Dan Ros

http://www.sdfsdfds.com/

<shigs> we just had an earth quake
<shigs> :\
<shigs> it was so bad my entire house (about 10 people) are in the landing maoning about it
<shigs> woke everyone up
<shigs> walls shook to fuck]
<Pthag> oh
<Pthag> was it an earthquake?

(more…)

I’ve just had to upgrade wordpress to fix this bug:

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5487 -

1. Create a draft post

2. Log out

3. Visit http://yourblog.com/index.php/wp-admin/

• is_admin() spots the wp-admin in the request and returns true
• query.php uses is_admin() to decide to return future, draft or pending posts

That’s not how you’re supposed to do authentication!

‘Code is poetry’, indeed.

Anyone who watches the Python jobs/contracting market will have noticed by now that Django has firmly established itself as the de-facto python-powered webapp platform. Turbogears doesn’t even appear on the horizon. Not quite as bad as HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray but close.

This is a bit unfortunate for me, having written thousands of lines of code within Turbogears/CherryPy. I attribute Django’s win to a couple of thing

1. The django website and documentation are better

This is pretty important, and partly related to point 2. To find proper docs on TG you need to dive off into the websites of other projects, which are of varying quality/completeness.

2. They own all the code

This too is important. With Turbogears you get a bit of a ‘mish-mash’ feel at times. Bugs upstream occasionally don’t get fixed for months. The API (such as there is) seems to change too much between releases.

Anyway, I’m having a play with Django. My first site will be a web2.0ish effort which will first collect together all the #aber topics for as many years as can be found, then push the lot into a database and allow people to rate, tag, and comment on them. So far it’s parsing the topics out of xchat log files.

First impressions of Django:

1. Documentation is great
2. Template system is ugly (everyone says this)
3. Database API is nice. Handier than SQLObject, but not as abstruse as SQLAlchemy
4. Rule/Regex based url dispatch is ok, but I didn’t really have a problem with the CherryPy style
5. The modularisation of sub-apps within a ‘website’ is cool but I’m not sure of a use yet
6. The admin system seems to have little use other than in debugging or if you were writing a straight content publishing site. Nice though.

Just got back from a holiday seeing the in-laws in Romania. We also spent 4 days in the Carpathians, in a small town named Cheia, which is nice country for hiking.

Cheia (Key) is so named because of its status as a former  border town between the states of Transylvania and Wallachia, two of the former main three principalities which make up modern Romania.

Pictures on the gallery.

Oddly despite being very remote, Cheia must be one of the best connected villages in Romania.

This is a satellite ground station which is used for transmitting Romanian tv to the US/Canada, amongst other things including data services. It also serves as a backup for  several satellite control operations. The village is linked nationally via two 155mbit SDH/STM lines, leaving in opposite directions.