Archive for 2009/04

  • No Glitter Hits for me

    Every time the music industry runs around crying like a little girl about how much pirates (they probably mean those in Somalia) hurt their business (by attacking tourists on expensive yachts and tankers, I guess) I sometimes start to feel sorry for them. But this state of delusion only holds for as long as it takes Last.fm to play Glitter Hits by the Italian band "The Styles".

    I live in Austria, a country -- if you don't mind consulting a map you think you can trust -- pretty damn close to Italy. But for some obscure reason I can't buy the above mentioned song. It's not available in the German Amazon store (which also acts as the one for Austria), not in the Austria iTunes Music Store.

    A couple of weeks ago, I contacted H2OMusic, the label of "The Styles" which seems to be owned by Sony BMG, and asked about this. Did I ever get a response? Not really. I guess the next company to ask would be Sony BMG itself, but it's not like I expect much more a response than what I got from H2OMusic. Making a deal with EA to include the song world-wide in various Burnout games seems to have been possible. Why isn't adding it to iTunes everywhere?

    At least, the song isn't available in the newly opened MP3 store on the German edition of Amazon either ... which I get all the advertising for but can't actually by anything from since I'm not from Germany ...

    I often wonder, if the music industry really wants to sell you anything.

    2009/04/03 at 23:39:22

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  • Random thoughts

    What a month. This might probably become the least active month in blogging for me for quite some time now. First I was busy doing my diploma exam, then I was busy not eating all of the world's ham stock, and for a week now I've been trying really heard to get rid of a quite intractable cold.

    So far this all resulted in me not getting anything done that I had planed for the first weeks after my final exam :-( The rewrite of this site is still WIP (and hasn't seen any work, actually, for the last 3 weeks), no major sprint for the German translation of the Django docs (although at least one larger file was finished) and no trip to London and Berlin. Well, at least nothing will keep me away from Euro.Djangocon and perhaps I will get enough done on my 10h train-ride to Prague ;-)

    2009/04/19 at 23:40:39

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  • Master your default-branch on Github

    Sometimes small features are just as important as big ones. For nearly 6 months I've been waiting for such a small feature and tonight github finally implemented it: The option to choose the default branch of a repository.

    Why is this so important for me? I have a small repository where we translate the official Django documentation into German. Since we want to stick as close to the structure used upstream as possible, we have the documentation for 1.1 in the master-branch and the one for 1.0 in the releases/1.0.X branch. The problem was until now that most of our efforts right now happen in the 1.0-branch which we'll then simply merge into 1.1 once it is mostly complete. Previously we had to put a huge WARNING in the description of our repository to tell people what branch to use, now we can make that just a small warning ;-)

    So now, when you visit the translation's project on Github, you see the 1.0-branch right away :D

    2009/04/23 at 10:54:25

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