DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

OpenBC is a German community site, similar to LinkedIn or Orkut. It appears that they recently decided their Web site wasn’t up to snuff. So what do they do? They kick off a relaunch effort. And that, apparently, is where it all goes pear-shaped.
Today, they sent an email to *all* their members (OpenBC has quite a lot of them), asking everybody to participate in “openDesign” the openBC redesign effort.
In the email they sent a link to their redesign Web site, along with an invitation to participate and the promise of EUR 10.000 (plus a chance of a job) for the chosen design.
It appears that these mails were actually sent out to all OpenBC subscribers at the same time; not to a focus group, or in a segmented fashion (a couple hundred each day). No — all at once. When everybody (including me) clicked on the link in the mail, this is what we got:

The message is “Sorry buddy, you’re one of quite a few people….”. Sorry, buddy?? Can a Web error message be any more condescending and misworded? Short of “Piss off, you’re killing our server”, I can’t think how.
Now — they’re German, I’m German. So I think I kind of sorta know what they meant to say. But ’sorry buddy’? Did they buy one of Monty Python’s rude phrasebooks? Or was today casual day and they took their inspiration from their office attire? Isn’t this supposed to be a professional community and networking site?
In the meantime, their server seems to have imploded or molten down and the redesign site is still offline. So I don’t know what their spiffy new design looks like.
But frankly, buddies, I can’t be arsed to check any more.

I found these Web site optimization tips very useful and extremely sensible: 16 Elements You Must Include in Your Site Design, by Herman Drost.
One tip that I applied immediately is the tip about avoiding duplicate content by making search-engine-friendly redirects when a site is available under multiple URLs (e.g. http://www.trogger.de as well as http://trogger.de ). I was very much aware that duplicate content is a problem in the Google PageRank algorithm. I just never found a clear and short explanation what to do about it.
One good thing about most “white-hat” search-engine optimization approaches is that they automatically also make your site more accessible and understandable to the user. Things like checking your links, using ALT and TITLE tags, avoiding too much Flash, having links that can actually be found and followed — all these are good and sensible ideas for any Web site.

After a looong wait, and a detour via customs, I finally got my grubby little hands on my Valleyschwag package (well, OK, I washed my hands first). If you check out the picture, you will notice the friendly green sticker saying “Selbstverzollung” (customs to be paid by recipient), which goes on to tell the post office that the “package is not to be shipped to the recipient but to be handed to customs authorities” (their emphasis). After I explained to the very nice lady at the local customs office that the package contained promotional items (Werbegeschenke), and opened it in front of her, she let me take it without paying any customs on it. Yay!
Hint to Valleyschwag guys: “Promotional Items” in German-speaking countries is “Werbematerial” or “Werbegeschenke”. Maybe you can expand your shipping DB and labelling software to add i18n?

Anyway. Now that I have the schwag, it was well worth the wait. I scored two t-shirts (one RubyRed labs shirt, which almost everybody got, as well as an ioda shirt), and a Moveable Type hat, plus a pencil, some stickers, the excellent goatse stickers, a Moveable Type keychain, PerplexCity cards (huh? haven’t a clue. Am I living under a rock or something?) and a slide condom. If I’m not mistaken, the extra shirt and hat are a “bonus” for having blogged about VS early on. Hooray! I’m pimping out my blog for t-shirts! Considering the VS guys paid more than ten bucks just for the international postage, I’d say this was excellent value for money. Pity the shipping took so long, though: I really could have used the shirts and the hat during my week in Crete.

Well, I’ve returned from a week of holidays in Crete. And, being the good trogger that I am, I kept a travel blog at trogger.de — thanks to the Internet PC at the hotel.
One minor annoyance: Why can these semi-public Internet places never set up their Internet PCs sensibly? Is a decent browser, together with decent popup blockers, too much to ask? The hotel’s Internet PC was a Windows box (not that there’s anything wrong with that), with IE6 as browser and no alternative browser installed. As a result, popups and pop-unders kept appearing and had to be clicked away. I’m a *very* impatient person…
Could this be a possible niche? Travel to all the nicest places in the world, setting up sensibly configured Internet PCs in hotels, etc.? It’s probably been done before. Pity!

