A big part of a person can be glimpsed by others via shared experiences. For many years a typical part of my life has been watchin an episode or two of some TV series while preparing and eating dinner every evening and a couple more for brunch on weekends. And some TV series I actually binge-watched on purpose. So, what I have seen over the years can be interesting for others, also after a few years you start to forget things, so it will also be useful for myself later on.
Systemd discussions are back! Wait, don't run away, it is not as bad as it sounds! Noone is seriosly proposing to change the init system back a few weeks before the freeze. In fact none of the proposals so far would have any effect on jessie release. So, please relax and put the pitchforks down.
Recently the discussions around how to distribute third party applications for "Linux" has become a new topic of the hour and for a good reason - Linux is becoming mainstream outside of free software world. While having each distribution have a perfectly packaged, version-controlled and natively compiled version of each application installable from a per-distribution repository in a simple and fully secured manner is a great solution for popular free software applications, this model is slightly less ideal for less popular apps and for non-free software applications. In these scenarios the developers of the software would want to do the packaging into some form, distribute that to end-users (either directly or trough some other channels, such as app stores) and have just one version that would work on any Linux distribution and keep working for a long while.
It's that time of the year, again, when I lan to go to Debconf, reserve vacation, get visa waiver, book tickets. Let's hope nothing blocks me from attending this time. It has been too long.
For a while now I've been looking for ways to improve my photo workflow - to simplify and speed up the process. Now I've gotten a new toy to help that along - a Panasonic FlashAir SD card with WiFi connectivity. I was pretty sure that build-in workflows of some more automated solutions would not be a perfect fit for me, so I got this card which has a more manual workflow and a reasonable API, so I could write my own.
I've been with Flickr since 2005 now, posting a lot of my photos there, so that other poeple from the events, that I usually take photos of, could enjoy them. But lately I've become annoyed with it. It is very slow to uplaod to and even worse to get photos out of it - there is no large shiny button to Download a set of photos, like I noticed in G+. So I decided to try and copy my photos over. I am not abandoning or deleting my Flickr account yet, but we'll see.
Esmu mazliet paceļojis pa pasauli un esmu redzējis vairākas sistēmas sabiedriskā transporta apmaksai un katru reizi atgriežoties Latvijā un Rīgā mani pārņem tāds mikslis ar sajūtām, kurā ir iespraucies gan optimisms par to, ka mums ir bezkontakta e-talonu sistēma, gan bezcerīgums par to cik tizli tā ir pie mums realizēa salīdzinot ar to kāda ir pasaules labakā prakse un kā tas vispār varētu ideālā izskatīties.
Whatever you do with translations, consider translation management issues. For example, you are developing a multilingual web site. All kinds of labels and buttons and form fields are nicely translatable with trans template tag and ugettext. You have po files that follow your code from dev to stage to production environment.
Now you add a CMS into the mix. And suddenly - you translations are in more than one place, in more than one format and follow different routes to production.
Now imagine that you need to add Chinese language to your entire site. The translator is an off-site contractor. What files would you send to him to translate? How would you generate them? How will you integrate them?
If someone adds or changes a page on production in English: how will your developers see that change? how will you know that an updated translation for Chinese is needed? how will you manage the update of the translation?
If you make a CMS and don't have at least the export_po_file and import_po_file management commands, then you are not really multilingual. It is either that or figuring out your own answer for the above questions.
I have finally found a Django-based CMS that has those - http://pythonhosted.org/django-page-cms/ . Have not really tried it yet, but I am hopeful.
After my server that has hosted my blog for some years had given out its last breath (second motherboard failure), I decited it was time for a change. And not just server change, but also change in the blog engine itself. As I now focus on Python and Django almost exclusively at work, it felt logical to use some kind of Django-based blog or CMS. I tried django-cms and mezzanine and ... Mezzanine is so fast and simple, that I simply stopped looking.