The Ufdi Network

Just a small plug for a project I'm currently working on. I'm playing a little bit around with zc.buildout right now and have come to a point where I want to have dependencies not only as subversion-repository, distutils or egg. I simply end up with too many Python packages on github for not having a way to use them. So while still learning my way around buildout I wrote a little recipe to do just that: clone a git-repo and make it accessible as a part. With this you can define first of all where the repository is, and also what branch or explicit revision you want to have for your project.

There is definitely still a ton of stuff missing that you'd find in any other zc.buildout recipe, but I see this mostly as a good way to finally find my way around Anyway, you can find it on the PyPI with a source package and an egg for Python 2.6. The code is also available on github.com.

"First steps with zc.buildout: Simple recipe for git" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

Normalerweise bin ich ja nicht so der Museumgeher (und noch viel weniger wenn es um Kunst geht), aber wenn einem einmal im Rahmen der Langen Nacht der Museen nahezu alle Museen der Stadt um nur 11 EUR offen stehen, kann selbst ich nicht nein-sagen. Vor allem wenn es mit einem Photowalk kombiniert wird Alles in Allem war das ein sehr unterhaltsamer Abend; man hat schließlich nicht alle Tage Gelegenheit, Minimundus bei Nacht oder allgemein Museen bis oben hin gefüllt zu sehen.

Was war alles auf dem Plan? Wie gesagt: Minimundus. Danach ging's in einem komplett überfüllten Bus zurück in Richtung Stadt und zum Bergbaumuseum, wo es neben der üblichen Mineralien- und Bergbauausstellung auch eine zu Klagenfurt während und gleich nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg gab. Danach gings auf der Suche nach etwas Essbarem durch den Landhaushof, den Wappensaal und den Sitzungssaal der Landesregierung zum nächsten offenen Kebap-Lokal und dem daneben gelegenen McDonalds. Frisch gestärkt und mit dem Rest noch im Sackerl gings dann zum Napoleonstadel, wo unter anderem ein Kunstwerk mit großen Bällen ausgestellt war. Irgendwie hat das dem Künstler aber nicht so behagt, als alle diese Bälle auf einmal ihrer Natur entsprechend verwenden wollte

Da ich eher früh wieder zuhause sein wollte, bin ich danach nur noch ins Landesmuseum mitgekommen, wo wir knapp eine Bodypainting-Schau versäumt haben. Wenigstens waren die Schmetterlinge noch munter und sind (hoffentlich) fröhlich um uns herumgeflattert.

Alles in Allem ein sehr gelungener Abend (mit jede Menge gratis Fruchtgummis , der definitv die 11 EUR für die Studentenkarte wert war

"Das war die Lange Nacht der Museen 2008" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

• Bleep Labs » Welcome!
  Thingamagoop - noise toy - a small synth with LFO, photosensor, etc. - not so useful for music, more for fun or noise.

• Bargain Hunting: 5 free alternatives to paid iPhone Apps : iSmashPhone

As you might have guessed based on the recent activity in django-zsutils, this project is more or less a dumping ground for some ideas I have and snippets I use on multiple sites (or at least see myself using on multiple sites). The new step for any of these is, whether I can see them as standalone library. If I do, I try to clean them up even more and split them of the main package.

This happened yesterday to my little object-oriented views-implementation for Django. If you don't know this library yet, please take a look at its README or this blog post. Basically, the idea is to be able to share some common functionality between views by making views out of Python classes.

Today I did some final cleanup, moved it over to setuptools and finally made an actual 0.2.0 release including PyPI-registration, files etc. So if you want to use it, just run easy_install django-oopviews

I also registered the project on launchpad.net, so if you find any bugs or have some feature request or other questions, please ask there

"Django-oopviews now in its own library" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

• APML - Attention Profiling Mark-up Language: The open standard for Attention Metadata

Right after 1.0 got released, some people started to wonder how to easily stay up to date on bugfixes for this major release. Back then I think it was James Bennett who told me to stay tuned for something on this front. Today, Jacob Kaplan-Moss announced that Django 1.0 finally has its own maintenance branch in the repository.

This means mostly one thing for you according the release process documentation: If you want to stay up to date with the latest fixes for the Django 1.0 release without getting some unexpected and perhaps not really welcome changes to the core, all you have to do is::

This way it should be easy to keep using your previous update process (if you were running on trunk that is) while having a solid base for your sites.

