http://us.pycon.org/2008/conference/proposals/
Just a heads up.
I think this will be the first year I actually propose a talk.
Author Archive for Chris McAvoy
I set out to get Linux installed on my old iBook G4 over the weekend. Not a huge task, I thought, easy install good payoff, a fun weekend project. Bah.
I downloaded the newly released and ported Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon for PPC. The install went bad, a software installation failed, so I had to install a bunch of packages with apt-get after the installer finished. After installing GDM, I couldn’t see the screen. It turns out, there’s a bug in a package that was pushed into the Gutsy release. Because PPC is a community supported release, its prone to a few more bugs than the mainline releases. No biggee, I think, I’ll just install Fiesty. All I really want is to have linux on some of my old hardware to play around with.
Somehow, my Fiesty CD didn’t burn correctly, and started throwing errors during the installation. Right after my hard drive was formatted. Now, when I insert a good CD, I hold down ‘C’ to try and boot off of the CD-ROM, nothing happens. I get to the Yaboot screen, which asks me to boot a bad partition of Linux. It lists CD as an option for booting, but nothing happens when I try booting off a new fresh CD.
All this is well and good, and kind of fun to troubleshoot. I’m not losing any sleep over the fix of the iBook, I’m sure I’ll figure it out. I think my next step is to confirm that I have a good CD for PPC. I’m not entirely sure how to do that. I’m thinking about trying to boot off my known-good OSX installation CD, just to see if the machine is still capable of booting off a CD.
Anyone else run into these sorts of troubs? I really would like to have a nice Ubuntu laptop that I can break occasionally, maybe hook up to a robot or something.
I’ve been working on a podcast for the past few months. It’s called “Same Title Different Story” and is available at http://sametitledifferentstory.com. This Sunday it’s going to be on “Hello Beautiful,” the Chicago Public Radio arts show. The show is on at 10am, on 91.5 FM. As if that’s not exciting enough, Justin Kaufmann (of Chicago’s Schadenfruede) is the host, and Art Shay is a guest. The Art Shay bit is my favorite part, as his photographs of Nelson Algren, one of my favorite writers, have always defined to me who Algren was outside of his writing. One picture in particular, of Algren playing poker in a smoky back room, is on my mental list of greatest pictures of all time. It was gigantic in my mind when I moved to Chicago in 2000. Seven years later, having a project of mine on Chicago Public Radio, alongside one of my Chicago heroes, it’s pretty overwhelming.
For those of you outside of WBEZ’s radio range, the show will be posted in podcast form sometime today. The “Hello Beautiful” website is at http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Program_HB.aspx
And here’s the picture I’m talking about, sadly I can only find it as the cover of “Chicago: City on the Make”,
I bought Halo 3 this week. I’d love to be able to say that this is a picture of me gunning a guy down, but sadly, it’s me getting gunned down. I love games, I’m just not that good at them.
Halo is plenty of fun, but the really cool stuff is how well it integrates with Bungie’s online community. You can review games through the Xbox, take screenshots, and upload them to your Bungie profile. You can share movie clips, whole game movies, and build your own custom maps for others to play with. Of course, most of these features were available to PC gamers for the past several years, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done so effectively for an Xbox 360 title. Lots of fun.
Yesterday was pretty fun…I ended up biting off a bit more than I could reasonably chew, but it was fun nonetheless. I took a small stab at 1028, making a few improvements to the high level RSS framework, but didn’t get anything done with it. I have a plan, based on the tickets suggestion of allowing a complete item template option, combined with some ideas from conversations during the sprint. Then, after lunch, Jacob asked for a FAQ system to be added to the main djangoprojects.com site. I thought it would be pretty easy, so I took it. When I downloaded the code for the site, I realized that I’d been developing Django apps in my own private bubble, and wasn’t “current” on what you’d probably call best practices. My first thought on seeing the code was, “where are the views?” Yeah, see, I never took the time to learn generic views. Which is a shame, because they cover a huge swath of typical data driven web app patterns. So, I had to sit down and learn them. The problem I had was, they appear to be pretty easy, so I didn’t really dive into them, I just started cutting and pasting code. It turns out, you really need to read the chapter before trying them out, they’re slightly trickier than they appear. Nothing huge, just read the docs.
I’m most of the way done with the FAQ system, just need to polish it all up and get the code uploaded. Probably by the end of this weekend. As for the syndication feed ticket, unless it’s taken away from me, I’d like to continue working on it, as it will make my life a lot easier. Podcast feeds will be easier (I believe) if you have control of the complete item template.
For more coverage of the sprint in general, check out The B List and Malcolm’s two part coverage: 1 2.
All in all it was a fun day. The Django community is a fun one, and made up of a lot of fun committed folks that don’t mind teaching and learning. It’s a great group.
Django is sprinting this Friday. The headquarters for the international sprint is here in Chicago. Matt Dorn and I are both attending from PSC. PSC is committed to making Python and Django a serious part of its toolbox. I’m happy to be at a company that allows me to participate in the community this way, hopefully it’s a trend that continues in other IT companies that leverage open source products. PSC has used Django on a handful of client projects, so PSC obviously has a stake in promoting and improving Django. Talking to your boss and saying, “we use this product for free, we should give back in some way” doesn’t always work out well. I’m glad that at PSC they take these sorts of commitments seriously and understand that open source is only as good as the community that supports it.
Django and Rails are friends. At first Django is irritating and aggressive. Rails is up tight, but Django teaches him how to have a good time. Then they drink 40’s and pour some out “for their homies.”
Just a bit of technical correction though, no one pours their beer out for their homies in the sink. They do it on the ground. Because their homies are in the ground. So, unless your homies drowned in the sewer system, make sure you pour it out…on the ground. Peace. Also, Django is pronounced Django*.
Regardless, Django and Rails are friends! How great!
* Intentionally unhelpful.
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