Things have changed a bit since I last created a structure diagram for Sheepology. This graph was generated by django-command-extensions and Graphviz.

Version control seems to be broken in the demo right now. It’s probably due to all the version changes of Django and such that have happened since last I test this feature.

UPDATE: Versioning is fixed. I had to install django-reversion 1.2 so it would work with Django 1.1.1.

I just rolled out an update to the Sheepology demo. Many changes have taken place since this demo was last updated:

• Content management system – I needed this ASAP so it was what I’ve worked on for the last month or so.  It doesn’t have a lot of features right now, but has an architecture that I am very happy with and is highly extensible.
• Revamped the communications architecture.
• Generalized the Flex-based visual tree editor so that it could be used with more than just groups. It is now being used for content categories as well. (I would actually like to rewrite this in Javascript now that I have played with raphael.js)
• Added version control for pretty much anything of importance (people, groups, events, content, etc.) using django-reversion. You can easily restore deleted people, content, whatever, or revert to previous versions.
• Updated the theme to the latest version of Grappelli
• Optimized some queries
• Got the whole thing running under Tornado instead of Apache. It now uses much less memory and runs in a single process. In theory it should be very fast but I haven’t load tested it yet.

I hope to role this out into production in my church (the “public” site in the demo is a previews of the site I’m doing for my church).

The list of features I want to add is growing faster than the list of items completed, but I think I need to get something into production and get it field tested before going too much further.

I take back everything nice I said about the Kindle.  Don’t buy one.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

Read more at Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others. Apparently Amazon can delete books right off your Kindle without your permission. And yes, they did refund the purchase price of the book, but that is little recompense for their intrusion. The irony of it all is that the revoked book is George Orwell’s 1984.

I decided after using if for a while I liked it and could get used it using it. But I have also come to the realization that paper is a really ingenious technology. Suppose you want to spread out several reference works on your desk while you are studying? You can’t do that with a Kindle.

Paper is good.

I wanted to automate some things on my Gnome desktop and being rather fond of Python, I thought that I would start there and see what I could do. My first task was to change the Gnome Panel from one screen to another automatically. I have a dual monitor setup and I want to automate the panel moving from one to the other.

I did a little research and came up with this little script that does the job. It simply toggles the panel between screen 0 and 1. I had no idea it would be this simple.

import gconf

path = ‘/apps/panel/toplevels/panel_0/monitor’

gc = gconf.client_get_default()
cs = gconf.ChangeSet()
cs.set_int( path, not gc.get_int(path) )
gc.commit_change_set(cs,True)

I finally started working on Sheepology again. I decided that the next order of business is a content management system (CMS). I have spent the last couple months working with Ellington and Jazbox here at the Naples Daily News and have developed strong feelings about these systems and consequently a vision for something better. Coupling this knowledge with my experience of Joomla and Bricolage, I think I have a pretty good idea of what a good CMS should be. (Bricolage is by far my favorite CMS, but not very friendly). And hey, Django was designed as a framework for building content management systems, so I’ve already got a good start.

In addition, the church I am attending has a strong need for a new website. I would like to use Sheepology to do that. Initially the integrated CMS will be simple so that I can get something out the door, but I do have a vision for something larger.

All that said, without thinking about it I packed away my desktop computer into my trunk to free up space on our camper’s kitchen table. Shari got a laptop and I decided that we no longer needed to have the whole desktop taking up all that space. So before I thought to commit my changes I tore it all down.

Thankfully we should close on “our” house by the end of July and all will be well.

I have an opportunity to play with an Amazon Kindle 2 for a while. I’m not supposed to buy any books since it’s on the company card, but there are oodles of free books out there.

I’m a big fan of Christian Classics Ethereal Library CCEL, so I wanted to see if I could get any of their books onto this Kindle. It turns out that many if CCEL’s books are available in the online store for a nominal fee, but having been mandated not to buy anything I decided to see if I could go a different route.

I started out by downloading a PDF from CCEL and trying to convert that. That was not as easy as I thought it would be. You’re supposed to be able to send an email to a service on Amazon and have it converted, but apparently my address was not approved for that. So I installed Calibre. That actually worked pretty well. It converted the PDF to a .mobi file and then I was able to drag it onto the USB Kindle “drive.” Unfortunately, the formatting is really not that great.

It turns out that the easiest way to do this is to simply use a plain old .txt file. CCEL has .txt files for everything so I downloaded one (Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History) and stuck it on the Kindle. Really bad formatting. No biggie because it’s just a .txt file. I can mangle it all I want with Python or Perl. So I put this little script together and it makes a very readable book on Kindle.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import re,sys

for line in file( sys.argv[1] ):
    if re.match('\s+$',line):
        print '\n'
    else:
        # shrink strings of spaces to one
        line = re.sub('[ ]+',' ',line).strip()
        # shrink strings of repeating characters
        line = re.sub(r'(.)\1{39,500}','\n'+r'\1'*40+'\n',line)
        print line,

I’ve been using a Mac now for a week. This is the first time in my life that I’ve actually used a Mac for anything serious or for an extended period of time. I vowed to give it a chance for at least a couple weeks before I install Ubuntu.

The hardware is exceptional. I have a 17″ MacBook Pro with 4G ram and about 300G disk. The screen is beautiful, the touchpad is the only touchpad I’ve every gotten along with, and surprisingly the chicklet keyboard isn’t as bad as I expected. The aluminum case is a thing of beauty.

I am getting used to it. In fact, I could probably exist in the Mac world OK. That is to say that it is tolerable. Tolerable requires a good shell (that rules Windows out) and a good scripting environment including such things as Python and Perl. Those come bundled on a Mac. Tolerable also requires something like Spaces (something that Linux/Unix has had since the early 90s). While Windows doesn’t come bundled with something like Spaces, I know that there are add-ons that can do something similar. Tolerable requires easy access to tools like ssh, ftp, sshfs, etc. While that doesn’t quite rule Windows out, most of the Windows based tools that provide that functionality are sub-par and barely tolerable.

So yes, I can get along on a Mac. That does not mean it’s ideal.

I have 3 chief complaints with Mac OS. One, easy access to open-source software is poor. With Ubuntu almost any open-source package can be installed with a few clicks. Fink and it’s clones are sub-par. Two, it is relatively uncustomizable. That is to say I can’t set short-cut keys easily to do the things I want them to do; I can’t make the finder open files with a single click instead of a double; I can’t make the window focus follow the mouse without clicking (without buying a $15 add-on that still doesn’t work the way I want it to), etc.

And now for the biggest complaint, three, the basic premise of the UI is a throwback to the 80s. In the 80s desktop computers were a single-tasking deal. You could only use one application at a time. So at that point in time it made sense for Apple to put the application menu bar at the very top of the screen unattached to the application windows itself. That simply doesn’t make any sense anymore and it causes problems when you want to have things like focus follows mouse. Come on Apple, even Microsoft figured that one out.

So yes, I will give this Mac OS thing another week to see if I can somehow tolerate this broken UI, but I’ve already downloaded the latest Ubuntu in anticipation of my install next week. Supposedly this thing came with bootcamp…

Today is my first day at the Naples Daily News. It’s 88° here today.

I am currently in Naples Florida interviewing for a job at the Naples Daily News. Naples is what I would call a tropical paradise. It’s a bummer that there are no mountains for skiing or hiking, but it has its own beauty. Walking on the beach in shorts in March is pretty cool.