http://rants.ekanem.de sometimes i get talkative, sometimes. Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:48:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A very old man once told me he couldn't stomach the disdain kids-these-days showed for the value of monet*. [excerpt] me: i don't understand sir, what do you mean? old man: here you belligerent fool, i 'll give you an example... mutters to self... chews his tobacco stained gums for a while and continues.. old ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2008/06/12/woome-raises-twelve-point-5-million-dollars-in-series-b/ despite our (the cognizant human race and google) best effort, the internet still remains a wild jungle or poorly organized collections of knowledge. it is to this end that I write this - in hopes that someday someone out there might find it useful. You have an iPhone It's pre- 1.1.4 (the ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2008/06/04/upgrading-jailbroken-iphone-to-114/ Due to this ... twitter fail, I can't do this .. And so .... I turn to this outdated medium called blogging. Kind of like the telephone: - used to call mama cos she won't get a twitter account despite my best efforts. Today's title was chosen in deference to @cv who detests the use ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2008/05/23/when-micro-blogging-fails/ London, England. 0700 hrs GMT I had just picked up my MacBook Air and despite having previously maintained an aloof curiousity about it, I could hardly contain my glee - so much so that I 'd bounced out of bed a full hour before to head to the secret pickup point. ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2008/02/17/apple-engineers-omnisciency-bundled-with-macbook-air/ What happens when spammers decide to move to the 36th century (sic) and run their code on ruby on rails? http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10919 http://rants.ekanem.de/2008/01/27/spammers-go-20/ The Problem On OS X, when I open a project, switching focus to another application and returning to TextMate.app causes the pizza wheel to appear and TextMate.app takes 10-20 seconds before it responds. Why On coming back to work last week, I thought it'd be a good idea to update my local database ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2008/01/09/slow-projects-loading-in-textmate/ WooMe hits New York in full force http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/12/20/60/ While I make no assertions as to the veracity behind this rant - I 'd love to draw your attention to the viciousness of said attack. The vehemence pokes out like nipples on a cold december morning. The delivery, passionate, focused and unrelenting. As I read, I could picture the author ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/12/03/when-your-developer-gets-mad/ After Dim sum with my sister on saturday afternoon - we took a stroll down Regent street so I could get replacement earphones for her well worn, tattered one from the Apple Store. As is typical of the UK's flagship apple store, it was teaming with people. It's patrons, eclectic and ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/11/03/high-hopes/ "Come now dad, even a bad book has it's merits", I remember sputtering at 12 to which he retorted "You read voraciously and without discernment. Boy!". While I admit he was right, this smarted a great deal for two reasons, I resented being called "Boy!" and he knew this. I ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/10/21/my-least-favorite-book/ One of my favorite 'tweets' - http://twitter.com/philcrissman/statuses/320937682 "does habitually having 50+ tabs open in Firefox mean I have: ADD, high information consumption, or a severe procrastination disorder...?" -Phil Crissman I have 3 browsers (Safari, Camino and Firefox) always open with multiple wondows and multiple tabs open on each of them. Every time my ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/10/08/attention-deficit/ WHAT? I 'd like to be able to update my favourite tweets(sic) on the go. WHY ? I use twitter primarily on my mobile phone. So when my friends say funny or insightful things, I tend to store it up until my inbox gets really really full and prevents more tweets from arriving. ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/09/28/twitter-wish/ Yes, WooMe is finally go. We officially and successfully launched before the audience and panelists at TechCrunch40 Sept 16-17th, 2007 in San Francisco. We are currently signing up beta users, so head over to the site and leave your email to be sent an invite. http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/09/18/enjoy-the-minute/ Pangea Day, Tell your story. http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/09/14/50/ Dear X, We had lots of people registering with bogus emails simply for the purpose of using our free calls without any intent to ever top up their balance. The point of the free calls is to allow people who would like to try ZooTok to do so and not for scam artists to ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/08/25/examples-of-emails-i-hate-writing/ The django documentation for newforms gives an example of how to extend the forms.Field class here. A snippet is shown below. from django import newforms as forms class MultiEmailField(forms.Field): def clean(self, value): emails = value.split(',') for ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/08/15/the-great-split-debate/ With as little or as much fanfare as would be considered appropriate for the occasion.... I am pleased to announce the launch of a little pet (side, beta) project my friend Yannis