Launch Box is a QuickSilver clone for Gnome. Seems a bit rough around the edges and the installation might be a bit hairy due to the hard dependencies.
Archive 9.10.2005 - 24.10.2005
Linux and RAW Digital Photography provides a lot of information about RAW formats and Linux.
Lphoto is a photo database for Linux, structured similarly to iPhoto for Mac.
generic search service for Django
If your Django application needs searching capabilities, you can roll your own. Or you can use my generic search view. This provides a parser for queries and a search machinery that is suiteable for moderate database sizes. It provides an extensible google-like syntax.
The main problem is that django doesn't support OR query combinations and that it doesn't support "icontainsnot" queries. So the search engine does multiple selects to get one query. It starts with the longest search word and goes down in size from that result set, restricting it from one step to the next. But since it needs to keep the last result set in memory (at least the list of IDs), if your database contains too much rows, this might pose problems to your server (especially if the users do silly queries that produce large resultsets).
Maybe in future this will learn some optimizations to make it work better with larger databases, but it's quite fine as a search engine for your blog or standard content management systems.
Ubuntu Breezy Badger
I pulled the Live+Installation DVD (hey, T-DSL 3000 rules!) and must say, I'm really surprised. Okay, there are a few issues: the keyboard layout is suggested as the default for the PC - but a Mac notebook can have different layouts (externally a PC keyboard, but internally always a Mac keyboard), so the selection should be a bit more clever. If you switch to the Macintosh keyboard in the selection, special characters like the pipe symbol and curly and square brackets and AT and such no longer work - with PC allocation, however, the labeling of the Mac keyboard does not match. And there is no allocation for the Mac special characters.
What also doesn't work is the second monitor - it is simply not detected and activated, not even initialized. Too bad, because Macs do have multi-monitor support by default, at least the PowerBooks and PowerMac models (the iBooks and iMacs only partially and then only with hacks). That should also be included in my opinion.
But otherwise - nice thing. That WLAN is not recognized is normal - or it is recognized, but not usable. Apple's WLAN chips are often not supported there. I also don't know where Bluetooth is configured - I probably need to install packages first. But that could also be done automatically in my opinion if a Bluetooth adapter is detected. Nevertheless, Ubuntu seems quite nice overall - it starts with usable defaults and already supports a lot of the computer. And the extensive translation of at least menus and dialogs in Gnome is very pleasant.
And that a Debian architecture is working underneath is of course particularly dear to me.
However, it is catastrophic that in the Live CD it seems that no terminal can be started anywhere ...
Nanomobil fährt auf Gold: The structure, which consists of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, is about three nanometers wide and two nanometers long. And let someone say again that Japanese cars are small ...
to flock - to gather
I don't know if the above is the right motto for me. Bookmarks in del.icio.us. Pictures in Flickr. Somehow, I prefer to have this stuff with me rather than with some central hosts.
What they do right: automatic indexing of page content, so you can find it again. If there were also an OS X version where the browser is really an OS X application (and not just an application that runs on OS X), that could really be appealing.
Version Control with SVK
Version Control with SVK is an online book about SVK - a distributed version system that works very well with SVN and CVS (among others). And it offers quite a relief especially for working with patches for upstream systems and for local forks of open source software.
The book is far from complete, but you can already find quite a lot of information in it.
very simple view functions
Sometimes you have a bunch of really simple view functions in your django project (yes, this is for your, bitprophet! ). View functions that are actually not more than just a render to response call - take a template, take some data from the request, stuff them in and render a response. It's rather boring to write them down and it breaks the DRY principle. So what to do? Write your own generic view.
from django.core.extensions \
import render_to_response
def simple_view(request, template, **kwargs):
return render_to_response(
template, kwargs)
That's all. A simple and nice view function that just does that - render a template. It even can be fed with context variables from the urlpattern. Use it like this in your urlconf:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^page/(?P<arg>.*)/$', 'cool.simple_view',
{'template': 'app/mytemplate'}),
)
That way a /page/foo/ view would be routed to the 'app/mytemplate' template with a context that just includes the variable 'arg' with the value 'foo'. And you never will need to write those simple_view functions again. For extra spices you could throw in a context_instance = DjangoContext(request) into the render to response call to even get the authenticated user and stuff like that from the request.
