Archive 1/2008

So next weekend Klagenfurt will see its 2nd BarCamp ever and once again it will be held in the rooms of the University of Klagenfurt and hopefully help people in Carinthia to get to know some new topics and exchange opinions in a comfortable and amicable atmosphere.

Yesterday, while playing around for the first time with Adobe Flex, I came across a really cool component for visualising directional and non-directional graphs. The Flex Visual Graph Library does more or less everything for you. All you have to do, is add nodes and edges to it and select one from a bunch of layouting algorithms for positioning these nodes.

Since I started messing around with JavaScript a little more for work and also finally used this opportunity for getting some knowledge when it comes to YUI, I was about to look into ways to efficiently deploy separated JavaScript files (or at least I planned to get into this topic this weekend). I guess for Django, there is now - thanks to Pedro Vale Lima - a really nice management command that makes packaging and compressing multiple JavaScripts easy.

Naturally you could also write an external script using one of the many packers that are already out there, but with the integration right into Django it's just much cleaner

Always wondered if the whole item-sharing on Google Reader couldn't be used to build something like Digg? Well, you're not alone. Dennes B. Abing launched a new service called Shared Reader that does exactly this. It builds a memetracker like site out of what people mark as shared items in Google Reader.

There are some days, you simply want to erase from your memory. First thing I did when I came to work this morning, I bought myself the MacHeist2 bundle for stuff like CSSEdit 2 and Pixelmator and was absolutely surprised how I could survive until now without CoverSutra. But just a few minutes later, I got something in my inbox that I hadn't expected: A mail from Dreamhost telling me that I owe them nearly 400 USD and my CC has already been charged with it ... WTF! I won't even go into the details here, because they are officially documented well enough.

One of the longest story-lines in the Star Trek universe is definitely the one about those almighty beings called the Q. They, together with their most well known representative Q (portraid by John de Lancie), had their first appearance right in the first episode of the second Star Trek show: Star Trek: The Next Generation and since then appeared in not only a couple of other TNG-episodes (including the last one) but also in DS9 and Voyager. With Q & A Keith R.A. DeCandido extends the world surrounding the Q Continuum with another story that brings Q again down onto Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise to finally explain some things.

Jonathan Buchanan just released version 0.2 of the django-tagging app which comes with quite some significant changes in how tags are detected. It's now also possible to have multi-word tags and as such tags no longer have to be separated by spaces but instead can now also be separated by commas.

Besides these and other new features as well as some bugfixes this update also comes with 2 backwards-incompatible changes:

1. The database tables are now named tagging_tag instead of tag and tagging_taggeditem instead of tagged_item.
2. The tagging.utils.get_tag_name_list function was removed. From what I can tell, tagging.utils.parse_tag_input is basically its replacement.

For more details check out Jonathan's announcement and django-tagging's project page

Sorry for the downtime yesterday evening and (the longer one) last night (when you're asleep, you can't reboot a server). Stefan and I are working on it We are still trying to find the best Apache configuration for our slice which sometimes ends in a disaster not to mention the whole VPS going down

Every now and then I come across a site that really makes me come back every other minute. So happened 2 days ago with CommandShift3.com. If you don't know it yet, CommandShift3 is basically Hot-or-Not for websites. The frontpage is dominated by 2 large screenshots of 2 websites and you vote for one of them by simply clicking the screenshot ... and wonder what weird taste other people have

ars technica today had an article about a whole lot of people leaving the locked down Jaiku and moving over to Twitter because of the instability of the service and missing contact with the developers. It's just funny because Michael and I were just talking about what happened to Jaiku right before I read this article

Right when I first heard about Jaiku, I really liked it esp. because of the whole channel idea which simply made it more than just a Twitter-clone, but after Google bought them and made the whole service invite-only, nothing really happened there anymore, as far as I can tell. No new post on the blog, not a single message on the jaiku-feed. It's really sad I guess sometimes now being bought by Google is a good thing.

Update: Seems like the folks over at Jaiku are still allive