Archive 5/2007

Today I wanted to use one of Django SVN's new features: A newforms's forum for a model instance that only uses a subset of its fields (For example if a model has the fields a, b and c, you could easily create a form that only handles a and b).

But I found a small problem: You can use such a form, to also write the data back to the database and in the process use the model's data validation and integrity checks. For some reason, only the validation is actually performed, while integrity problems still raise an IntegrityError which you'll have to deal by yourself.

For the last couple of days I've been playing around with Adobe's Lightroom. Probably because of my lack of talent nearly all my photos have only a quite low contrast and dull-looking colors and for thing like that LR seems to be great. With just a few clicks you can improve a photo from being "meh" to "not that bad" Just an example:

When I thought about getting my first MP3-player a few years ago, one of the most important features for me was that it supports Ogg Vorbis, the free as in speech competitor to AAC. I was back then (and still am) a proposer off open source where it makes sense , and an open audio format definitely falls in to this category. I had basically my whole music collection archived in this format so it made total sense for me to also want a portable player that supports this format. But only half a year later, my little travel mate died (can't blame it, though) and I had to think through all this again.

This time I had just bought my first Mac and kind of liked that whole seemless-ness you get when sticking with Apple products - it's probably the same feeling you always get when sticking with just one one brand Another problem was, that it seemed to me like I was the only person out there who liked Ogg Vorbis outside of the science and software development community. There were no stores (at least widely acknowledged as being legel) who sold you music in this format.

The first photowalk in Klagenfurt is now history. And if this was the first chapter, the whole book will be great

At 15:00 o'clock last Saturday 14 pseudo-tourists met at the Heuplatz in Klagenfurt to shoot at everything that would make the local tourism agency want to hire at least some of them ... if they'd known

Remember the days when MTV was actually good? I mean when they showed music videos? Yeah, it's been a looooong time. Now Last.fm is on the verge of offering all those people who miss these good old days an extension to their current music recommendation service:

Last.fm will soon be able to offer its users personalised channels from the largest legal catalogue of music videos on the web. The quality of videos on Last.fm will be significantly higher than that of YouTube, with audio encoded at 128kbps compared to YouTube's 64kbps.

Last.fm aims eventually to have every music video ever made on the site, from the latest hits to underground obscurities to classics from the past.

Press release

Very nice Now I just hope that their service will be a little bit more performant (on the Flash side) than YouTube.

On nearly Web2.0 site you see it. It's not the login field, it's not the advertising. It's the popular links where you get to a site that miraculously shows you the most popular item posted or referred to by the users of this particular site.

Well, one famous exception of this rule is a not completely unknown photo community called Flickr. You might have heard of it. Flickr has something different: They call it "interesting" ... interesting.

To avoid confusion between the different Netscape products, we have made the decision that the next Netscape-branded browser (previously known only as Netscape 9) will be named Netscape Navigator 9. What's old is new again!

blog.netscape.com

From time to time I come across an application I'm not so sure whether I really want it. Recently I had two of these and therefor went with the trial version for now:

1. Omniweb
2. and Cocoatech's Pathfinder