Mannesmann trial this time without victory for Ackermann?
Anyway, that sounds like when judges express doubts about Mannesmann acquittals:
On the first day of the trial yesterday, judges had already expressed doubts about the acquittals of Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann, former Mannesmann CEO Klaus Esser, former IG Metall chairman Klaus Zwickel, and other defendants.
Module Hacking for Django
Django itself constructs model modules dynamically from your model classes. That's what I used in my first take at the abstract tagging application. Now I found a better way in the current version - I can modify the dynamic module myself quite easily, generate a dynamic model class and push that into the model module. What it actually does is just mimicking what happens when Python defines a class - most stuff is done by the meta.ModelBase metaclass in Django, anyway. I only had to add some module hacking stuff. Python introspection rules!
What this gives you is a much cleaner interface to create the tagrelation class for your model - just a function call, no silly subclassing or superfluous assignment. Everything happens as by magic.
It is magic.
Twisted Names I should take a look at - a DNS server in Python based on Twisted. I could rewrite it for database usage as an alternative to PowerDNS.
AgfaPhoto goodbye
Unfortunately, but Agfa is probably history now: AgfaPhoto cannot be saved. Even if someone buys the name now, it won't be Agfa anymore. No more APX. It's kind of a strange feeling.
Aperture
It's been announced, and now it's here - Aperture. By Apple. The video about it is nice, and it looks very useful, what they've done. And I would even let myself be persuaded to pay the almost 500 Euros - okay, Photoshop updates would be cheaper for me, but Aperture is built with a focus on RAW and Photoshop only has a RAW importer. But what really bothers me: the hardware requirements. The programmers have lost their marbles.
Yes, photo editing needs memory - after all, it's a lot of data. And you need decently powerful hardware for using filters. And yes, a fast graphics card is useful. But the minimum requirements for Aperture are already partly beyond belief - especially since we know how these minimum requirements will work - probably as well as Mac OS X with 256 MB of memory ...
Sorry, but photo editing is not rocket science and not weather simulation - what is this completely exaggerated resource demand of the software? Have today's programmers completely forgotten how to optimize?
Man, I scanned and processed an entire film with Photoshop 5 on an Apple with 128 MB of RAM and a 275 MHz 603e CPU not so long ago. Of course, RAW images are larger - but why should a photo editing program require a dual G5? Ridiculous. Delusions of grandeur.
So I'll probably just continue working with Photoshop 7, even if the Open Dialog still crashes under Tiger. At least it works decently on my nice, old 12" Powerbook (yes, the one with 867 MHz and only 640 MB of memory). It's enough for my purposes, I don't want to shell out several thousand Euros just to be able to start the photo editing program ...
Tuckesburg in Münster
Tuckesburg in Münster
The Tuckesburg was the retirement home of Professor Landois. In the Middle Ages, it was the workplace of the executioner, where, among others, wealthy citizens and nobles were executed.
Tagging with Django
Since the question about how to do tagging with Django shows up quite often, I have written a small solution to this problem: AbstractTagging. This is a generic application and generic views that give you a very simple solution to add tagging to any model you have in your django apps. It's currently used by me in my CMS project. The source is in the stuff project.
It was a bit weird to build, because I had to dynamically construct a base class you can subclass in your models - this is because of the magic in django.core.meta, where model classes are turned into modules. But the result is quite nice, I think.
What should the name be
The RFC 1437 is - as anyone who has read the introductory text will probably already suspect - one of the April RFCs. But somehow, this April RFC appealed to me more than any other - even if it is technically rather weak (the RFC with the carrier pigeons - RFC 1149 - is much better).
The idea of transporting intelligent life forms is not new - almost every science fiction has a variation of it. However, there is already the transport of intelligent life forms today - at least if you use a suitable definition. Of course, there is no physical transport by beaming. But what makes intelligent life forms?
For me, the central component of intelligent life forms is communication. And not just purpose-bound communication - there is also such a thing among pack animals during hunting, for example. But rather, communication for its own sake, communication for the sake of communication. Representation of ideas and thoughts, just to convey them to others, without there being a specific reason to do so.
