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Archive for 2008/08

  • Something new in django_zsutils

    The first big change in my "little collection of Django-related stuff" is a new folder structure. This was necessary because for some modules I just want to have some sort of unit-testing going on, and with the old structure this would just have been a total mess.

    The actual new part of the package is the django_zsutils.utils.oopviews.ctn module which includes a sample implementation of content-type negotiation. Stuff like that is always interesting if you want to provide rendering for different types of clients while still using the same URL.

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    2008/08/30 at 12:37:27

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  • jQuery.com got new clothes

    Just a short "Congrats" to the jQuery team for the redesign of jQuery.com. The old design got quite ... well, old after all this time ;-) In general, the new design looks like a complete reboot: New color-scheme, new logo, new feel and all great in my opinion. The new narrow design really helps me focus on the actual content of the site, esp. in the documentation section which (although structurally identical from what I can see) feels much lighter and easier to look at. Only the whole "Be a Javascript Rock Star" is kind of weird and definitely addresses the wrong audience (script kiddies). There is actually already a huge discussion about this on the jQuery blog.

    Update: Now also for people who don't want to be rock stars. Thanks :-)

    2008/08/29 at 20:14:22

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  • Linkinus, my new X-Chat?

    For many years now I've always been using X-Chat whenever I wanted to go on IRC. First under Linux (with some small side-trips to BitchX) and since 2 years now on OSX thanks to the X-Chat Aqua port. Yesterday MacApper ran a story about Linkinus, a relatively new IRC client by Nicolas Lapomarda, that tries to revive the IRC market on Apple's operating system.

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    2008/08/26 at 21:27:43

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  • Django Documentation Refactor has landed

    A long time coming the documentation refactoring has finally landed on docs.djangoproject.com and in trunk. Compared to the previous format this one now uses Georg Brandl's Sphinx documentation system, which also finally gives you as a user a simple way to have the documentation bundled with Django itself to be converted to HTML with one command (if everything works) :-). To do this, simply go to the docs folder of your Django checkout and run make html (naturally after installing Sphinx) and if everything works you should end up with a whole bunch of HTML files. Great work Jacob et al. :-)

    So far for me this isn't working yet, probably because I'm living on the bleeding edge with Sphinx for a couple of reasons, but perhaps I can find some time to dig into this. If you get a syntax error line layout.html line 10 when building the documentation, make sure that you've installed Jinja 1.2 (instead of something older like 1.1).

    The structure is new too and it will definitely take some time getting used too, but the separation between primary content (the one on the left side of the index page) and additional articles (in the boxes on the right side) definitely makes sense :-) For now it isn't linked yet in the main menu on the site, probably because it's still in testing stage.

    2008/08/24 at 07:56:37

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  • Next Ma.gnolia to be open-source

    If you follow the blog on the social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia you probably know that the team behind it is far from being lazy. Every month there is something new. Most of the time it is something that only a couple of people will probably be interested in (like the integration with Gnip or the EAUT+OpenID support added this month), but nonetheless.

    But today, they had something way bigger to announce: The next version of Ma.gnolia will be open-source. But this is only part of the story. M2 (as the new version is called) will not only make it possible to install your own little bookmarking service for you and your friends, but it will also be possible to link installations (including Ma.gnolia.com). The whole open development project will launch next month on github. For links to the respective project parts visit ma.gnolia.org.

    According to the published charter this move also opens the doors for a whole new business direction: consulting and support regarding custom installations. The whole business this around Ma.gnolia was always a little bit of a mystery to me. Last year there was some talk about finally introducing a pro account, something that never happened. But with M2 all roads are open again. Esp. if you want to sync your own site with Ma.gnolia.com, I can imaging, there might be a new pro account somewhere in there.

    Anyway, great move and I can't wait to see what the final infrastructure will look like. I'm esp. curious how the whole federation between multiple services will be handled and esp. with the "root" servers.

    2008/08/22 at 23:52:16

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  • Embed your Flickr slideshows ... officially

    Just last monday the question came up how do you actually embed a bunch of Flickr photos into your blog? Back then all I knew was that there was a well document yet not really official trick which basically gave you the slideshow in an iframe. Since this was obviously too complicated for some people, flickrslidr.com appeared on the net.

    Today Flickr itself finally announced an official way to embed a slideshow which thankfully doesn't use an iframe ;-) For this you can now find a new "share" link whenever you're watching a slideshow.

    Embed your slideshows (with options)

    If you don't want the default size, just follow the "Customize this HTML" link indicated in the screenshot above and you get to a simple form for doing just that.

    2008/08/21 at 20:13:21

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  • Geoserver with OpenJDK on Ubuntu? I guess not

    Or at least not for now. Today I had to install Geoserver on a new Ubuntu 8.04 server within a current Tomcat (6.0.18) for a colleague and was greeted by a nice error message related to casting and the javax.imageio package (or earlier on with a ClassDefNotFound exception related to the same package). The problem here seems to be that the stable Geoserver 1.6.x is not really compatible with OpenJDK yet.

    So for now the fastest way to get it working again (that is, if you don't absolutely require OpenJDK) to move back to the old Sun Java 6 package by first installing "sun-java6-jdk" and then by switching to it using update-alternatives --config java.

    At first I thought I had to install some external libraries and miserably failed to install the jai_imageio binary package thanks to the package being broken and naturally Sun has to have internal checksums so that you can't easily fix this. But luckily this has become a non-issue with the move back to Java6 for now, but I'm really curious if I just messed up something there or the missing jai_imageio package was really the problem here. I guess, this is a problem for later, now that I have a workaround in place ;-)

    2008/08/18 at 13:44:44

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  • BlueprintCSS alive again

    A small update on the whole BlueprintCSS front from what I could gather on the mailinglist etc.: The old site on Google code is basically dead. The development will probably continue on a new repository on GitHub with a tracker on Lighthouseapp thanks to Joshua Clayton, where I moved all the currently active tickets to a couple of days ago. Christian Montoya, who's been in the same boat as contributor to BlueprintCSS as Joshua before, has now also set up a new website on blueprintcss.org that first of all points people to the new repository in order to make people aware of the change. The goal here is to get a high enough pagerank so that people won't stumble upon the "old" project site and think the project is dead.

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    2008/08/15 at 23:42:15

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  • Online leaderboard for Geometry Wars RE2

    Nice, Bizzard Creations has now also put the leaderboard for Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 online. Flash ... but better than nothing :-) Now I just have to get a higher score in all, I guess, all modes. Lurking around in the lower 50,000 isn't all that nice.

    Screenshot of the leaderboard

    I already thought that my 800 MS space bucks were already well invested, but with an online leaderboard, I really have to start getting into the higher score-ranges ... Sometimes achievements simply aren't good enough.

    [via Joystiq]

    2008/08/14 at 19:55:15

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  • GenericForeignKeys with fewer queries

    When working with generic relations in Django you have to be quite careful not to end up with n+1 queries for a simple fetch of n elements. The reason for this is that internally a generic relation is not really a true foreign key (naturally) but just an id combined with a foreign key to a content-type. But there are some ways around this problem. Among them a quite simple one: Doing the actual content-loading by yourself.

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    2008/08/13 at 16:36:40

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