You can’t just do Ubuntu
You have to be Ubuntu

Ahh… We learn something everyday.

Reading is the best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the stress levels by more than two thirds or 68%.

New research by consultancy Mindlab International at the University of Sussex says reading works better and faster than other methods to calm frazzled nerves such as listening to music, going for a walk or settling down with a cup of tea.

Listening to music reduced the levels by 61 per cent, have a cup of tea of coffee lowered them by 54 per cent and taking a walk by 42 per cent. Playing video games brought them down by 21 per cent from their highest level but still left the volunteers with heart rates above their starting point. (Source: Marie Claire)

I’ve been reading quite a bit these couple of months. What I feel is that reading from a book helps reduce stress much more than reading from the screen.

If you don’t like reading books typically, you may get humor books just to have a laugh. I have a book with only funny pictures — that worked too. I probably flipped through hundreds of times, each time looking at around 10 pictures. That seems to keep my stress level down. Whoever said “laughing is the best medicine” might just be right.

In his 2000 memoir, On Writing, King revealed that he’d been so shattered by his alcohol and drug abuse in the 1980s that, even today, he cannot remember working on many of the books he wrote back then. There were times when he’d been doing so much blow that he wrote with cotton wads stuffed in his nostrils, to prevent blood dripping on his typewriter. (Source: Life)

If you’re interested in CakePHP, you may like to check out CakePHP Application Development by Packt Publishing. This book covers lots of beginner topics such as installation and configuration. It is a good book to get started on CakePHP, it has a step-by-step guide that can be useful for starters. The book targets CakePHP 1.2 however, the book is written before CakePHP 1.2 is released so it does not have updated screenshots in it.

Generally the book’s concept is correct. The explanations are written as if someone is talking to you. If you do not like that style of learning, best you avoid this title. CakePHP Application Development covers a creation of a sample app — Quickwall — at the end of the book. Unlike typical tutorials that teaches you how to create a blog with XX framework, this goes into more depth on how best to use the inbuilt features of CakePHP.

My major grip on this book is its numerous errors in code, and a couple of quite unforgiving ones too. The books could have been better edited. Some of the codes did not appear to run and you have to look around to check for syntax errors. It isn’t often, still it’s a bad impression. The codes in the book are badly indented too. This makes the codes hard to read. It’s a good book to learn, but can be better.

Find out more about CakePHP Application Development here, you can also have a look at the book’s Table of Contents here.

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.

The Waldo Ultimatum

[via The New Yorker]

I think this may very well come true.

The Django Book is one of the more interesting initiatives where the public can contribute comments to the contents of the book before it is published. It’s a great way to discover errata and fix sections which are ambiguous. Books are usually written be experts and there are times they don’t see the difficulty the same way the readers do. Ultimate, The Django Book is aimed for beginners.

As of now, 3 chapters are written.