend and speak at a variety of conferences both within the Flash world and in the greater world of web development, web standards, and open source. This has meant that in the last year or so alone, I got to opportunity to present to plethora of different audiences at conferences as diverse as MacWorld, Wizards of OS, Flash on the Beach, and d.construct. XTech, however, was very different to any of my previous conference experiences and I have to thank Jeremy for suggesting that I speak at it. (Jeremy also live-blogged several of the sessions from the conference and you can find several of the session slides online at SlideShare.)

XTech, at its birth, was a conference about XML. Although, as I understand it, the focus of the conference has shifted somewhat in recent years to embrace other web technologies and the crazy/sexy world of Web 2.0. Shifts in focus notwithstanding, I still had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with delegates from a variety of interest areas that I hadn't had the chance to at previous conferences, from people who make dictionaries to government representatives.

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I ran into a sneaky little bug when working locally with the Google App Engine Development Web Server and using the Mail API: sending email begins to fail if you change the source code of the class or module that contains the Mail API calls.

The actual error you get is: SystemErrorParent module 'email' not loaded.
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The Google App Engine Mail API lets you easily send email from your applications. However, I found it difficult to test it locally when using the Development Web Server.

The documentation states that you can either use an existing SMTP provider or sendmail with the local server but the former solution didn't work for me with GMail or the SMTP server at my web host. And, from a quick Google search for sendmail, I got the impression that I should stay away from it.

In the end, I opted to use a simple Python-based SMTP server by Les Smithson to debug my mail calls locally.

It's very simple to use:
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Rosie Sherry has a very useful site called Project Brighton for keeping track of all things geeky in Brighton.

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