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Archive for 2009/01

  • World, meet django-flatblocks 0.1.0

    A couple of months ago I found out about Clint Ecker's excellent django app django-chunks, which basically does one thing and that very well: It takes the idea of a django.contrib.flatpages and uses it for small chunks or blocks on a page, like a help section a small "about" part you want to have on every page, yet still keep it editable. All you have to do, is create a model instance, give it a specific name/key/slug and then use a bundled templatetag to include that object into your view.

    {% load chunks %}
       ...
       {% chunk 'my_help_section' %}

    Many people started forking it to add some additional fields. Kevin Fricovsky added an active-flag, Peter Baumgartner added a header field, ... which is something I personally needed for one of my projects. But I also need a couple of other things, like an inclusion-tag instead of a plain-old-django-templatetag, so that I could easily add, for example, an edit button right next to each such block. That was the time when I knew, I had to make it a real fork.

    The first step actually was to also allow the name of the chunk/flatblock being passed via a template variable, so you could all of a sudden do something like this:

    {% load flatblock_tags %}
       ...
       {% flatblock blockInAVaribale %}
       

    ... which makes things a little bit easier if you're, for instance, operating in a multi-lingual environment. But first I have some other things I want to see in django-flatblocks with a simple view for editing being quite on top of that list ... so that I don't have to write it again and again in each and every project I'm working on ;-)

    But now enough of that. Enjoy django-flatblocks 0.1.0 :-)

    Update (2009-02-25): django-flatblocks 0.2.0 is now available :-)

    2009/01/30 at 22:13:09

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  • Prince of Persia

    Every once in a while, I get a game more or less by chance. Back when I was a kid this happened quite a lot but now I only very rarely get a game without thinking about it for weeks. So happened just a week ago with Prince of Persia for the Playstation 3. Amazon.co.uk had a sale back then I thought it couldn't be not worth EUR 23. It's not like it got bad reviews or something but its developers definitely made some controversial gameplay decisions.

    Read more about "Prince of Persia" ...

    2009/01/25 at 23:08:26

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  • EuroDjangoCon site online

    SiuDesign just launched the official website for the European DjangoCon this May in Prague, Czech Republic: http://euro.djangocon.org/. The big news is the exact date: 4-6 May. According to the official announcement the venue has already been fixated and information about that will be released shortly and registration will start on February 6th.. If you want to give a talk, there is also already a submission form up.

    I, for one, can't wait to be there. Tech conferences are just always so much fun :-)

    2009/01/24 at 15:24:50

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  • Prince of Persia: The buggy edition?

    Last Thursday I got my copy of Prince of Persia for the PS3 and so far I'm really enjoying it. They story isn't bad at all, I love the characters and the whole jump'n run action is just pure entertainment. But: This is definitely the buggiest "big" game I've played in a very long time. Even the first 30 minutes had one really big issue that someone has to have noticed during QA ...

    Read more about "Prince of Persia: The buggy edition?" ...

    2009/01/21 at 00:36:03

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  • Gitready for your daily knowledge-dosage

    Need your daily dosage of "perhaps learning something new"? Why not improve your git-skills at the same time?! On gitready.com Nick Quaranto offers a really nice collections of tips the powerful SCM grouped by skill-level (beginner, intermediate and advanced). Want to contribute a tip? There is also a submit form for you :-)

    [via github.com]

    2009/01/20 at 16:37:49

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  • Star Wars: Retold

    Ever wondered what Star Wars looks like if you have only seen bits and pieces of it? Joe Nicolosi asked his friend Amanda to recap the plot for him:


    Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

    That's the definitely the funniest Star Wars-related video I've seen in a while :D

    [via Leah Culver]

    2009/01/16 at 08:20:13

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  • Free Sackboy-knitting instructions

    Remember issue 49 if Simply Knitting and its great tutorial on how to make your own Sackboy? Well, me neither. If I was living in the UK I'm quite sure I'd have bought that issue, but since it is not available here I had to keep on living without my own handmade Sackboy. I was looking all over the place for alternatives but, honestly, importing something like that all the way from Hong Kong felt kind of ridiculous to me.

    I never would have guessed that the original instructions were also available for free on the Sun's website, though ... and ever since new-year's eve 2008 :D

    [via Kotaku, image from the PDF]

    2009/01/14 at 11:30:41

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  • Some tentative Palm Pre excitement

    Last night I did something really stupid: I started watching the Palm press conference about the Pre at 01:30 in the morning. Well, 45 minutes later I was tired as hell and had one gadget more on my watchlist ...

    While the hardware looks really nice all around (USB mass storage, standard earphone plug, built-in keyboard, ...), I guess the most exciting aspect of the Pre is the new platform for it called "webOS". It offers things like gestures and a unified contact management and communication interface. According to Palm basically every application for it is written in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.

    Read more about "Some tentative Palm Pre excitement" ...

    2009/01/11 at 12:54:51

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  • Farewell, 1UP.com crew

    What a day. The first thing I read when getting up yesterday morning was that 1UP was basically going down with most of the people I really liked there losing their jobs. It's not like we didn't all see the takeover by UGO coming, but I never would have expected it hitting that hard.

    For the last nearly 3 years the podcasts and shows by 1UP were a fixture in my weekly schedule. Sitting in the Mensa and listening to the latest thing Shane was the biggest fan of on the whole wide world... Not to mention all their great features esp. those about the TGS and the hilarious Broken Pixels. While Garnett Lee already indicated, that there might still be a 1UP Yours, it hardly will be the same. But as a friend told me: Everything eventually comes to an end.

    It just was so sad to follow Ryan O'Donnell's twitter feed when he and the video crew cleared their offices. Now all I can do is wish the whole former 1up-crew good luck and that they will ASAP find a new job they enjoy as much or even more as their previous one.

    P.S.: You can find a small collection of links about this on my delicious account

    2009/01/08 at 00:39:17

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  • Barcamp Klagenfurt 2009: Ein paar Details

    Für all jene, die es noch nicht wissen: Am 7. und 8. Februar gibt's wieder ein Barcamp in Klagenfurt. Georg hat heute einmal zusammengeschrieben, was derzeit Stand der Dinge ist und ... da hab ich eigentlich nichts hinzuzufügen ;-) Falls ihr nicht wisst, wie man nach Klagenfurt kommt: das findet ihr auch dort neben Information zum geplanten Veranstaltungsort, den Anmeldeformalitäten und der kommenden Frühjahrsmode.

    Wie man aus dem Posts von Georg et al. entnehmen kann, gibt es das Barcamp Klagenfurt natürlich auch auf Twitter, Facebook und Flickr. Zusätzliche werde ich auch noch versuchen, die wichtigsten Neuigkeiten in unseren Raum auf FriendFeed zu stellen :-)

    2009/01/05 at 23:24:34

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