I just read an article about common grammar mistakes that occur in blogs. I hope a lot of bloggers read it and it has a positive affect on blog grammar. Its always been one of my pet peaves. If your interested in improving your grammar, then their are many sites on the web to help out (i.e. Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style).

PS: I should of mentioned that I taught English in Berlin for 5 years. So I consider myself somewhat an expert.

I’ve been working on a project using Django for the last couple days and am falling in love with it. There are so many nice features that make the life of the developer much more enjoyable. The nicest thing is the automatic administration panel. For many projects it’s enough to define a model and activate the admin panel. Another nice feature that I just discovered is the automatic api documentation for you project. If you click on the ‘documentation’ link at the top right of the admin panel, the documentation is presented in a very well organized and attractive manner. You’ll need docutils installed for this. Whenever an error occurs in you code and you set ‘DEBUG’ to ‘True’ in settings.py, you get a really clean error report. Generic Views saves you a huge amount of coding.

I’m still trying to get my head around everything, but so far everything has been going quite well. I would like to have a way to automatically choose the current user in the Admin panel and some of the included apps (comments, for example) need to be documented. Most aspects of the framework have quite nice documentation, though.

Ok, back to the project.

This was originally going to be a response to a comment on my last post but it got a bit long.

I’ve been using Ubuntu Dapper Drake since Febuary and often forget about the improvements I noticed upon first upgrading. For me, Nautilus has finally become a pleasure to use instead of the pain it used to be. Although not in the default install, NetworkManager is my absolute favorite improvement. Even my wife can now connect to almost any network. The infrastructure for updates and adding/removing software is a huge step forward for linux distros. And last, but not least, the documention is light-years ahead of Breezy. I applaud the documentation and localization teams.

Some of the smallest things are also what makes Dapper such a pleasure to use. For example, my laptop’s (Thinkpad T43) volume keys finally change the master volume and not just the PCM volume. Also I now get an on-screen indication of the change. The menu layout is also much improved.

Even with all the wonderful improvements, there are still so many things to refine and many things that are still semi-broken. One of the more questionable choices in my view is making the live cd the recommended install path. I’ve tried this a couple times on machines with 256mb of RAM and it hung everytime. Even on the machines with plenty of RAM I found myself fighting with the partitioner. Both of these issues have been quite a lot of attention in Malone (The Ubuntu Bug Tracker). For me the “text-based” install is extremely easy to use and works flawlessly. I’d like the idea of have an atttactive introduction before the actuall install but not at the expense of causing a large portion of potential users the headaches that will prosumably come from the live cd.

Overall Ubuntu is hands down the best distro for the largest audience. Not only because it is currently the most user-friendly distro but because the communty (users and developers) that surrounds it is rapidly growing AND dedicated to continuing this tradition.

PS: For anyone interested in getting started with Ubuntu, Linux or open-source software, please don’t be afraid to ask questions to me directly. To start, go to ubuntu.com to get a feel of what ubuntu is.

Last night I went to the Berlin Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) release party at Danial Holbach’s (dholbach) place. It was nice to meet other ubuntu lovers. I arrived at 8pm and left at ~4:30am. By then the sun was already on the rise and by the time I arrived home it had already become completely light out. I finally woke up at 12:30pm with a sore throat from all the talking I did.

It seems as if Daniel and I share a love for a certian british band from the 80’s and the singer of said band. I met Ellen, a kde usability contributer. I envy her persistence with such a thankless task. I also met Daniel Elstner, co-maintainer of gtkmm as well as a very easy-going and likable guy. Furthermore, Matthias Klose, Nina Feyh and about 20-30 others including a couple people from Frankfurt were there.

So it seems as if the Berlin Ubuntu community is pretty strong. Too bad I’ll be leaving in a few months. Of course, the wonderfull thing about the open source community is that it really doesn’t matter were you are. The community is global.

A couple nights ago I got back from my week-long trip to Bodensee in the south of Germany. The weather didn’t play nicely however and I spent most of my time reading rather than riding my bike around the lake. The last 2 nights were especially bad. There were only 2 days with half a day of sun and the temperature seemed to fall a degree or 2 each day.

As I usually do when camping in less than nice weather, I went to the movies to pass the time and get warm and dry. The first film I saw was X-men 3. I really like X-men movies although this one was the weakest of the 3 and had lots of room for improvement. I’ve always liked the idea of taking on special powers.

The 2nd I saw was The Da Vinci Code. Man, Ron Howard screwed this one up. It was just bad. The pace was way to fast (especially at the beginning), many important details were left out that were in the book (one of the cryptex passwords was “sofie”, her brother was also at Roslin, etc.) and I saw at least 3 instances where it seemed as if Robert Langdon was trying to mollify the catholic audience. In the book I got no sense that Robert Langdon’s character was trying to play to the catholic crowd.

The third and last film I saw was As in Heaven. I really liked this film. It’s a swedish film that was nominated for best foreign film at the last Oscars. It really makes you feel good although it’s not necessarily a happy movie. I strongly recommend this film.

As mentioned earlier, I also read alot. I read “The Da Vinci Code” during the first 2 days. I think I’m the last person on earth to read it. It’s a really fun book, a real page-turner.

I then moved on to Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral.” After reading The Da Vinci with it’s suspense, the pace of American Pastoral was a bit of a shock and it took time to settle into it. It’s one of those books that you need to reflect on and maybe read again to enjoy it thoroughly. Basically, it’s about America and the pent-up emotions that we build-up to maintain face.

And lastly, I’m working through Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” now. I truly love this book. I’m not finished yet but I simply love the way the stor(y/ies) is/are told in the book. I’ll be getting more of his books to read later. As a sidenote, it’s strange that as a white kid from The South it’s hard to imagine the charecters as being Japanese although I know that the story takes place in Japan. I have no problem imagining white, black, hispanic or even asian-american characters. I guess everyone is influenced by their surroundings. Now that I’m nearing the end of the book, I’ve chiseled into my head the image of Japanese characters into my head.

It’s been so long since I’ve read non-computer books. It was really refreshing. I didn’t use a single computer or the internet all week. I hadn’t done that for years.