"Django 1.0 now with its own branch " was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

I'm so very pleased to announce that Lovely Wife Lou is pregnant!

After
years of not having any luck naturally, we sought help from a fertility
doctor, but this too was not working, at least the procedure and
medications weren't.

Finally, we had one good egg and were ready to
have it fertilized and see if that would work. Not taking any chances,
we went with a procedure (ICSI) where they select the specific sperm,
and fertilize the egg with it. Days later, they called and it worked!
Next, Lou was implanted with the fertilized egg, placing it in the
ideal location.

Two weeks later, we found out she was pregnant!

Today,
we are nearing the end of the 1st trimester and doing well. This photo
is of the fertilization at 5 cells, and the next 5 are ultrasounds. The
fertilization photo is approximately 1hr before it was implanted. Photo here.

• Open Source Cross-Browser WYSIWYG Editor
  wysiwyg xhtml editor to replace textarea

At least that's what you should expect after reading this story on gizmodo about one of the biggest retail chains in the USA shutting down their DRM-based online music store (August 2006 - February 2008) since they're since February 2008 trying to be all-DRM-free. I have no idea how their system works, but in the e-mail published on gizmodo it is suggested by the support team that you burn your music to an audio CD. So I guess the music is somehow bound to a local software component and a server key, so you'd have to re-activate your music if you for example re-install your operating system.

It naturally should be the job of the user first to make sure everything of importance is properly backed up, but in the end most people rely on the service provider to at least act as 2nd tier in the backup-chain. This 2nd level is now dropped. At least they seem to offer a way to get the music out of the DRM-lock, but just think of other services that don't do that. In the end this case should finally shake quite a few people up who previously bought music online without really checking what rights they have on it. Many people always think "Hey, I can get this song online for cheap". Nope, you can get the rights to play it on a single (or 2 or 3) device with a bit of device-lock-in and only very limited ways to use this song for cheap. Congrats.

I at least hope that more people will finally start to get it and also recognize it in other systems; not only those of the music industry but in all parts of the content industry. In this regard (and only in this since I in general don't enjoy people having problems) I hope that many people have bought DRM'd music from Walmart.

"DRM-fear slowly becoming mainstream?" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

At least that's what you should expect after reading this story on gizmodo about one of the biggest retail chains in the USA shutting down their DRM-based online music store (August 2006 - February 2008) since they're since February 2008 trying to be all-DRM-free. I have no idea how their system works, but in the e-mail published on gizmodo it is suggested by the support team that you burn your music to an audio CD. So I guess the music is somehow bound to a local software component and a server key, so you'd have to re-activate your music if you for example re-install your operating system.

It naturally should be the job of the user first to make sure everything of importance is properly backed up, but in the end most people rely on the service provider to at least act as 2nd tier in the backup-chain. This 2nd level is now dropped. At least they seem to offer a way to get the music out of the DRM-lock, but just think of other services that don't do that. In the end this case should finally shake quite a few people up who previously bought music online without really checking what rights they have on it. Many people always think "Hey, I can get this song online for cheap". Nope, you can get the rights to play it on a single (or 2 or 3) device with a bit of device-lock-in and only very limited ways to use this song for cheap. Congrats.

I at least hope that more people will finally start to get it and also recognize it in other systems; not only those of the music industry but in all parts of the content industry. In this regard (and only in this since I in general don't enjoy people having problems) I hope that many people have bought DRM'd music from Walmart.

"DRM-fear slowly becoming mainstream?" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

Just came across NetBeans for PHP, which is a free IDE for PHP development. If you configure xdebug on your machine, the IDE allows you to debug and step through your code. Luckily this is a Java app so it runs smoothly on my Ubuntu Laptop as well.

They’ve also got excellent documentation on how to setup the IDE on various platforms including Ubuntu. Here’s the link to the Ubuntu and Windows setup help documentation:

Setup Instructions for Ubuntu
Setup Instructions for Windows using XAMPP

If you’re eager like me to get straight to the code debugging functionality, head over to this page which explains how it is done. Debugging PHP Source Code in NetBeans IDE.

NetBeans supports working with SAAS applications in PHP. Some examples are Amazon services API,  Facebook, delicious, Yahoo and more… Here’s a tutorial on how simple it is to use NetBeans to create an app using Yahoo News Services - SaaS in PHP: Yahoo News Service Tutorial.

