ChichaPlanet

We interrupt these wonderful 6 months without posting in this blog to share the joy, directly from Django’s BFDLs, my christmas present to myself:

The Django Book! I bought it in Amazon and it was only 3 days late to Peru, not bad for christmas season.

I can’t wait to read this book. I did read the chapter previews in the site and they were very good. I’ll write a review of the book as soon as I finish reading it.

(btw, I’m sick of wordpress, it’s a buggy piece of ^*($#, is there a decent django powered blog with an import-from-wordpress feature?).

Nobody else cares, but still:

Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery
Subject: ADMINSPOTTING
Message-ID: <5cl3le$q24@infoserv.aber.ac.uk>
From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary Barnes)
Date: 28 Jan 1997 14:49:18 -0000
Organization: Ripoffs R Us
X-No-Archive: Yes

Choose no life. Choose sysadminning. Choose no career.        *****
Choose no family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose hard  *   *
disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers  * A *
and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine  * D *
and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose * M *
a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and   * I *
matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office  * N *
in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why  * S *
the fuck you're logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting * P *
in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web    * O *
sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose     * T *
rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some  * T *
miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to    * I *
the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the    * N *
computer-literate.                                            * G *
Choose your future.                                           *   *
Choose sysadmining[1].                                        *****

Gaz
[1] It might fuck you up a little less than heroin[2].
[2] ObFootnote.
--
 /\./\   gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary "Wolf" Barnes)
( - - ) "Do not ask any lady to take wine, until you
 \ " /   see she has finished her fish or soup."
  ~~~                - Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society

Have a nice sysadmin day!

Thanks to Jaime Wong:

The “Chicha Simpsons” by Jaime Wong, featuring Antonio Ognio, Miguel Rabi, Cesar Villegas, Homer Simpson drinking chicha morada and yours truly (with a friendly Python).

Thanks a lot Jaime! I’m already using this as my avatar in pownce and in IM.

(???sq?? d?l? ?po??un ??? ?o dl?? ??? ???? ?lq?ssod u??q s?? ?sod s???)

??? ???? s??lqo?d ???? no? ?? ?ou? ?? ??l ????s o?u??p ??? u? ?s?l????? ?u???od ??? ???? ?s?? ???? s?? ?? ??? ??oddns o? ??u??? ?lq???d?o?u? sp??????q ?s??? (?u??? ?) ??? ?u?????o? ?? ? os ‘????p??? ?o uo?s??? ?s???l ??? ??o?q ?p???dn s???

?(????o? ???? ?o ?z?s ??? ?? ?ool ?sn?) ??u??q s??? u? ??o? ?u?z??? s?? ?o? ???uu?p??? ?lo?l?? o? sopn? ???oddns ?po??un ????? s?? ‘s???n?u?l ????o ???lun ‘uo???d ?sn???q ?lq?ssod ?u?????os ‘????? ?po??un ?l??ld?o? ?o? o?u??p o?? s??p ??os

Some days ago Django got completly Unicode aware, something possible because Python, unlike other languages, has great Unicode support. Kudos to Malcolm Tredinnick for his amazing work in this branch (just look at the size of that commit).

This upgrade broke the latest version of Feedjack, so I am commiting the (I think) first backwards incompatible change to support it. It was very easy with the Porting Checklist in the Django site. Let me know if you have problems with it.

(this post has been possible with the help of the Unicode Flip website)

A new version of Feedjack has been released: Feedjack 0.9.10.

Changes:

• Fixing CSS tags for styles 4 and 5
• feedjack_update now strip()s tags before storing them
• feedjack_update shows the feed number being processed
• We no longer cache the tags in feedjack_update, it had encoding problems
  and makes the script safe to run more than one instance at the same time

I said that 0.9.9 would be the last release in the 0.9 branch. I lied. 0.9.10 is a maintenance/bugfix release. The 0.10 branch of feedjack is on the works.

Share and enjoy.

Our friend and notorious chichero (or chicha as he used to say), toggg, has just passed away. He colaborated to several open source projects, like SPIP, jQuery, Tikiwiki and PEAR.

Taken from a Python up, Ruby down discussion in programming.reddit:

Ruby takes all the elegance and simplicity of Perl, and mixes it with the library support of Lisp…

- foonly

Previously…

A new version of Feedjack has been released: Feedjack 0.9.9.

Changes:

• Fixed i18n related bugs in the templates
• Fixed a bug related to the –settings option in feedjack_update.py
• The feeds per user, tag and user/tag are working again
• You can choose between rss2 and atom in the feeds for user, tag and
  user/tag
• The default /feed/ url now redirects to /feed/atom/ instead of
  /feed/rss/

You are encouraged to update to this version, it has all the acumulated bug fixes known at this moment (thanks Petar).

This will also be the last version of the 0.9 branch. The 0.10 branch (currently trunk) will have several modifications in the data model, so please be careful if you update your site via subversion. Just follow the right branch or install only official releases and you will be safe.

Also, if you are running a Feedjack site, please update your links to our new site: www.feedjack.org. You can also announce your site in the Feedjack mailing list so we can add a link in the project site.

Share and enjoy.

James Allchin, co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms & Services Division:

I’m not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers, both business and home, the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are.

(source)

We already knew that Mr. Allchin, please continue.

I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that does not translate into great products.

Well at least you have great marketing.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.

Why not? Just use the best tool for the job (hint: not Microsoft). After all you are still using Linux servers in portions of your site (via Akamai). And you used Linux for your main site a couple of years ago after worm and virus attacks (Microsoft hides behind Linux for protection). Microsoft just doesn’t get security but hey, you already said that :)

And I’m sure you still remember how your own techies admitted that FreeBSD was superior to Win2k for massive server installs when they migrated the frontend of Hotmail? Oh, and I think the Hotmail backend is still running Solaris?

And of course, since you are responsible of Microsoft’s operating systems, you know that your programmers use Perforce instead of Visual Source Safe?

And of course you know that between your own employees, for every MSN search user there are FOUR Google search users?

I think I get the point Mr. Allchin: If Microsoft doesn’t eat its own dog food anymore because it has lost its way, all your costumers should start doing the exact same thing:

USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB (Hint: NOT Microsoft).