and I have spent the last couple of weekends hacking away at. We call it ZooTok - but you ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/08/05/zootok/ Bonsoir, Je sais que c'est avec surprise que vous lisez ce mail. J'ai vraiment besoin de votre assistance dans l'exécution d'une transaction financière de la somme de US$7.500.000. En contrepartie je vous donnerai 17% de la somme totale. Je vous prie de me contacter à mon adresse email pour plus ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/08/05/exotic-spam/ From Django 0.96, the forms have been rewritten - currently called newforms and imported as from django import newforms as forms newforms is a great deal better than the oldforms with all the 'manipulation' and a million other unholy things in it. The problem right now however is that there is very ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/07/21/django-newforms-passwordfield/ I received an email from Dreamhost last night about what they thought were dubious activities on my shell account. I logged in from a UK IP address and a mere minutes later, I logged in from a US IP address. They immediately moved my .ssh folder to dot_ssh_disabled_by_dh and deleted all ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/07/12/i-feel-supported/ Details of our July meet are finally up on upcoming. Apologies for the short notice - we wanted to get a venue so we could have a class rather than our normal lovely pub meets. Details are here, bring friends http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/218452 http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/07/11/xslug-july-meet/ My iBook's hard-drive kept filling up and no amount of df, du magic would tell me what's taking up all this space: 40GB (Yeah, it's 3 years old so back off Mr 100 TB ). Well, today I found out when I kicked open iPhoto to import some pictures from my ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/25/how-i-hate-duplicates/ http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/24/sarcasm-is-this/ I think this is one of the highest, well, perhaps "best expressed" accolade for the work we have been doing on the Web21C SDK. Honestly, you have got to love any project with the tag line ” Do Less: Achieve More”. That’s a project mission statement written by a developer, not ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/17/someone-gets-it/ At a little past 6 am this morning, I uploaded my 1000th picture to flickr. Also in the last 24 hours my account registered it's 5000th view. This would be where I say thanks, fumble for the microphone and promise to continue working hard to inspire the kids and create ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/17/flickr-milestones/ Today, we are in your BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6757361.stm http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/16/hackday-on-the-bbc/ The guys over at DivX are giving away free downloads of DivX Pro for a limited time at their website http://www.divx.com/dff/index.php?lang=en&version=mac. Grab your copy and save yourself $20. Thanks to Tom Morris for finding and twittering this. http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/08/divx-pro-free-download/ I am not entirely certain how it came about but a few minutes after hitting my desk this morning, I found myself on Google searching for "Otu Ekanem". Not content with browsing through the first few results page, I hit the last page and found a blog entry with my ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/08/narkissos/ Neat trick I recently stumbled upon. Python 2.4.3 (#2, Oct 6 2006, 07:52:30) [GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> l = range(10) >>> l [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] >>> print [x for x in l[::-1]] [9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/07/reverse-looping-in-python/ just love their walls. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/06/05/greenwall_pla.html http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/07/these-guys/ But Ch Supt Derek Barnett, Vice President of the Police Superintendents' Association, denied that PACE was being breached. He told Law In Action, "In such circumstances it may not be the wish of a detainee to have a solicitor present. "They may feel uncomfortable discussing other matters in their presence or there ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/06/somones-lost-the-plot/ If you have a spare £5 or £25, http://www.aswarmofangels.com/ is making history by attempting to make a move under the Creative Commons license. Yes that's right - an Open Source movie. Their tagline reads A groundbreaking project to create a £1 million film and give it away to over 1 million ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/06/06/a-swarm-of-angels/ Between conversations about cakePHP, privacy on the web (totally dead), PSPs, XBOX and a myraid other things that geeks talk about, we were able to get a few XSLT related things in there, like XSLT jobs going at the BBC, possible applications using XSLT for Hackday London (June 16th). We ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/30/xslug-may-meet/ There has been a lot of requests on mailing lists, twitter and the blogo-ball place for joost invites. You can now send yourself an invite from here https://joost.com/presents/gigaom-newteevee/ Help spread the word. http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/29/joost-invite/ Two days ago, May 13th marked the 10th year anniversary of this infamous interview of Michael Howard by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. I managed