i.justrealized

Django 1.0 Template Development, published by Packt, is a book that focuses on the templates portions of Django. Django is a popular Python web framework. Django models are easy to build but I always found the templates rather hard to understand.

Chapter 1, 2 and 3 gives an overview of how Django views work together. If you’re a developer, you shouldn’t skip that. I found myself understanding the Django MVC architecture better. (I come from a CakePHP background.) The author (Scott Newman) also did a good job introducing custom filters in Chapter 7. It’s something I haven’t explored till I read the book. There is also a chapter dedicated to pagination, also a must read.

The book is 272 pages, not too long. If you’re looking to improve your understanding on templates, this could be a good companion. I should also stress that the book is well organized. You can skip through the chapters and go straight to what you need without missing out much.

You can download a sample chapter here [PDF], and if you like it, you can find out how to get the book here.

Mac OS, great at making Windows look like sh!t again:

Mac OS, great at making Windows look like sh!t again

Saw this in Snow Leopard. All the executables look like a bad TV.

My academic results are out. I did better than I expected this year. I am quite surprised by the results. I have rather low expectations this time and thought I may do badly for my “software engineering, algorithm design and analysis” class because I do not really understand what I learnt. For “data communications and enterprise networking”, I spend most of the time scribbling and chose to do those questions that require a lot of writing. The results made me quite happy at this hour. The red ones are the results for this year:

I think they moderated the results or something.

Have a look at the new INQ mobile:

INQ mobile

What’s striking asides the scarlet back is the strong focus on integration with social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger. Now you can stay connected with your pals where ever you are. INQ mobile also added push Gmail and iTunes synchronization recently, a very welcome addition to the already feature-packed phone. INQ also supports multitasking, the change in icon during incoming messages, friend requests and updates is a nice touch.

Here’s Walt Mossberg opinion on the INQ “facebook” phone:

Walt Mossberg & Katherine Boehret about the “facebook phone”

The INQ is equipped with a 3.2 megapixel camera that’s perfect of capturing candid moments of your friends and share them to Facebook before they can stop you. INQ positions itself as a simple yet feature-rich device to keep you connected to your social circle. The simplicity becomes evident as they chose not to ship a manual and instead have a Help Cards section of their website which guides you on the features of INQ rather than teaches you how to find or use them.

Attractive prizes can be won if you spare some time to check out the blog posts on INQ mobile here: sparklette.net, nadnut.com, jayleif.blogspot.com, lawrencewong.net, krisandro.com, techielobang.com, simplyjean.com, litford.wordpress.com, holly–jean.blogspot.com and hpility.blogspot.com

[This is an advertorial.]

After watching District 9, I noticed the budget of every movie I come across and continuing being amazed over District 9′s thirty-million dollar budget.

Firefox’s address bar, also known as the Awesome Bar, stores all sorts of awesome information in a SQLite database. The SQLite database slowly starts getting fragments and the Awesome Bar just isn’t as awesome if it gets all laggy. To solve this, you can vacuum the SQLite database that Awesome Bar used.

Go to Tools, then Error Console. And copy the following:

And paste and click on Evaluate:

Vaccuming Firefox in Error Console

The browser probably freezes for a few seconds and the address bar feels faster.

[via MozillaLinks]

Not long ago, word’s been going around to upgrade WordPress to its latest version 2.8.4. Robert Scoble suffered some loss, some hackers broke in and deleted some of his blog posts. In addition to that, the hackers also placed malicious code in his archive pages and Google sent him an email stating it has removed his blog from its indexes.

I would be terribly upset if such things happened to me. I keep updating WordPress just in case. But what happens when it did get hacked? Are the WordPress developers to be blamed? One of things brought up is custom plugins being incompatible with the new WordPress. I hate to say this but when it comes to security, it’s still more important to temporarily disable the plugin and fix it ASAP instead of not upgrading. The risk is just too much.

And backups. Do them frequently. If it’s hard to do backups, just pay your host to do so. I just pay them to settle those stuff for me. I’m not too clever with all the backup utilities. I never had the time to explore them.

One of the comments in Scoble’s Friendfeed caught my attention:

This recent wave of WordPress incidents shows the negative side of using open source software. Matt says that there are many people looking into WordPress’ source code, but the problem is that probably half of those people have malicious reasons for doing so. – Nikolay Kolev

To which Matt of WordPress fame replied:

Nikolay, it’s always better to have more people looking at the code, because a bug that’s been found is better than a bug that hasn’t. WordPress used to get almost no security problems and people thought it was because it was coded differently, when in fact it was coded far worse than it is today it just didn’t have enough users to make it worthwhile to target. Also where many commercial or proprietary companies try to minimize information about their problems or sit on a fix for months so they can package a bunch into one update, we put everything out there doing a new release as soon as possible after a problem has been reported. – Matt Mullenweg

Here’s another response from another user, Tim:

Nikolay: I would also push back against your assumption that using Open Source software equals less security. Microsoft Windows and OS X are both closed source and both have security holes – there is a competition each year to help MS and Apple find them and fix them. Both Apple and Microsoft came away with security holes to fix this year. So just because it’s open source doesn’t automatically make it more open to security holes. I agree with Matt and believe that have the source open to all makes fixing the holes much quicker. – Tim

I think I can relate to this…

Anyway, Matt also wrote an article on How to keep WordPress secure.