I have been indulging in this communication for many years in various forms. For some time now, again intensified on the Internet in the form of photo albums (e.g. leicaesk and hugoesk (shut down)) or weblogs (e.g. Hugos House of Weblog Horror). Furthermore, software has always been a central means of communication for me (e.g. PyDS - a weblog and news aggregator software, or the software of this server).
This site is intended to be a supplement. Here, various media should be brought together and used jointly. No idea where this will take me, no idea if anything more than just a few test pages and general blabla will ever be created, but if you never set off, you will never be able to go on a journey.
Of course, the whole thing did not come to me immediately as a great revelation. For example, I used the domain rfc1437.de for a long time simply as a funny mail domain - mail as the idea of virtual beaming. But mail alone is a very narrow medium. Many ways of expressing myself can only be poorly transported by mail.
Moreover, it annoyed me that people kept pointing out to me that my domain was broken, just because no web server was set up ...
No idea if it's really The Coolest DHTML / JavaScript Calendar, but it looks quite nice. And it has a few quite important features - such as the ability to move it.
call of the noodle
Someone is writing a Lisp compiler for Python bytecode - very interesting, as you could use the Python libraries under a Lisp dialect. Let's see what the Lisp dialect will look like when the first release comes out and what features it will cover. With support for Lisp macros, it would be very interesting.
Using Django as a CMS
I am currently reworking one of my sites - Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form. It was a Apache::MiniWiki based site before and is now in the transition to being a Django based site. The idea of the code for that site is to build a CMS based on Django that fully uses the Django admin. So the users should be able to do all management only in the admin, while the site itself behaves a bit like a Wiki. Autolinking, Autoediting of missing pages, Editlinks, Versioning (currently missing in the source) - all that should be done based on tools the Django admin provides.
This isn't for a full-blown site, though - the linked site is allmost empty, I never put much up there. It's more a project to dig deeper into the Django admin to see what it's like to work in it - so I know about that stuff when I start to build real projects.
The code itself is freely available - and there is already a nice thing in it. It's a template loader who pulls stuff from the database instead from the filesystem or from python eggs. It's "ticketed" at Django under #633, so it might make it into django.contrib some day.
Dismantling the Alleged Savior
Nice when a corporate bigwig is taken down. I've always wondered why the SPD lets an HR manager from the automotive industry reform unemployment insurance (keywords Bock and Gärtner and so on - and yes, I am aware of the auto chancellor). Will his name ever be separated from this absurd unemployment policy, or will politicians in the future still be proud of the name Hartz?
Church Tax and Non-Religious Spouses
The churches in the dioceses of Hildesheim, Osnabrück and Münster are changing the calculation of church tax - and specifically, in marriages where one of the partners is not in the church, the joint income will now be used to calculate the church tax of the other partner. Robber baron thinking, which hopefully moves as many people as possible to turn their backs on this absurd association ...
Especially in view of such rather arbitrary changes, I see the state's collection of church tax even more critically. Because the state is making itself here the accomplice of the arbitrariness of the churches over their members.
Matt Mullenweg and the Money
Well, as Ralf reports in the Netzbuch under the nice title Wordpress, the Weblog Prostitute, Matt Mullenweg - the main developer of WordPress - has once again come up with a grand idea for making money. Naturally, once again at the expense of the PageRank he has built up through the many backlinks from WordPress blogs. And of course, once again without any major discussion or at least open communication within the community. This time it's about advertising placements through some ad space marketer at absurdly high prices.
what the media is committed to
When it comes to securing advertising partners, even public broadcasters are diligent and quick:
The NDR had initiated legal steps against the order on the same day and immediately achieved a temporary suspension of enforcement. Thus, the NDR was able to continue showing the Microsoft logo in its broadcasts on election night. This is now possible again for the time being after the temporary suspension has been lifted.
Oh yes, how wonderful, the NDR really put in a lot of effort so that it can continue to slap the Microsoft logo on inappropriate broadcasts - such as election coverage. Because that's important, you have to fight for that, that must be preserved. Product placement? Oh come on, it's all just talk. Probably politics is already sponsored by Microsoft and our federal chancellor will then wear a Microsoft logo on her coat.
