Posts in May, 2010

Pakt publishing have released a new Django book called Django 1.2 E-Commerce, written by Jess Legg. I'll have a copy soon and post a review here.

In the meantime they are offering a free chapter of the book; Chapter 2 Setting up Shop in 30 minutes.

Meebo, the instant messenger in your browser company, are seriously looking for Python developers right now to work in Mountain View, California. From what I can gather they are expanding, and are building a number of sites in the Django framework.

Meebo are hiring!

If you have experience with Django, or some other web framework, and you live in California (or can relocate) this may be an excellent opportunity for you to work for a cool technology company. Contact Kiko Griffin if you're interested — and please mention where you read this!

See Meebo's job page for more information…

Since I've upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04, I figured this would be a good time to play with video editing, which is something I've been wanting to play with for a while. I suspect that video editing could be a killer app for Linux, and there are a few packages to chose from. Kdenlive looked to be the most feature rich, but I'm afraid I found it buggy and prone to crashing, so I settled on OpenShot, which has a clean, simple interface and didn't crash on me once.

Here's the video I put together:

If you know the answer, please don't post it straight away – to give others a chance to figure it out…

Upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 went remarkably smoothly, with the exception that audio in Flash was erratic. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Since I use my PC as an entertainment system, this was pretty much a deal-breaker.

Googling for it got me no where. Apparently “no audio in flash” is the Ubuntu equivalent of “i have a headache” – it's a vague symptom that has multiple possible causes. Long story short, the problem was that I had both Flash 9 and Flash 10 installed. Firefox appeared to pick one at random (as far as I could tell), but audio only worked with 10. The solution was to delete Flash 9 – which I couldn't do from the package manager, because it turned out I had Flash 9 installed locally. continue reading…

Django has support for Generic Foreign Keys, which let you reference one model instance from another, without knowing up-front what that model type is. The classic use for something like this is for a commenting system; you need generic foreign keys – or something like them – because you wouldn't want a commenting system that only worked with a single model. continue reading…