DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

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 just found these via eatmyhamster.com: A collection of metaphors/similes supposedly written by high-school students.
“5.: She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.” Classic!
I’d love to steal use the one or the other of these in the right situation. Like number 20: “The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.” But I just know I couldn’t keep a straight face.

Tags: Metaphor; Humour

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.