The blixtra blog has a list of the Top 30 Django Tutorials and Articles. My Django on Windows HOWTO appears to have made the list.

Well, after having just about continuous downtime since Friday, my Internet connection finally seems to be up and running again. After allowing the firewall box to grab a new address via DHCP, I noticed something different:

Yep, that’s a Comcast address.

I had heard rumors that Comcast was going to buy/take over Suscom for probably almost a year. It looks like they made the official switch last night at midnight.

I’m sorry to see Suscom go. I’ve always had really good experiences with them, including the few times I had to call them about something. Each time I was quickly connected to a helpful and friendly person. Hopefully Comcast will be as good, but based on the experiences I’ve heard from other current customers, I don’t have high hopes.

Update: According to Speakeasy…

Hrm… maybe Comcast isn’t so bad afterall.

So after driving over to the UPS depot to pick it up, I finally got my new Dell XPS 400 on Tuesday night. Drove home, hooked it up, and hit the power button.

The first thing I noticed was the awesome new and simplified interface.

I thought I had ordered the box with Windows XP MCE 2005 on it. But instead I guess I have some better version made by Dell. Rather than all those confusing icons and menus, my computer just says:

No boot device available - Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility

See, simple! Only two options, and hitting F1 takes me right back to the same two friendly beeps and error message. Pressing F2 lets me click around many menus indeed.

Plus I had the chance to (so far) spend 111 minute and 58 seconds on the phone listening to relaxing music and speaking to people in exotic and distant lands.

Yay for Dell! And yay for my new Dell DOA 400!

Update: I guess I’m not the only one… Woe betide my Dell

More: Read my follow-up post to this one to see how this all worked out in the end. Not good.

Jeff Cogswell takes a first look at IronPython (i.e. Python + .NET).

Jehiah (of relative date function fame) now has some information about spatial proximity searching:

This article covers how to search a database via latitude and longitude to find matches based on spatial proximity (or distance). This code is for mysql (also some in python), but it should be easily adaptable to other languages.

The example involves searching based on zip code data. Could come in handy.

Lots of people are talking about the latest Django vs. Ruby on Rails vs. Symfony benchmarks. It’s the two sentence summary that seems to be getting the most attention:

Summary

Rails performed much better than Symfony. And Django performed much better than Rails.

More at the Django Weblog and from Ian Holsman. You can also check out some other benchmarks.

Jehiah has a function called getRelativeTime() that will make it really easy to do relative date printing, such as “4 days ago” or “in 2 days.”

For you hardware hackers out there:

Pyro stands for Python Robotics. The goal of the project is to provide a programming environment for easily exploring advanced topics in artificial intelligence and robotics without having to worry about the low-level details of the underlying hardware.

A while back I took an interest in robotics and picked up a Basic Stamp. I should really get back into that.

Jonathan takes a look at the relative popularity of Python and Ruby at Indeed.com.

Ok, so this seems very cool… There’s a WordPress plugin to easily add Snipplr code snippets (mentioned yesterday) to a blog post. There’s even a screencast to show you how it works.