Screen-shots:

A Screenshot of NetBeans for PHP IDE

NetBeans Services integration for PHP

Links:

Download NetBeans PHP Beta
NetBeans PHP Official Site
NetBeans PHP Learning Trail

• Weighted Bayesian Rating - Kobra's Corner
  Weighted Bayesian Rating - improve the results from rating systems on your site. Total ratings, and average ratings are meaningless and do not reflect the 'true' average.

Just came across this on the web, some good stuff for PHP developers who are thinking about their career path.

A recent Gartner Research study found that 10 percent of the PHP community are corporate IT developers, and predicted that during the next five years, that number will grow to 40 percent. That’s good news for PHP developers looking for corporate gigs–and very good news for PHP tools maker Zend Technologies, which cited the Gartner finding at the Zend/PHP Conference last week as evidence of widespread, more strategic adoption of PHP in enterprises.

Read more at the Devx blog

• Zend: PHP set for enterprise growth
• Zend Technologies gets $7M for PHP application support
• Zend and Adobe announcment
• PHP upgrade improves Windows backing

Today, Automattic announced that they have acquired the centralized commenting service IntenseDebate. Over the course of this year, 3rd party commenting systems have gained quite a bit of momentum for various reasons including having one place where to find all your discussions. With this move now, the centralized system gains even more momentum with virtually all new WordPress installations, hosted or self-installed, getting support for IntenseDebate out of the box according to Matt Mullenweg.

In the end, being able to discuss and follow a discussion an article no matter where you are just makes it much more compelling to get back to that article. And this is exactly what makes services like IntenseDebate or Disqus so interesting to me. Now I just hope that this acquisition won't blow the competition out of the water.

For now according to the announcement on the ID blog that acquisition also means, that ID has moved into private beta mode again, so the real party will probably get started when it moves into public mode again hopefully in the near future. And if all of a sudden all users on WordPress.com end up with their own ID-account, than this party is going to be pretty big ... Let's hope those shiny new Automattic-servers are enough to handle that

"IntenseDebate acquired by Automattic" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reused under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

Today, Automattic announced that they have acquired the centralized commenting service IntenseDebate. Over the course of this year, 3rd party commenting systems have gained quite a bit of momentum for various reasons including having one place where to find all your discussions. With this move now, the centralized system gains even more momentum with virtually all new WordPress installations, hosted or self-installed, getting support for IntenseDebate out of the box according to Matt Mullenweg.

In the end, being able to discuss and follow a discussion an article no matter where you are just makes it much more compelling to get back to that article. And this is exactly what makes services like IntenseDebate or Disqus so interesting to me. Now I just hope that this acquisition won't blow the competition out of the water.

For now according to the announcement on the ID blog that acquisition also means, that ID has moved into private beta mode again, so the real party will probably get started when it moves into public mode again hopefully in the near future. And if all of a sudden all users on WordPress.com end up with their own ID-account, than this party is going to be pretty big ... Let's hope those shiny new Automattic-servers are enough to handle that

"IntenseDebate acquired by Automattic" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

You know the streetview-car, but do you already know the Flickrbike? Take a bike, bundle it with a GPS device, and a camera that takes a picture every 60 seconds and automatically geotags them and you can track the life of your bike, and where you've all been with it. Flickr now sent such a bike out to various cities in the USA, Europe, Asia and Oceania and you can follow them on Yahoo's new Start Wearing Purple-site.

Purple isn't exactly my color, but I'd definitely love to get my hands on such a bike ... as long as I don't have to pay the bandwidth bill for the automatic uploading

[Photo from Start Wearing Purple]

"Flickr on a bike" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reused under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

You know the streetview-car, but do you already know the Flickrbike? Take a bike, bundle it with a GPS device, and a camera that takes a picture every 60 seconds and automatically geotags them and you can track the life of your bike, and where you've all been with it. Flickr now sent such a bike out to various cities in the USA, Europe, Asia and Oceania and you can follow them on Yahoo's new Start Wearing Purple-site.

Purple isn't exactly my color, but I'd definitely love to get my hands on such a bike ... as long as I don't have to pay the bandwidth bill for the automatic uploading

[Photo from Start Wearing Purple]

"Flickr on a bike" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.