to dig up a link to the video from the BBC's website. Absolute hilarity. "Did you threaten to overrule him?" http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/15/did-you-threaten-to-overrule-him/ UPDATE We have had to change the date from Thursday May 31st to the Tuesday May 29th. All other details remain same. Details of the XSLT usergroup meeting in May are up on upcoming.org http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/190628 Details: Date: May 29th (Thursday) Time: 6:30 pm. Venue: The Anchor pub 34 Park Street London, London SE1 9EF See Map if you ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/12/xslug-may-meetup/ When building webapps, I serve static resources directly from apache for obvious reasons. I do this using apache's mod_rewrite. Code shown below. RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(media/.*)$ - [L] RewriteRule ^(admin_media/.*)$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(dispatch.fcgi) RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi/$1 [L] All static files javascript, css, images live in subdirectories under media/. The issue occurs when I want ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/12/serving-static-pages-from-django/ To skip the first N lines in a file: declare a variable to hold the total number of lines in the file. I use awk to calculate this. wc -l /path/to/file would also work(sic) io2@berlin:~/Desktop$ l=$(awk ' END { print NR }' global.css) Use expr to calculate the difference between the ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/10/skip-first-n-lines-in-a-file/ I hear a lot of people say "I hope I never have to look at another raw XML file again". For some reason, this comment always make me smile. Mostly because while I see what they mean by it, I love working with XML and given the myriad tools available ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/07/in-my-toolbox/ A lot of libraries still depend on the no longer supported PyXML module. ZSI is one of these, so is twisted. Although there are moves within these projects to remove the dependency, this isn't happening as quickly as we 'd want. So here is a link to download pyXML 0.8.4 for ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/05/01/pyxml-for-python-25/ The question is this: "With Scheme would he have done better?" Courtesy of JeffPalm over at JeffPalm.com http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/04/25/so-would-he/ Nic Ferrier and I have been doing a lot of work with XSLT recently. This prompted a discussion on the merits of forming an XSL community and to find out whether other known XSL users in London saw the merits of one, we decided to have a preliminary event (another ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/04/12/london-xsl-meetup/ Back in September, BT previewed it's .NET Web21C SDK, a set of libraries for the Microsoft .NET framework which allows you to do ultra cool things like make phone calls to any number in the world, send text messages (SMS), get someone's location based no cell data to name a ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/03/29/make-it-ring-with-python/ what A service which allows you to inform twitter when you publish a new earth shattering piece of work on your blog, not unlike this one you are reading. how Most blogging tools allow you to add ping servers to your blog. When you write a new blog article, the ping servers are ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/03/24/automatically-twitter-your-blog-postings/ this is a post to test http://ekanem.de/twitter/ping/ humans please ignore! robots, do your thing. http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/03/22/testing-twitter-ping-service/ Disclaimer: This is purely for information purposes. I, the author am not responsible for any 'nefarious' or 'illegal activities' which might be undertaken as a result of the lesson learned in this article, including but not limited to proxy avoidance, firewall circumvention, port forwarding and/or shooting yourself in the foot. Ask ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/03/18/running-ssh-on-multiports/ My flatmate Su directed me to this video this morning. This afternoon I made some http://jyte.com claims about it, here and and twittered about it here http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/03/08/americans-an-opinion/ And in international news, your wordpress blog can now be used as your OpenID URL, more news of ths announcement, made this evening by Mr Willison can be found here http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/03/06/openid/. Increasingly as with many things, I get the distinct feeling the OpenID vs other authentication mechanism battle was fought and ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/03/06/openid-and-wordpress/ This strip embodies all that's great with the Geekdom nay, with the World. Although you would never ordinarily own up to it, you humans have a great and conscious desire to be ranked against your contemporaries. This isn't at all new and predates civilisation as we know it today. You aren't ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/03/05/of-geeks-and-statii/ Take Simon Willison of http://simonwillison.net, get him interested, nay excited about a new technology OpenID and BAM we have this http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7463164786703060643 A short screencast which does a brilliant job of explaining what OpenID is, how it works and what you gain by owning and using one. While he doesn't say why content providers ... http://rants.ekanem.de/2007/02/27/my-bit-for-the-environment/