November 2005 Archive

It is practically impossible to travel to Muslim countries without hearing some anecdotes about Nasreddin Hodja. Here is one (the source):

Hodja was once a judge. One day a man came to his house to complain about his neighbor. Hodja listened carefully and then said to him,

- My good man, you are right.

The man went away happily. In a little while the first man's neighbor came to see Hodja. He complained about the first man. Hodja listened carefully to him, too, and then said,

- My good man, you are right.

Hodja's wife had been listening to all this, and when the second man left, she turned to Hodja and said,

- Hodja, you told both men right. That's impossible. They both can't be right.

Hodja listened carefully to his wife and then said to her,

- My dear, you are right, too.

Sometimes I feel like Hodja.

One day I read an opinion that the reuse of 3rd-party components helps TG. A corollary is "it hurts Django." I heard it on several occasions. I agree that reuse of popular components can help to bring existing users into fold. Probably it is good, I think.

Another day I read another opinion that Django is, well, better regardless of all other things. And I agree too. The author criticizes Django on some accounts. I agree again!

On the other hand, Internet is big enough for a few web frameworks. Different people have different opinions.

Am I being inconsistent? You bet! You are right too.

Finally I released WebUI 0.1 (Homunculus) alpha — AJAX-based web interface for OpenWrt made with Dojo! Highlights of this release: 5 more applets including firewall configurator and more network settings. Now proceed to install the package and to read release notes.

OpenWrt RC4 is out. Take it while it's hot! It includes multiple stability updates and webif web-based user interface!

Update: OpenWrt GUI alpha is released and tested with RC4. 

During final tests I found a nasty bug in "Firewall configurator" applet. I decided to postpone the release until I'll be able fix it. You can see bastard's picture on Flickr along with some description of it.

I found a blog post describing London Web Frameworks Night, which took place on 11/17/2005 at the University of Westminster. Jabbering Giraffe reports on presentation of three web frameworks: Catalyst, Django, And Ruby on Rails.

It is an interesting read. Author remarks that Django's Admin ("with lots of Ajax and JavaScript goodness") was the main object of envy of other frameworks. Another interesting remark was how good Rails people are at marketing.

I hope it will provide you a fix until next event: Chicago's Rails and Django presentation. Creators of both frameworks will present their "children" and answer questions. This event is expected to be videotaped and published afterwards. It means even if you cannot go to Chicago, IL you can still have your questions answered publicly by David Heinemeier Hansson and our very own Adrian Holovaty (with Jacob Kaplan-Moss on bench, who is getting ready to play when situation gets rough).

Go to event's page and submit your questions.

I was able to work more on OpenWrt GUI. Alpha release seems inevitable now. I'll try to publish it during this weekend.

I added back the main applet, which serves as a menu for all other applets. More network configuration-related applets are added. Status applet is cleaned up considerably: all less important information was moved to tooltips. New screenshot is available for your viewing pleasure.

Stay tuned for upcoming alpha release!

Last time I visited New Orleans on July 23, 2005 on my way to Florida. It was a short visit. I planned to stop again on my way back, but I didn't have time. "New Orleans is not going anywhere. I can do it some other time." One month later Hurricane Katrina made landfall devastating New Orleans.

I am looking at pictures I took during that brief stay — everything is so peaceful. It was about noon. Streets were practically empty. Tourists were sleeping late after crazy night on Rue Bourbon.

This is one of my favorite pictures of the set. The horse is waiting while guide talks about history of New Orleans to tourists. You can see more on Flickr.

It feels strange to look at these pictures now — some places were destroyed by flood, or trashed by looters. It felt surreal when I read news about Katrina. I still hope to come back one day and see the city in its full glory. I hope New Orleans will bounce back.

As you all know Django has new shiny RSS framework. This change breaks my simple RSS tutorial and I am glad that it happened! To tell you the whole truth, it breaks only "The Simple Way" to do RSS in Django replacing it with even simpler one. "The Smart Way" RSS still works as you can see on my web site. Like I predicted the feedgenerator is still around and it learned some new tricks: it can produce Atom feed now! I am going to update the tutorial recreating old examples with new RSS framework. It will be fun!

Now with RSS overhaul behind us I will add Atom feed to my web site. Additionally I plan to increase repertoire of feeds by adding simple implementation of Google Sitemap protocol.

Recently I looked at the stats of my web site. DreamHost provides Analog 6.0. I supplemented it with awstats. Plus there are some other means to analyze the traffic. Let's put it this way: I know my average reader. I thought I did. Anyway I found a few surprises.

