Archive 2008

Just a small plug for a project I'm currently working on. I'm playing a little bit around with zc.buildout right now and have come to a point where I want to have dependencies not only as subversion-repository, distutils or egg. I simply end up with too many Python packages on github for not having a way to use them. So while still learning my way around buildout I wrote a little recipe to do just that: clone a git-repo and make it accessible as a part. With this you can define first of all where the repository is, and also what branch or explicit revision you want to have for your project.

There is definitely still a ton of stuff missing that you'd find in any other zc.buildout recipe, but I see this mostly as a good way to finally find my way around Anyway, you can find it on the PyPI with a source package and an egg for Python 2.6. The code is also available on github.com.

Normalerweise bin ich ja nicht so der Museumgeher (und noch viel weniger wenn es um Kunst geht), aber wenn einem einmal im Rahmen der Langen Nacht der Museen nahezu alle Museen der Stadt um nur 11 EUR offen stehen, kann selbst ich nicht nein-sagen. Vor allem wenn es mit einem Photowalk kombiniert wird Alles in Allem war das ein sehr unterhaltsamer Abend; man hat schließlich nicht alle Tage Gelegenheit, Minimundus bei Nacht oder allgemein Museen bis oben hin gefüllt zu sehen.

As you might have guessed based on the recent activity in django-zsutils, this project is more or less a dumping ground for some ideas I have and snippets I use on multiple sites (or at least see myself using on multiple sites). The new step for any of these is, whether I can see them as standalone library. If I do, I try to clean them up even more and split them of the main package.

This happened yesterday to my little object-oriented views-implementation for Django. If you don't know this library yet, please take a look at its README or this blog post. Basically, the idea is to be able to share some common functionality between views by making views out of Python classes.

Today I did some final cleanup, moved it over to setuptools and finally made an actual 0.2.0 release including PyPI-registration, files etc. So if you want to use it, just run easy_install django-oopviews

I also registered the project on launchpad.net, so if you find any bugs or have some feature request or other questions, please ask there

Right after 1.0 got released, some people started to wonder how to easily stay up to date on bugfixes for this major release. Back then I think it was James Bennett who told me to stay tuned for something on this front. Today, Jacob Kaplan-Moss announced that Django 1.0 finally has its own maintenance branch in the repository.

At least that's what you should expect after reading this story on gizmodo about one of the biggest retail chains in the USA shutting down their DRM-based online music store (August 2006 - February 2008) since they're since February 2008 trying to be all-DRM-free. I have no idea how their system works, but in the e-mail published on gizmodo it is suggested by the support team that you burn your music to an audio CD. So I guess the music is somehow bound to a local software component and a server key, so you'd have to re-activate your music if you for example re-install your operating system.

It naturally should be the job of the user first to make sure everything of importance is properly backed up, but in the end most people rely on the service provider to at least act as 2nd tier in the backup-chain. This 2nd level is now dropped. At least they seem to offer a way to get the music out of the DRM-lock, but just think of other services that don't do that. In the end this case should finally shake quite a few people up who previously bought music online without really checking what rights they have on it. Many people always think "Hey, I can get this song online for cheap". Nope, you can get the rights to play it on a single (or 2 or 3) device with a bit of device-lock-in and only very limited ways to use this song for cheap. Congrats.

I at least hope that more people will finally start to get it and also recognize it in other systems; not only those of the music industry but in all parts of the content industry. In this regard (and only in this since I in general don't enjoy people having problems) I hope that many people have bought DRM'd music from Walmart.

Today, Automattic announced that they have acquired the centralized commenting service IntenseDebate. Over the course of this year, 3rd party commenting systems have gained quite a bit of momentum for various reasons including having one place where to find all your discussions. With this move now, the centralized system gains even more momentum with virtually all new WordPress installations, hosted or self-installed, getting support for IntenseDebate out of the box according to Matt Mullenweg.

You know the streetview-car, but do you already know the Flickrbike? Take a bike, bundle it with a GPS device, and a camera that takes a picture every 60 seconds and automatically geotags them and you can track the life of your bike, and where you've all been with it. Flickr now sent such a bike out to various cities in the USA, Europe, Asia and Oceania and you can follow them on Yahoo's new Start Wearing Purple-site.

Purple isn't exactly my color, but I'd definitely love to get my hands on such a bike ... as long as I don't have to pay the bandwidth bill for the automatic uploading

[Photo from Start Wearing Purple]

Take an old concept, put it onto a new medium ( ... OK, not really new) and think it is a great new idea. This WTF-moment was brought to me by SanDisk in association with this big 4 (SonyBMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner Music) this morning. slotMusic is that "new" idea and it's all about using microSD cards as replacement for the good old CDDAs. Honestly, the idea is in my opinion not completely bad, especially since -- probably thanks to some extra-terrestrial influence -- the music will be stored as 320Kbps MP3s without DRM. As Michael Arrington I'm totally baffled how SanDisk could convince the 4 labels to do that.

Normally I've come to expect the last day of a conference to be more on the slow side. Only half of the people are there anymore and so on. But not in Birmingham, where the my 2nd conference day (3rd in total) was even more interesting than the first one, although all we could find on this not-so-sunny Sunday morning was some expensive McDonalds breakfast.

So yesterday was the first day on the PyCon UK and it was great The mix of topics and personalities was simply astonishing. But let's look at it from start to finish: My day basically started (at least it's the first thing I can remember right now) with a great breakfast right next to the conference venue with something called a "Traditional Breakfast". I guess this has been the weirdest combination of great stuff I've ever had for breakfast. It was some eggs, a sausage, half a tomato, bacon, and beans. More than enough for a whole day

But now to the actual talks: First thing in the morning was a talk about using Python to facilitate working on embedded systems. Next came a talk about introducing students to Python as a first language. This was the time I was finally awakening for real and so I actually really enjoyed this one. "Now we are finally more popular than Maths courses" made my day