Im Zuge des diesjährigen Linuxtages würden wir uns gern am Freitag, 30. Mai 2008, 17:00 Uhr mit anderen Django-Benutzern und -Entwicklern treffen und gemeinsam gekühlte Getränke genießen. Treffpunkt ist vor dem Haupteingang.
We’d like to take the opportunity of this year’s Linuxtag to meet on Friday, May 30, 2008
5:00 PM with other Django users and developers to have an informal meetup and some cold beverages. The gathering place is in front of the main entrance.
After visiting this year’s awesome Pycon in Chicago I’m very looking forward to attend another major event of the Python community: Europython 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania. The flight and accommodation is surprisingly inexpensive, so if you are not sure about attending here are some other good reasons.
The call for participation went out in April and promises to bring us all a great conference. If you have a good idea for a talk or a lightning talk, want to be in touch with other developers of your favorite Python software in an open space or just like to hang out with nice people please consider participating. Since Europython is a community conference you decide what will happen!
As you may know EuroPython is divided in a conference and a sprint part. Like other occasions in the past (like Pycon) I think there is a good chance we can hold a Django sprint if enough people join. And I think on the way to Django 1.0 it’s a good time to fix bugs, work on documentation, test edge cases, discuss new features, work on reusable apps and do other fantastic things with Django. We all have seen what the queryset-refactor brought us, so let’s meet to work on the rest of list.
If you are interested please leave a comment here or come to the #django-sprint IRC channel to discuss things further.
UPDATE
Yay, apparently Europython’s registration opened today!
Since version 3.56 Virtualmin Pro is slowly gaining support for Python based web applications because it includes an official install script for Django. This makes my version of a Django install script slightly unnecessary, even though the official version only supports stable releases (0.96.1) and not the SVN trunk (which we all know is quite common in Djangoland). Anyway, I think this is great news.
Other Python based web applications also benefit from the official Django install script of course because there are some helpful features in Virtualmin’s codebase now. Which brings us to:
Virtualmin already does a great job managing Subversion repositories for virtual servers but misses an install scripts for a web application that makes working with these repositories easier later in daily work. Since I really like Trac for its ease of use, powerful features and ubiquity in the developer scene I wrote an install script for it: trac.pl.
Just put it in /etc/webmin/virtual-server/scripts/ and go to the “Install script” section. Keep in mind that you need to create the repositories (important: with “Allow anonymous read access?” set to yes) and give the users the appropriate rights to access the SVN repositories before. The installation looks like the following image and results is this Trac installation: http://jannisleidel.com/trac/.
I used a server running Debian Etch and Virtualmin Pro 3.56 to build that and would love to hear what experience you have with it.
Although I don’t normally write much about my studies at Bauhaus-University Weimar I’d like to show you today one particular interesting product of my university work: pyTUIO.
First some background: Some time ago I attended a workshop on tangible user interfaces at the great Interface Culture Lab Linz that was held by Martin Kaltenbrunner. We learned a lot of theoretical stuff about physical and tangible user interfaces and even had a look on using a very cool Software: reacTIVision.
reacTIVision is a video tracking software for so-called fiducials (see left image), markers that can be attached to any object. While being filmed by a camera, reacTIVision recognizes these markers and determines their position and other relevant data.
This information is then sent as OSC messages to a specific socket. The Music Technology Group for example created the reactable by using reacTIVision and a custom software. Hop over to Youtube if you want to know how it looks like.
Then last year, during the summer semester, I had the pleasure to work with Nicole Weber to develope the software for her Newsmachine, a realtime video mixer, based on reacTIVision, Python and Pygame. This was great fun but still had some bugs, programmatically and logically. Building a live video mixer with Pygame wasn’t the best idea since it seemed to have reached almost its limit of performance. Anyway, it actually led to something better:
A Python library that understands the TUIO protocol.