A model for the complete failures too ...
... in Berlin, I mean: as easy as Berlusconi changing the electoral law - because maybe then it will actually be enough for the CDU to have its own majority, without hiding behind factional squabbles and other hypocrisies. Oh well, Adenauer's heirs have mainly inherited his stupidity and corruption, with election successes it's rather bleak. It's enough to just lie to yourself about the world with your pathetic 29 percent.
Desktruktive?
Got a question for those who feel the need to accuse my blog of being destructive: could you idiots please tell me why I should be constructive when dealing with the nonsense that politicians, media, and the economy are peddling? If someone takes a dump in your front yard, you probably take it quite constructively as rose fertilizer, right? Dreamers.
Business Model of Open Source ...
... just hearing that gives me goosebumps. This absolute inability of economic interest groups to imagine motivation without a business model is sad.
IE7 and its impact on CSS Hacks
IE7 and the demise of CSS hacks is about the IE CSS hacks that have been loved over time and are urgently needed for IE6 to make CSS layouts at least presentable on the IEs. With IE7, a lot will change - and some of them will no longer work.
Urgent recommendation: Switch to conditional comments and move the CSS corrections to a separate stylesheet that can then be loaded for the IE. Unfortunately, with this you can only add CSS elements for the IE, not hide non-existent elements from the IE - possibly you can do something with overwriting elements.
In the IE Blog is a list of hacks that will be problematic with IE 7.
Seehofer strengthens the position of the SPD ...
... say Merkel and other CDU bigwigs. Why are they then making Stoiber the Minister of Economic Affairs? Or is that now a different title for the court jester? They can, in my opinion, gladly dispose of the threatened horror cabinet to Madame Tissot right away.
Spyware in World of Warcraft?
According to Bruce Schneier, Blizzard Entertainment uses spyware to check compliance with their EULA - and it's one that looks at much more than just the data from their own program, but also additional data from other applications ...
Concerning because it doesn't just read the data from its own program - but even then it would still be concerning if it were limited to Blizzard Entertainment's software. Or did any of the users of the software agree to this monitoring? To the loading of code onto their own computer? To searching system lists for information? To sending this information over the Internet?
It is also questionable how such practices can be in compliance with data protection regulations, for example in Germany.
Tailor - Version Broker
Tailor is a Python script that can exchange changesets between different versioning systems. In principle, you can also mirror repositories in other versioning systems with it.
Thatcher
Even a warmonger is being revered now, just because she turned 80. It doesn't matter that she started a war. Who cares what the media says - paying tribute is in fashion. Corrupt and perjured former chancellors are just as welcome as warmongers and other riffraff. Oh well, I'm probably just being terribly destructive right now, because breaking one's oath of office and sneaking around the law and starting wars, that's just so constructive.
Trac on Darcs
I love Trac as a project tool - and I'm quite satisfied with Subversion for version control (or, more recently, with SVK as a version control tool based on Subversion). But darcs has also excited me because it's so beautifully bureaucratic - and now there's also Trac on Darcs - a patched version that works with darcs instead of Subversion. I think I'll take a closer look at that ...
The same patch also allows a Bazaar-NG backend for Trac - which is particularly interesting because both Trac and Bazaar-NG are written in Python. I think I should take a look at that part as well.
And just now I was pointed out in IRC that SCons is also Python - a pretty nice replacement for the already quite old Make.
This all sounds almost like Developer Nirvana.
If you ever need to help a colleague without SQL experience with Oracle, like I did: Oracle/SQL Tutorial. Quite nicely done.
SVK - Subversion distributed
SVK is a distributed version control system with a special feature: it can mirror trees of other version control systems (including SVN) and then define working copies on them. You can mirror a Subversion repository of a project, create your own local branch, work in it, and version the changes locally. When your own branch is ready, you can make a commit against the original repository, or simply pull a diff and send it to the developer. Very nice thing, especially because of the good integration with Subversion.
