Archive 3/2007

Welcome to the 2nd installment of my little series where I write about what I learnt today when trying to implement zerokspot.com using Django. This time it will be all about Django's contributed syndication framework

As some kind of project for the next couple of months I've now started to work on a new implementation of zerokspot.com no longer using a pre-built CMS like WordPress or Drupal but trying to do it completely on my own using Django and several generic apps for it.

For the last two days of so now I've been trying out the new public beta of Twitterific, the Twitter client for MacOSX And for now I'm not really sure how to judge it...

Recently I've seen quite a few posts out there with people describing for what purposes Twitter could be used.

So for the last couple of days I'm not giving Twitter a try. But not as a replacement for blogging (as some people have indicated Twitter in general to be) but more as a supplement for small statements about recent events or things that I've just experienced. This is something I don't want to post on my main weblog so I guess Twitter might be really a nice place for this, esp. things that are posted on it are normally not something you'd consider a classic weblog post anyway

I guess I've now finally reached a point, where I want to and will try something new for me: Music from majors only if I reeeeally want it. For quite some time now I've become more and more annoyed by how big companies like SonyBMG, Warner and their organizations like the RIAA and the IFPI are treating their customers as well as simple the quality of the stuff that is played on the mainstream radio stations. So now I want to do a little experiment on myself and see how long I can survive by primarily getting music from indie labels.

Ok, not subsets in the original sense but more a way to group a bunch of sets into a so-called "Collection". The coolest part of this IMO is, that it's also possible to create collections within a collection which finally makes at least some kind of nesting for sets possible

Everyday something new to learn For quite some time now I'm coding mostly small scripts but also bigger stuff in Python (and now I'm also trying to get really into Django) and from time to time Python's for-each preference to the C-style for loops sometimes got a little bit in my way.

For example: I have a list and I want to iterate over it but also know where I am during this loop. So until today I would have gone this road:

data = ('a','b','c')
   i = 0
   for f in data:
       print "%d => %s"%(i,f)
       i+=1
   

Ben has started a quite interesting discussion over on say-so.org about what e-mail format people prefer: Plain text or HTML.

And I was pretty shocked when noticing that more people preferred HTML. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against HTML per se, but I simply can't stand it when it's about e-mails and just like ManInTheFatSuit there I even consider it rude when someone sends me an HTML mail.

Dear user of the contact form,

Please, please, please! Please, don't use the contact form on my site to ask me support questions about phpBB. While I'm on their support staff and I could probably help you, this is really not the place to ask.

If you're looking for some help, please simply go to the official support forums on phpbb.com or join the IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

Why don't I give personal support? Simply because I don't see the point in it. It is very likely that someone on the boards will be faster in answering your question than I can even check my emails. And don't forget the whole social thing about support: Other users might have the same problem as you do, find the answer on the boards because someone answered your question, and they're done. Do the same thing with a private e-mail conversation

Thank you and best regards, Horst

After quite some time I finally dared to look outside of my usual Star Trek and Star Wars books again and discovered A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.

The plot takes place in a very distant future (thousands of years). Earth is no longer all that important and a big part of humankind consists now of traders that make their living by finding new customers on other worlds. But in all these years, humankind has never met an advanced non-human civilization.