Archive for 2008/08

  • MacVIM as TextMate replacement

    TextMate is one of the coolest editors around thanks to its Snippet-feature, ease of extensibility and community support. But more and more I saw myself using VIM instead of TextMate for one reason or another, but mainly because I'm just so used to searching with / and using :s for search-and-replace. And MacVIM helped quite a lot too, thanks to its pretty nice integration into OSX.

    Today I tried two plugins for vim that move it pretty close to what TextMate has to offer (not that vim is less powerful than TM or something, but some gems are just too well hidden ;-) ): snippetsEmu for snippets and NERD_tree as a replacement for the project-drawer.

    Read more about "MacVIM as TextMate replacement" ...

    2008/08/03 at 17:05:04

    3 comments

  • BlueprintCSS ready to be forked?

    At least if you read the official mailinglist it might look like that too you. Olav Bjørkøy, the original author of BlueprintCSS, basically dropped of the net in March (except for some twittering ;-)) and nothing has really happened with the framework since then. If it were bug-free, this wouldn't be a problem, but since it is not (hint: the ie.css still requires class names that have been removed from the rest with 0.7) it weird, to say the least. Not that Olav seems to be the only person with commit permissions there, but perhaps he's the only one who can commit to the root folder.

    Now, after 5 months of stagnation, some people on the official mailing-list are starting to wonder, if Blueprint is really dead and Christian Montoya wrote in the same post

    [...] , but if Olav is really gone, I'm willing to pick up support for BP and maybe even develop it to version 0.8.

    Another problem the Blueprint community currently faces is that no one seems to be administrating the mailing-list, which kind of invites spam right now.

    That said, I personally don't have any problems with the framework (except for the ie.css), but some of the other problems in the issue tracker look definitely like issues, that should be resolved if Blueprint should stay interesting for developers and designers out there. I can just hope, that this all gets resolved rather quickly now that there are finally some people thinking about solutions.

    Update: Joshua Clayton has no created a repository on github, which hopefully wake some people up again ;-)

    2008/08/06 at 22:59:44

    0 comments

  • About git-svn, trunk, master and everything

    I guess this can be categorized as "Shooting yourself into the foot with a smile". For the last couple of days I've been working on a patch for bringing some gettext into Sphinx. First I started the work in the most recent release, just to see how hard it would be. Then I made a checkout from the SVN repo using Git in order to rewrite the patch for trunk. Everything fine, so far. Yesterday night then I wanted to go through the patch one more time before sending it through the ether and noticed something rather stupid: When checking out from SVN using git-svn, Git, for some reason, didn't make "trunk" the new master-branch, but instead, I guess, used the branch with the most recent commit.

    When then moving to the "real" trunk and applying my patch, at least most of the hunks (and all the big ones) passed, so it only took me about 20 minutes to get the patch ready again.

    So from now on, the first thing I will do when cloning an SVN repository is a git reset --hard remotes/trunk as suggested by the manual (deep down in the basic examples) just to be on the safe side ;-)

    2008/08/08 at 12:28:33

    0 comments

  • First baby-steps in GeoDjango

    For a couple of days now, Django trunk finally also includes GeoDjango. A geo-spatial extension module for Django that adds -- among other things -- model fields and managers to easily use backends like the geo-spatial extensions for PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle. Let's see, how hard it is to get it going on my little MacBook.

    Read more about "First baby-steps in GeoDjango" ...

    2008/08/10 at 01:54:48

    1 comments

  • Das war der Webmontag Klagenfurt 4.0: WCAG und Gesetze

    So, gerade vom Webmontag zurückgekommen. Heute haben Andreas Jeitler und Mark Wassermann vom Beratungs-, Mobilitäts- und Kompetenzzentrum der Universität Klagenfurt eine Einführung zum Thema Web-accessibility gebracht. Als ich mich das letzte mal im Rahmen von 2 Kursen von Prof. Brajnik mit dem Thema zu tun hatte, waren gerade die WCAG 2.0 in ihren frühen Entstehungsphase, weshalb die Diskussion im Zuge des Vortrages genau zu diesem Thema doch ein paar Unklarheiten beseitigen konnte.

    Andreas und Mark kurz vor ihrer Präsentation über Web-accessibility

    Andreas und Mark haben außerdem ein paar der gesetzlichen Änderungen (die jetzt seit rund 2 Jahren in Österreich gelten) ein bisschen näher erläutert. Mir zum Beispiel war neu, dass eigentlich sämtliche der Öffentlichkeit bereitgestellten Dienste barrierefrei sein müssen. Bis jetzt dachte ich immer, dass es hier eigentlich ausschließlich um staatliche Einrichtungen und Organisationen geht. Inwiefern das gerichtlich einklagbar ist (ich denke hier primär an Gratisdienstleistungen) sei einmal dahingestellt und Leuten überlassen, die sich mit der Materie deutlich besser auskennen, aber es ist doch ein sehr wichtiger Schritt in die richtige Richtung.

    Nach dem Vortrag gab es noch das übliche Beisammensein und Martin hat mich an das Barcamp München 2008 am 11. und 12. Oktober erinnert. Irgendwie war ich doch schon ziemlich lange nicht mehr in München, also nehme ich mir einfach einmal vor, dort zu sein. Hoffentlich kommt nichts in die Quere :D

    2008/08/11 at 23:05:38

    0 comments

  • 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.

    Read more about "GenericForeignKeys with fewer queries" ...

    2008/08/13 at 18:36:40

    14 comments

  • 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 21:55:15

    0 comments

  • 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.

    Read more about "BlueprintCSS alive again" ...

    2008/08/16 at 01:42:15

    0 comments

  • 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 15:44:44

    1 comments

  • 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 22:13:21

    0 comments