Programming

Via Simon Willison: This is a really convenient way to add custom functions to model managers in Django. Way easier than defining custom managers each time you need extra functionality.

Google has released their own programming language, appropriately named Go. I haven’t had time to dig deeply into this yet, but I’m seeing some interesting stuff that I like such as fast compilation, garbage collection, easy to read syntax, built in support for multicore machines and of course an open source BSD-style license.

Via Simon Willison: This is a real cool Django app that creates an awesome interface to help internationalize your site. Allows the adminstrator, and an optional group of designated translators to read and write your site’s gettext files.

This is one of the more promising projects in progress on the Schema Migration front. Schema evolution can be a bit painful and projects like this for automatically migrating database structure based on the Python model code will be a necessity for long term projects.

Via James Bennett: Some very clever uses of code in blog titles. My favorite belongs to Charles Miller: tail -f /dev/mind > blog.

Heh, I had a little fun this afternoon writing a little Django app for my site that will regularly import my public Pownce notes and allow me to display them in the sidebar.

In case you missed it, Pownce announced the release of the second revision of its public API today. The new API is much more elaborate than the previous version (which was honestly kind of a joke), and promises to be robust enough that interested parties could use it to rewrite the Pownce desktop app from scratch without losing any functionality.

This is a hell of a rant against the Rails community by Zed Shaw (creator of Mongrel). It’s passionate and angry, so yeah maybe take it with a grain of salt but he does make some solid points, although there is a lot of vitriol pointed towards specific people.

Michael Trier points out a cool new feature in Django that is awesome for debugging. On Django error pages (with DEBUG turned on) there is now a button that will automatically post the contents to dpaste.