Archive 7/2008

Kleines Update für alle Österreicher, die Django benutzen. Seit letztem Wochenende gibt es jetzt endlich auch ein eigenes localflavor.at-Package (r8087, r8113). Zum aktuellen Zeitpunkt kommt es mit einer Select-Box für die neun Bundesländer, einem einfachen Formularfeld, das österreichische Postleitzahlen validiert, und einem Feld, das die hier gültigen Sozialversicherungsnummern akzeptiert, daher.

After some e-mailing problems, 2 days ago I finally received word that the top-case replacement for my nice little white MacBook had arrived in Graz. But I'm in Klagenfurt and don't have a car, so why Graz? Simple. In Graz is the nearest certified Apple service provider for me and I don't really have the time to sent my MacBook to Apple (I guess all the way over to Amsterdam) and then sit on my hands waiting for it to return within a couple of weeks.

So yesterday I took the first bus -- that is the first in what I consider as morning compared to "night" -- and only 2.5 hours later I was standing in the offices of nc digitalis. If you ever get there, don't expect a storefront. It's basically just a small office within something that, I guess, previously was an apartment build in the early 1900s. Just ignore that if you don't like it I was just really happy with the service. Within 15 minutes I had my MacBook again with a shiny new top-case (and a clean keyboard :-P ). And the best part: It was all done under warranty. Just great service

When I moved over from Dreamhost to Slicehost, one of the (minor) motivators was the option to use something different than MySQL. Don't get me wrong, though: MySQL is a nice system, fast, relatively memory-efficient and so on. But what drove and still drives me nuts is that not every storage engine within MySQL supports transactions. MyISAM can be as fast as it gets, if it lacks transaction support, I won't use it for at least some of my tables. And having to manually check that every time I write a new app really started to annoy me. But how to move a site like this, that is using Django, from one database system to another (or to be specific, PostgreSQL in this scenario) as simply as possible?

Just a small update for those of you reading this blog's feed: If you don’t want to see my German articles, there is something new for you: A feed that only includes English posts.

http://zerokspot.com/weblog/feed/en/

Das Gleiche gilt für diejenigen unter euch, die nur meine deutschsprachigen Beiträge im Feed haben möchten:

http://zerokspot.com/weblog/feed/de/

Enjoy

Think about what it would look like if a versioning system like git and a pastie had a child, and you'd probably came quite close what the folks behind the project hosting service Github let loose on the web just yesterday: Gist, a pastie that supports versioning and much more.

After nearly more than a year of development Brian Rosner merged the newforms-admin branch into trunk last night. This marks the last missing branch getting merged into trunk before the 1.0 release. Big kudos and thanks to Brian and everybody else involved in the development on this branch.

Another big change happened last night: newforms is now finally the "official" forms library for Django. At least it now resides directly within django.forms.

Both of these changes are backwards-incompatible, yet fully documented (1, 2). For everyone running on trunk (and who hasn't been preparing for this merge) this means some work esp. if you've messed around quite a lot with oldadmin. Also some of the styling in NFA looks a little bit different than before thanks to the move away from the old form manipulator modules which added some special classes to each form-element. If it annoys you, check out #5609.

I will try not to spend too much time on this book here since I'm rather pissed right now. When "Warpath", which was released in March 2006, ended it was quite clear in what direction the next book would go: the mirror universe and the whole story behind Iliana Ghemor. This book does at least the later, but leaves the first one open to the next books ... and that's my problem with "Fearful Symmetry" by Olivia Woods. The book doesn't really progress the story. It answers basically all questions you could have had about Illiah, but the actual timeline progression is veeery minimal. I guess I couldn't even spoil anything here even if I tried.

Pownce released last night the first alpha of their new desktop client. The previous, at least for me, had become unusable due to login problem and such, so I'm quite happy that there is finally an official -- yet still alpha -- replacement.

This new version thankfully comes with a simplified style and also embeds content like YouTube movies and the like instead of requiring users to once again go to the actual website. The client still uses Adobe AIR and is therefor available on Windows, MacOSX and Linux.

For the last 2 days I've now been hard at work getting some of the achievements trophies which are now available in some PS3 games since the last firmware update. And since the only game I have that supports trophies, I've been playing tons of Super Stardust HD again After getting the first 2 for finishing the first 2 levels, I noticed that for most of the trophies you have to get the expansion pack which costs 3.99 EUR. Since I wanted to get it anyway, that's not a big deal for me, but I still think its weird and a bad idea, to be honest, to make only about half of the trophies for the core game.

Ever made a comment on a weblog that was using Disqus while you were not? Well, now you can claim such comments according to this post on the Disqus blog so that you don't lose track of them if you afterwards created your own account on Disqus.

The process itself is pretty straight forward. When you see a comment that you made without being logged in, you click on your avatar and get redirected to a profile page. Such a page is generated for every anonymous commenter's email-address. You can now lay a claim on this page by entering the email address that it belongs to. Then you receive an email to confirm that this email address really belongs to you; and that's it.

Since this profile is email based (the user-specific part of the profile's URL is basically the MD5-hash of the email address) I guess this now includes all your comments made with this email address into your Disqus profile.

Really nice. Is this perhaps the first step for real comment importer?