I found this via Slashdot (Ok, this probably means everyone else found it before me…). Finally, a native version of Google Earth is available for Linux. It can be downloaded from Google’s site.
I must admit I haven’t tried it yet (too many other things to do), but I really like the fact that Google is starting to release their software for Linux. Earlier, they released Picasa for Linux and appear to have collaborated very closely with the Wine community, giving a lot of code and know-how back to Wine, thereby making it better for all of us.

Tags: Google; Google Earth; Linux

P.S. - I had the time to give it a quick whirl. It runs really well and looks really great. A bit frightening, in fact. The quality of the satellite images for Germany now is excellent. In downtown Darmstadt you can almost read the sale sign on the front of the large shopping center. Anyway — Google Earth, now one less reason to boot up Windows.

Well — it’s finally happened. My new travel portal is almost as good as I’m going to get it by fiddling around with it by myself. In the hope of getting feedback for improving the application, and of course also in the hope of having built something that people will actually want to use, I’ve installed and started the site: www.trogger.de!

What is trogger? It’s a German-language community portal for all things to do with travel. Going on a trip? Keep a travel blog on trogger.de and stay in touch with your friends. Been on a trip? Post a trip report and insider tips on trogger.de, along with your photo albums. Read a good travel book lately? Write a book review on trogger.de and tell everybody about it. Planning a trip? Then come to trogger.de, read the info and tips available here and discuss with other travellers.

Of course, trogger.de is sprinkled with a selection of “Web2.0ish” goodness — blogs, tags, interactivity, RSS. More and exciting features are planned for the future and will be prioritised and implemented depending on visitor feedback.

Tags: travel; blogging; trogger; Django

I’ve been busy these last two days converting my Django-based project over to the newest development trunk of Django, which now includes he results of all the work done on the “Magic Removal Branch” after that has been merged over.
The aim of the Magic Removal branch was to clean up the Django framework syntax and get rid of a lot of the so-called “magic” (hence the name): Auto-generated package names, auto-generated accessors for fields, etc.
There was one hiccup — the new development version no longer supports model inheritance (the Desk model inherits from the Furniture model which inherits from the StuffYouCanBurn model). As a result, after some whining in the newsgroup, I had to flatten the inheritance hierarchy, inlining the inherited properties into the classes and make them all inherit from the common Django base class for data models. It’s not nice, every copy/paste operation hurt, but if the result means that I can benefit from all the other changes in Django (and not launch my application with a codebase which will soon be obsolete and a lot of data migration at some point in the future), it had to be done.
Apart from this issue, the new Django version is a joy to work with. Everything is extremely logical and you find yourself wondering why it’s ever been any different. Take the ORM mapping of many-to-many-fields (a Course has several Students, and a Student has multiple Courses): Previously, you had an autogenerated (magic) setter and getter, one of which returned a list of ‘real’ objects, the other insisted on taking a list of object ids. So there was some converting to and fro in order to add an element. The new code for this gives you a collection object (more or less), to which you can simply add() the new object (not its ID!), save the model et voilá! (to remain linguistically consistent with the headline) - done.
Also, the way queries from the object base are created and chained (a little bit of selecting, some ordering and then just the first few elements) is a lot more readable. Where previously you had to write
students.get_list(name__exact='Einstein', order_by=('-birthday', 'relativity'), offset=2, limit=3)
(where ’students’ is one of these auto-generated aliases for all instances of the class ‘Student’) it’s now:
Student.objects.filter(name='Einstein').order_by('-birthday', 'relativity')[2:3]
which I find a lot easier to read and understand.
All in all, this is a great step forward for Django and again deserves a round of applause for all developers (and documentation-writers) involved.

