April 2009
1 post
Essential Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts →
Most people are blown away when I show how conveniently and efficiently you can get things done using the keyboard in OS X. Power users have always know the keyboard rulez over the mouse, but coming…
February 2009
4 posts
Bjørn’s top 22 iPhone app picks →
Apple recently announced that there are more than 15,000 apps (applications) in the app store. My iTunes shows I have downloaded and tried 189 of them, but even going through those, there…
Loads of new Django-based FOSS components from... →
As you know, several of the core Django developers went to the Washington Post to work, and they just announced several open source components that looks extremely promising, quoting them: …
TVCC on fire (next to CCTV) →
Shot from my apartment last night:
May 2008
2 posts
playing with appengine
jetlagged in Prague, looking for cool coffee shops w/ wifi
April 2008
1 post
Great interview with Greg Stein →
FLOSS Weekly is really on fire! The last episode of the podcast has a really interesting interview with Greg Stein, previous chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founder of the …
March 2008
1 post
All thumbs →
Eric Clapton is all thumbs after all: Stevie Ray Vaughan, not as good as you thought:
January 2008
1 post
Fun in the snow →
This video is from our ExoSocial event at Nanshan Ski Village just outside Beijing today. It shows what the few people that went to the top were up to (most people stayed on the green slopes). Fun to see programmers, PMs, and sysadms basking in the snow. This was my first edit using the new iMovie. It’s a very rough cut
December 2007
1 post
Wrap-up of Django sprint at Exoweb offices →
On occasion of the second world-wide Django sprint we got together 12 people to sprint at Exoweb’s office yesterday.
The good:
It was great to see new Djangoistas, and it made me think there might even be enough interest for a Django user group in Beijing. There’s already a Python User Group in Beijing.
I personally found it fun to get down-and-dirty with the core Django framework. It’s good...
November 2007
2 posts
Django sprint at Exoweb offices →
If you’re in Beijing, feel free to join as at the Exoweb office Saturday Dec 1st from 11:30 until 24:00 for the Django sprint.
Jonathan Coulton goodies →
I’ve been having so much fun listening to songs and watching music videos by Jonathan Coluton, an ex-software developer gone Internet music artist, or “Internet star”. He originally made headlines with his “Thing a Week” project in which he would make and publish a song every week. Merlin Mann has a good interview with Jonathan where he discusses what the process was like.
His unique background...
October 2007
3 posts
Even simpler way to ssh through a firewall
In his article Jacky explained how to easily drill holes through to ports on machines behind a firewall. What I normally want is to have ssh access to machines behind firewalls, allowing me to do scp, and easily ssh in without a stupid stop-over on the firewall machine.
I came across this solution that does exactly that. After the super-simple set-up I’m able to do:
% ssh rexobox
% rcp...
The day the podcasts died
Richard noticed that Feedburner has been blocked in China. This is terrible news as a lot of blogs and podcasts are using feedburner! No wonder half my podcasts suddenly stopped working. Let me know if you find a work-around (besides using Tor for everything).
(via Bjørn Stabell 白熊)
Public wifi - how could it get so bad?
Warning: This is a rant.
With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.
In the case of wireless access points (AP) owned and operated by...
August 2007
1 post
Python 3000 alpha 1 released!
Guido just announced it Time to experiment.
(via Bjørn Stabell 白熊)
Blueprint, a CSS framework
Tired of fighting with browsers on CSS issues regarding layouts, styling of buttons, or generating print versions? Then you’d probably be interested in the Blueprint CSS Framework which I discovered via Mark Boulton. It’s getting great reviews, looks to have a lot of promise… and by a fellow Norwegian to top it off. Check the tutorial for a good introduction.
(via Bjørn Stabell 白熊)
July 2007
68 posts
Finding Python packages
Although easy_install might be sufficient to install a Python package (aka egg) onto your system, it doesn’t help you find available packages or see what you have on your system. Most package managers does, so this was a bit surprising. I was frustrated enough that I started looking at what it would take to make one. I came so far as to create a little utility built on top of setuptools that...
Slides from “Django Master Class” at OSCON
At OSCON 2007 Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Simon Willison, and Jeremy Dunck held a Django Master Class. Jacob just posted the slides on the web, and it contains a few goodies, like:
testing strategies
testing support in Django
dumpdata
templatetags introduction
custom model fields
OpenID (which seems to be on Simon’s mind a lot lately)
a cool example using jQuery to do Ajax-style client-side form...
RESTful Web Services, a book review
After hearing about it on an ITC podcast (also mentioned in previous post) I ordered the “RESTful Web Services” book from Amazon (and got into an argument with Sam Ruby regarding Python pain points; he seems to be a Ruby-convert these days). It arrived last week, and I spent a lot of this weekend browsing through the book, and this is a review of sorts.
This book has a star rating of 5 out of 5...
Painful…
My good friend Glyn sent me this link:
Although I’m guilty of my share of broken-and-painfully-hard-to-understand Chinese, and there’s plenty of Chinglish around in Beijing, this HDD installation instruction manual is in a league of its own.
(via Bjørn Stabell 白熊)
Do we really need separate fields for first and...
This post shows how name components, which one is sorted on, and which one is normally used, vary around the world. The Chinese section is a bit weak as it doesn’t mention common titles such as 老毛 and 小毛, and the common use of nicknames, often by doubling given name characters like 东东, but the author gets his point across. Maybe it’s time to just use a full name field, and perhaps a field for an...
“Zope is back” movie trailer
Martijn Faassen (whom apparently started EuroPython years back) did the funniest lightning talk at this year’s EuroPython, promoting his new web framework Grok, built on Zope:
Talking to him, he seemed very passionate to reinvigorate Zope through Grok. I must say I think both Zope 3 and Grok is a big step forward compared to Zope 2.x, and I’m sure they’ll pick up more developers over time. ...
