Big Head Labs has a nice guide to creating a simple blog application with Django. It’s aimed at people with little or no Django experience, but that have a general familiarity with Python. I just skimmed through it so far (having already written a blog in Django), but it looks like it is well written.

I really think that it’s these type of guides (i.e. the really, really, simple ones) that will get more people to check out Django. Nice job!

Tonight’s CPLUG meeting topics were Monit and NetReg.

I did the Monit talk and, as far as I could tell, it went pretty well. People seemed to be fairly interested and there were some really good questions/discussion afterward. If you are interested, my presentation slides for my talk are online.

Jason Long covered NetReg which is basically a set of Perl scripts that coordinate your DHCP server with Apache to create a captive portal. Really interesting stuff.

Overall, it was a good meeting.

Update: One of this issues brought up was how to monitor Monit (i.e quis custodiet ipsos custodes?). Jason suggested running Monit from inittab/inetd, which seemed like a decent idea… and one that I was pretty sure I had seen mentioned before. As it turns out, that issue is covered in the Monit FAQ under Question 7.

Don’t ask why, but I was attempting to install Apache 2.2 on my Windows desktop tonight. Unfortunately after double-clicking the installer, it would give me the following error:

After quite a bit of hunting I found a rather odd solution. If you disable all of your network interfaces (I had two running) and try the installer again… it seems to work fine.

I have no idea why that works.

As I’m sure you know, Congress decided to change when daylight saving time is observed this year claiming that it will reduce energy usage. Well, a side effect of that is that the clocks on my two Gentoo servers were off by an hour today.

In both cases I had to emerge sys-libs/timezone-data-2007c. On my MythTV box, that seemed to fix the time almost immediately. On my other server, it still seemed to be an hour off until I restarted the clock service:

europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart * Caching service dependencies * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service * Stopping bitlbeed * Stopping exim * Stopping syslog-ng * Your TIMEZONE in /etc/conf.d/clock is still set to Factory! * Setting system clock using the hardware clock [Local Time] * Starting syslog-ng * Starting bitlbeed * Starting exim

After all the services came back up, my time seemed to be correct.

Honestly, I haven’t looked into why I had to do that… but I figured I’d pass it along in case it was helpful to anyone else. Enjoy.

Brian Benzinger put together a nice roundup of Web 2.0 apps for developers:

I’m talking actual products for project planning, system administration, usability testing, collaborative development, and web services. I decided to make a compilation of products that developers may find useful. There’s a little bit of everything in here - some are still in private beta, but still worth mentioning.

While I don’t have a real use for many (most?) of the sites listed, I always like checking out the latest well-designed sites. Some of those listed are really worth checking out.

What do you hate most about your language? That’s the simple but interesting question Brian asks in a recent post:

Try this question the next time someone tries to push a different programming language on you, or even when you want to hire someone: “What five things do you hate most about language X?”

If they can’t find five things to hate, they don’t know the language well enough to either advocate it or pull in the big dollars using it.

First Titus listed his five, and now Jacob has his list up as well. Both are well worth reading.

Can you name five things you hate about your favorite/pet language?

The slides for the Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites PyCon presentation by David Shoemaker and Jamie Turner of Polimetrix are online.

Some nice press coverage for Python over at eWeek in an article called Python Slithers into Systems. Nothing too exciting.

Nate pointed out a link to the Top 10 Resources for Django-Newbies.

You know, he claims to be all about Ruby and Perl… but I think deep down inside, he wants to code in Python. The sooner he comes to terms with that fact and just admits it, the better off he’ll be. :)

Quoth Titus Brown regarding the new testing-in-python list:

This list will hopefully serve as a forum for discussing Python testing tools, testing approaches useful in Python, Web resources for same, and whatever else people would like to talk about. (”Proposed: The Death Star would not have had a single point of failure had it been written in Python and tested with the Death Star Testing Protocol Tool. Discuss.”)

Heh. You can read more at Grig’s blog.