Well - it seems that the next Valleyschwag packages (see my previous entry) are finally on their way. I’m not making any predictions as to when they’ll arrive, but knowing the German postal service and taking into account the fact that next Monday is a holiday, I’m not expecting anything to arrive before the middle of next week.

Maybe I’ll post pics when it’s there.

In other news, Amazon finally delivered my copy of “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge“. An imposing brick of a book. With very few full-page color photographs and cartoons (none, from what I’ve seen so far while skimming through it on the drive to work). I’m not yet sure wether to be thrilled and excited or to be afraid, be very very afraid.

OK. I’ve got a Ph.D., have been in the software business more or less for twenty years. I’ve seen a lot of things come and go. You’d think I’d be a bit blasé about IT stuff. But I’ve still got enough of a fifteen-year-old nerd in me to be immediately thrilled, delighted and ultimately hooked by the idea of Valleyschwag.

Valleyschwag, in a nutshell, is actually paying money for stuff you should get for free: someone’s advertising material. It’s what the brand-conscious teens all do. Why pay a normal amount of money for a normal sweatshirt when you can pay three times as much and be a walking billboard for the company?
Only — these are IT brands. The advertising is about IT stuff and IT related. And being hip IT geeks altogether, the Valleyschwag dudes (and, possibly, dudettes) even say they won’t include stuff from companies considered evil. Now isn’t that something!
I looked at the flickr albums of people unpacking and showcasing what they got in their first schwag “care package”. Stickers, flickr bages, a Technorati t-shirt (some folks even appear to have received an extra pair of oranges, and used them to inspire the biggest flickr comment storm I’ve ever seen). Now, the rational part of my brain said “big deal — they just paid fifteen bucks for company stickers and a t-shirt. Stuff you can pick up at a computer expo for free (or maybe in exchange for a business card — getting you not only the t-shirt, but also an endless supply of advertising junk mail adressed to someone who has almost exactly — but not exactly — the same name as you).”. Yes — sometimes I actually think the parentheses.
The fifteen-year-old geek inside me, who still thinks the ZX Spectrum was a neato system and the Z80 the best processor evah, quickly pounded the rational part of my brain into submission and started a barrage of “Oooooohhhh, I WANT that. Gimme gimme gimme GIMME…!”.
No points for guessing who won. And now the Valleyschwag guys have sent an email letting me know that they’ll ship my first package any day now. I can’t wait! I know it’ll take some time to get to good ol’ Germany. I just hope they air-mail it. And I hope it’s not wrapped in burlap. Who needs natural fibres anyway?

Well — my portal site is almost ready to launch. Roughly two-and-a-half months of part-time effort (a few evenings a week, plus the weekends) from first idea document to implemented software, running on my hosted server, with my own domains, trademarks applied for, etc. Not bad, if I say so myself. Although I have to admit a lot of the development speed is actually due to using the Python-based Web development framework, Django. Being accustomed to Java/J2EE/Tomcat-based development and deployment, I’m amazed at the speed and productivity that this development environment gives me. Python feels quite comfortable, Django fits my way of thinking perfectly. Almost everything is exactly where I would have expected it. The build-test-fix-turnaround is phenomenally fast.

I’m not sure that I would want to use this for every kind of project, though. I’m still not sold on untyped programming languages, for instance.

For one thing, I still miss all the support my Java IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) gives me during the coding — most of which is due to the typed programming language. In IDEA, code completion is very helpful. As is the continuous background checking of the implementation, flagging potential semantic and runtime errors even before I’ve started compiling — sometimes even before I finished typing. The Python IDE in Eclipse just cannot keep up. Since it has no idea what my shiny new variable blaBatz actually is, it cannot reasonably provide me with any code completion suggestions once I write “blaBatz.get” and press CTRL-SPACE (or whatever).