In short - I’m buying a lottery ticket.
While I know rationally that buying a lottery ticket is just taxes for people who aren’t good at math, recent events (and reading too many books lately) make me think that I’m possibly involved in a time-space discontinuity where random events have been significantly altered from normal distributions of probability.
In short - I got summon to Jury Duty - AGAIN. Superior Court, King County (instead of Municipal), near the end of the month.
Yeah, yeah - random. Right. I’d never been summoned for 5 years in Seattle and many more before that in Missouri, and now all of a sudden I’m requested twice in nearly two months?
I’m buying a lottery ticket.
Adobe is releasing the “goods” to Flex including “core ActionScript libraries ” under the Mozilla Public License. The overview on that page says that everything needed to run a little flashy goodness is available in the license.
Now lets see if the project gets some traction. It’ll be a really interesting view to see how Adobe plays these cards. We’ve already seen how Sun did with Java (or not, in the case of open sourcing the language). I’ll let you come to your own conclusions on the effectiveness and general “goodness” of Sun’s tactics. I think the only components remaining closed behind Adobe doors is the player itself…
In case you missed it on the Django lists, RSS feeds, and other good tidbits - Simon Willison posted about, and made available, code to enable pretty much any Django based site to take advantage of OpenID.
He took a really interesting tack - instead of tieing OpenID into the authentication system that comes as a part of Django (contrib.auth), he overlaid the session tidbits with a middleware component that passes information into your views (and potentially your templates) as an extension on the request object. So instead of using the Django auth mechanisms for your OpenID users, you can let it ride without permissions and really even heavy tracking of those users just through their OpenID.
Obviously that may not be quite what you’re looking for, but in taking advantage of enabling some light level of authentication and identity to a public site, it’s really in a sweet spot.
I was really impressed with is how he packaged the whole kit for someone to take a look at, learn, and use. First off, there’s a great “single-page” documentation page right in the source, along with a .txt counterpart. The in addition to the core code itself, he packaged up a super-light django “example” application that most folks will be able to pull down and immediately fire up to get a sense of what it is doing and how to use it.
In working with Fritz to implement TrenchMice’s OpenID consumer support, we ran into a number of problems when we bound OpenID into the heavier weight contrib.auth setup. “Required” fields were not always returned from the OpenID provided when requested through the registration extensions, and he ended up iterating on the process a couple times to finally route the OpenID registration process into their normal registration process when there wasn’t enough information to fully process things.
Clearly, if you don’t need the heavier weight (contrib.auth) setup, Simon’s contribution will be a godsend to your application.
Congrats to Andrew who’s moving to Rogue Sheep! I’ve known a couple of the sheep for a while, and they’re great folk, doing some incredible work. Jobster is loosing someone in this exchange - no doubt about it.
Congrats Andrew!
I was doing some upgrading of a Django site, getting rid of some of the pieces that are listed in the upcoming backwards-incompatible changes list. Learned some interesting tidbits…
For one, the AddManipulators (being deprecated as things move to newforms instead of the Manipulators setup) don’t play nicely with the removal of LazyDate and auto_add_now functionality from the older models setup. My terribly hack workaround, since I don’t use too many of the AddManipulators, is to tweak them when I run into it.
In particular I’m storing “creation_time” for some objects (which had been set to auto_add_now), and the AddManipulator decided that it was required, regardless of “null=True” or other goodies. I was overriding the save() method in the model - so I’m getting the data… but the Manipulator was being a pain. My tweak for the Manipulator went something like this:
book_manipulator = Book.AddManipulator()
for field in topic_manipulator.fields:
if field.field_name.startswith('creation_time'):
field.is_required=False
Which appears to have resolved the whole “creation_time_time” and “creation_time_date” fields being required and stuffing up my otherwise nicely functioning forms. Hopefully nobody else will run into this and need this hack (at least until I get rid of the AddManipulators in favor of the newforms setup) - but just in case, I thought I’d make it nicely available for Google.
A few days ago, a friend of mine from Singingfish - and whom I’ve sailed with - took an incredibly nasty fall. A railing gave way at Shilshole somewhere, and he fell 15 feet to a concrete dock with the nasty end results. The uber-short mention in the Seattle Times really doesn’t even present half the details - for one, Tony would be a hell of a lot better off if he DID land in the bay.
He’s at HarborView in the ICU, slowly stablizing. The prognosis is good for someone who’s just had some massive head trauma, but as far as I can tell from a distance and the update, he’s nowhere near “out of the woods”.
Jen set up a CaringBridge site for him - guestbook, pictures, updates - all the good stuff. If you know Tony, or if you don’t, check it out. Maybe sign the guest book.
I can tell stories aplenty about the fellow, especially sailing with him. He’s a good man, and I’m pulling for him. This shit shouldn’t happen to people as good as him.
Late Night Cocoa 14 is out - Steve Harris gives a nice API overview of SearchKit, sort of a verbal overview of the API’s and how the functions tie together.
Nice episode!
At C4 last year, Brent gave a talk on Hybrid apps - and then graciously redid the same talk for the XCoders. Along those lines, Paul Bissex wrote a short bit about DjangoKit today.
Being a fan of that particular framework, I find it pretty interesting. It’s not quite in the realm of the hybrid application that Brent was talking about, but it’s definitely another take on how you can get some functionality on the desktop in a consistent way pretty darn quickly. I still think straight Desktop style apps that do the cool whizzy feedback will keep their place, but the possibilities for something like DjangoKit to make a quick appliance wrapper interface is really appealing to me. (DjangoKit on Apple TV?)
I haven’t tried out DjangoKit, but I’ve got all the prereqs (that would be a copy of PyObjC on my laptop). It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
I stopped by the newest Sushi joint on Queen Anne, Calva Cafe. Cited where everyone on Queen Anne is used to thinking of “Pats Coffee”.
The fish there is excellent. The unagi, in particular, was really wonderful - and there was a lot for the money. Tonight I tried a general smattering of sushi. $16 and some change for the “Sushi Deluxe”: 8 nigiri sushi and a tuna roll. The cuts were all sorts of inconsistent, but the quality of the fish was outstanding. The staff there is friendly, and somewhat disorganized - and I rather like them. I think they’re “trying to hard” at the moment, and it’ll take a while for the settle into something regular. Neat joint though.
Not much inside seating, but it hasn’t been packed there as yet. I’m looking forward to watching them continue, and I’ll periodically pop back in to check them out.