I abstracted most of the logic from the Newsmachine code and tried to make it very easy to start tracking tangible objects. Consider this working code snippet:
import tuio
tracking = tuio.Tracking()
try:
while 1:
tracking.update()
for obj in tracking.objects():
print obj
except KeyboardInterrupt:
tracking.stop()This is all it takes to start receiving positional data of tangible objects.
I’m also very happy to see it included in Nodebox, which is “a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie.”
I really like the idea of being creative with code, so it was a no-brainer to ask the developers of Nodebox to add the library. Don’t miss the documentation of the TUIO library at the Nodebox site.
While holding two fiducials in front of the camera, the following Python code created in Nodebox the image on the right, for example:
tuio = ximport("tuio")
def setup():
global tracking
tracking = tuio.Tracking()
def draw():
global tracking
tracking.update()
fontsize(10)
for obj in tracking.objects():
x = obj.xpos * WIDTH
y = obj.ypos * HEIGHT
rotate(obj.angle)
rect(x, y, 20, 20)
reset()
text(obj, x, y)
def stop():
global tracking
tracking.stop()
I also would like to encourage you to go to pyTUIO’s Google Code project site to learn more about it and see some other examples.
As a little side project I hacked together a Django and xmpppy based Jabber bot for Pownce. It’s implemented as a reusable Django app, using Django’s signal framework and database backend.
So, without further ado I present: pownce-jabber-bot
Please don’t hesitate to send feature requests, bug reports or become a project member!
See the Google Code project page for installation and setup instructions.
Currently available commands:
help COMMAND [...]message NOTE [RECEIVER]link URL [NOTE] [RECEIVER]register USERNAME PASSWORDunregister PASSWORDSome time ago Hetima published a plugin for TextMate called MissingDrawer which “provides Xcode-like project window interface without drawer.”
I thought this would be a great idea but found it a little incomplete. Thankfully they released the source code under the MIT license which made modifications very easy.
UPDATE: I’ve set up a Google Code project at code.google.com/p/textmate-missingdrawer/ to handle bug reports and feature requests a little better. You are very welcome to join the project and make this plugin even more useful.
UPDATE 2: Updated screenshot for 2008-03-19 version.
UPDATE 3: I fixed some of the bugs in version 2008-06-10, download it at Google Code.
So without further ado, here a current screenshot:
Download, Installation instructions and changelog
Please go to http://code.google.com/p/textmate-missingdrawer/.
Since many in the Django community have asked (me including) for t-shirts I’ve put together a shop at Spreadshirt. The printed logo is crisp and the quality of the shirts is quite ok. No, I don’t make any money with that :)
Feel free to visit the shop at django.spreadshirt.net!
UPDATE: I’ve added some girlie clothes to the shop though the product portfolio of Spreadshirt is biased towards boys. Hm.
UPDATE 2: Due to some strange reasons Spreadshirt runs its US business separately and offers a smaller set of customizable products. The American shop with fewer Django-affine products can be found at django.spreadshirt.com.
To all whom it may concern: Some djangonauts from #django-de would like to meet informally at this year’s 24C3, the Chaos Communication Congress organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Berlin Germany, probably sometime on friday afternoon. Just drop us a line at IRC or leave a comment here. And stay tuned for more.
The setup and administration of a shared-hosting server is of course quite a topic. I don’t want to go into too much detail about that, because it’s beyond the scope of this tutorial. I assume you have a running Virtualmin (Pro) server and the need to enable each user to run Django in the shared environment of your root server.
Despite yesterday’s bitter-sweet post I’m very proud to announce the availability of a new meeting point for all German-speaking Django developers and users: Django-de. We totally owe David Larlet and his pals of Django-fr a barrel of beer since most of Django-de’s backend comes from them. Meeting cool people during the Django sprint last weekend in Dresden and afterwards also speeded things up and got this community thing started.
Our first goal should be the translation of Django’s trunk documentation which becomes 1.0’s docs in the near future, just like django.es and django-fr.org are already doing. If you’d like to participate in the growing Django community, please hop over to Django-de and get in contact with us at the Django-de Google Group or #django-de at Freenode.
PS: I know, writing this post in English seems weird to me, too.