For vim: snippetsEmu emulates the snippet function of TextMate, but with vim macros.
vi meets Word
Shocking: vi Steuerung für Word - built as Word macros. Somehow sick. I think I need to install this ...
How to convert accent characters to their base characters in Python. Pretty basic approach, but sufficient for many purposes. For proper solutions, there's PyICU ...
No idea if I've had this before, but Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters looks like a useful description of HTTP caching directives, with explanations for application programmers.
Django i18n status
I worked a bit more on the i18n stuff in django today and finally switched my gallery to the i18n branch. You can now see the strings on that site with either english or german settings. Other languages get english output (so if you are in Germany and still see english strings - check the language settings in your browser, wether German is defined with higher priority than English).
The code works quite nice and I think I will give it a week or so to settle and than start to put finishing touches to it - like adding much more translation hooks to the django source.
There is a hole in the canal
Here's the translated Markdown body:
Expressed differently: we have the canal empty:
However, according to WDR information, the barrier in Lüdinghausen might be about to break. Therefore, as a precaution, a state of emergency was declared for the lower reaches of the Lippe up to Ahsen.
It's strange to imagine that the canal now has a full closure at two points ...
Getting Nix Done - Yay!
Innovative Power of Software Patents
Because software patents have such high innovative power, Blackberry will probably disappear from the US market, because:
As part of that litigation, NTP, whose only assets are wireless e-mail related patents, had been granted an injunction banning the sale of BlackBerry devices in the United States and forcing Research in Motion to stop providing e-mail services to all American customers except government account holders.
Exactly. A company that has nothing but a few patents (which are also quite banal, as one has almost come to expect with US patents) has obtained a sales ban against another company whose product is physically available for purchase through the courts. Extremely innovative. And certainly something we need in Europe as well.
Creationist Plague
Oh, great, now the creationists are already in Thuringia. Well, no wonder, if you belong to a party that also demands a reference to God in the European Constitution...
And no, "Intelligent Design" is not a scientific theory that could be discussed as an alternative to the theory of evolution - ID is complete nonsense, religiously motivated hostility towards science. Barely disguised creationism, nothing more. Therefore, the demand for a scientific discussion of this alleged "theory" is simply nonsense.
Cryosat crashes into the ice
Shit - this is annoying. Especially because of the satellite's purpose:
This was the first mission in the "Earth Opportunity Missions" program of the European Space Agency (ESA), which aims to solve scientific problems using relatively small and cost-effective satellites. The satellite was the first to have a novel radar altimeter that can distinguish individual ice floes with very high spatial resolution and measure their thickness.
Hopefully the project will be restarted ...
I also find the Russian share interesting because of the swords-to-plowshares mentality involved: the rocket was a converted intercontinental ballistic missile ...
von Galen, his blessedness and his resistance
The WDR has a very good text about Cardinal von Galen online: Clemens August von Galen - a resistance fighter?.
The "Lion of Münster" roared well, if he did roar. He never questioned war and dictatorship as such, unless it concerned church affairs. He never found a word about the persecution of the Jews. While he feared the ideological "destruction of Christianity," the actual destruction of Judaism went unnoticed.
The article is really worth reading because it deals with the critical points about von Galen - it was about the church, the freedoms of the church. Not about democracy or freedom for all. His resistance also did not arise from him alone; he had people who urged him on. And he was a nationalist - beyond the borders, perhaps with the evil Bolsheviks, one could kill without hesitation.
The only part of his resistance that was probably really motivated by personal disgust and feeling, and not to be regarded as an attempt to protect the church, was his clear stance against euthanasia. Therefore, he was still a bit more of a resistor than most church leaders. At least that part of him can be acknowledged.
However, the way the Catholic Church now celebrates Cardinal von Galen is embarrassing. As a great symbol of resistance, he really cannot serve - if what he achieved is the best the Catholic Church can show from the Nazi regime, then they should better remain silent in shame. This is in no way proof of the incompatibility of the cross and the swastika. Rather, it is proof that the Catholic Church was at most concerned about its own power, but had little interest in preventing this abominable regime.
Weather Blogging
In October, enjoy cake in the cozy garden cafe and later sit outside in the restaurant for a beautiful dinner - I could get used to this.