The country list includes 77 countries. Out of 193. Not bad for a personal blog. Practically all Eurasian countries, and countries of both Americas are in the list. Australia, New Zealand, and many island countries are there as well. Only 2 countries from Africa: South Africa and Senegal. Pity.

Many people come to my site to read more about Django. Let's do the math, shall we? At present moment Django has 15 locales. 7 more languages are registered in Django's list. People from 77 countries were interested in Django. Do you see the discrepancy here?

I understand that some people are satisfied without additional translations. Canadians, British, Australians, New Zealanders can read U.S. English, Austrians, Liechtensteiners, Luxembourgers, and Swiss understand the German without problems, and so on.

But why don't I see Japanese language in the list? I refuse to believe that the major developed country doesn't have a single dedicated guy to do this simple job. It cannot be! Where is Korean language? 50 million people in South Korea and nobody wants to translate for compatriots? Impossible! And don't get me started on ex-Soviet states. Probably they understand Russian, but come on, show your pride! So far only Latvian is registered.

Another big enigma is lack of Persian and Arabic languages. 70 million Persian-speaking people, 200 million Arabic-speaking people, and 0 of them are brave enough to translate Django's Admin. I know you are out there, I've seen you on my web site! I am disappointed.

The weirdest search phrase, which routes people to my blog, is ... (drumroll) ... "rails lost connection to mysql server during query". 2 month ago I mentioned that Django's MySQL backend was losing connection to MySQL server. At that time I've noticed that Ruby on Rails had similar problem. I investigated the problem, it was solved the very next day, and the patch was submitted for Django. But now every day I have visitors looking for "rails lost connection to mysql server during query" or some variation of this phrase. Every single day somebody is googling for it. I checked RoR's ticket — it's still open for the last 10 months marked as "blocker", and with the "highest" priority. I wish I knew Ruby better.

And last but not least surprise. Almost a month ago I posted screenshots of  OpenWrt GUI on Flickr. This is the project am working on in my rare free time. The most viewed picture of the set was viewed about 400 times. Two weeks ago I released a preview version and recorded a screencast. The archive was downloaded ~200 times. The screencast was viewed about 900 times. Huh? Apparently people love to watch screencasts. I can understand that they can't download the software (lazy, scared of viruses and trojans, don't have proper hardware, and so on). I don't understand the desire to see a slideshow instead of raw pictures. It puts me in the minority: I rarely tempted to watch screencasts. I prefer to see thumbnails of screenshots checking out the most interesting for me. I feel it is more time efficient. I guess I was outvoted by my readership.

Update (after 1 day): Yep, somebody was looking for "rails lost connection to mysql server during query" again today. Yep, almost everybody who read my rant about unexplainable lore of screencasts immediately proceeded to watch my screencast again. Some things never change.

As of today i18n branch of Django is merged back to trunk. What is i18n? It is an abbreviation of the big word "internationalization". l10n ("localization") is a sibling of i18n. In practice it means that now you and I can do truly international multi-language web sites without much hassle. While this is more important for big corporations and international organizations, it is a big step for Django's truly international community. Let's thank Hugo (the engine behind this effort), all participating developers, and all translators for their monumental effort to make it a reality.

As of now Django supports 11 locales for its Admin application: cs (Czech), de (German), en (English), es (Spanish), fr (French), gl (Galician), it (Italian), pt_BR (Brazilian Portuguese), ru (Russian), sr (Serbian), zh_CN (Simple Chinese). Judging by a list of translators we can expect Norwegian, Slovenian, Dutch, Hebrew, Latvian, and Polish locales in the near future. If you don't see your favorite locale, you can do it yourself. The first step is to register as a translator.

But it doesn't stop here: you can easily make your applications international too. Upcoming documentation will clarify a lot of details, but for now you can chew on translation document. Jacob notified us that Adrian is going to produce related documents and we all know that Adrian writes excellent documentation. Come to think of it, you kind of expect it from a journalist (now an editor for washingtonpost.com) as well as a software developer. Well, I can be spoiled easily nowadays.

What if your site is offered in one language? Should you modify your code before upgrading to the latest revision of Django? Most probably you don't need to change a thing. It's taken care of. I did simple svn up and as you can see it works without any changes to my code.

New TinyMCE 2.0RC4 is out. It fixes numerous bugs, which never bit me. Is it going to be the last RC before actual release? Who know. Grab it while it is hot!