So, Django Con Europe just ended a couple of days ago and all the party people have been blowing up the Planet Django feed that I subscribe to and I wanted to make a list of the talks I want to watch when they hit the 3 dubs.

• From static to real-time: one app’s journey into the modern age - Interested because, when people at a Django conference have a talk about about node.js stealing some of Django’s thunder, and you don’t know much about node.js, it’s basically the most relevant way to learn about it.
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Python Packaging - I can’t claim to worry about how I package my Django applications, but I am almost sure that I can find some ways of making life easier on myself.
• Django and PyPy: Performant is a word
• 3 CMSes in 45 minutes
• One size fits all: responsive web design with Django, Compass, and the Less Framework - Interesting to me because I wrote different stylesheets for different devices once and never did it again because it was complicated.
• Continuous integration and continuous deployment
• unjoinify: a module to tame the SQL beast - Keep my hands off of even more sql?! Sure!
• Celery - An asynchronous task queue (not only) for Django
• Reusable Apps using “Eight Spaces” - One of the big themes of Django con Portland 2010 was problems with apps not being purely pluggable and almost always taking some additional customization to get them working in your stack.
• Core developers panel - Last year it seemed that most of the questions were related to different talks and kind of served as a medium for an official response, plus, I am interested in seeing what kind of input some of the new core devs have to give.
• The Impact of Django
• An iPhone-Python love affair: Building APIs for mobile
• The Best and Worst of Django Core
• Django on Rails: Getting Resourceful
• Deploying, At An Unusual Scale
• Taming runtime dynamic models in Django
• Scalability panel
• Whither Django?

And of course, if your Django tastes are different then mine, there is a full list up at http://djangocon.eu/schedule/

I’ve been messing around with Erlang after picking up Erlang and OTP in Action(affiliate code) and hopefully I will be writing massively scalable applications soon because Erlang makes it so easy. Even though I’m not quite there, here is what I got so far:

-module(all_work).  
-export([convert_temp/1]).  
convert_temp({T,c}) ->  
{T * 9/5 + 32,f};  
convert_temp({T,f}) ->  
{(T - 32)* 5/9,c}.  

A simple program to convert C to F.

24> c(all_work).  
{ok,all_work}  
25> all_work:convert_temp({73,f}).  
{22.77777777777778,c}  
26> all_work:convert_temp(all_work:convert_temp({73,f})).  

What is Next? Who knows.

572 days were accounted for in the output of uptimed but I had this same Linode allocated to me since oct 20th 2008, thats about 30 months that it has been up and run a variety of distros starting with Gentoo, then CentOS 5, Debian, and now I am switching to a new linode running Ubuntu server LTE 10.04.

`
root@steni / $uprecords

Uptime | System Boot up

----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------  
1 236 days, 23:10:44 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Tue Oct 27 18:48:32 2009  
2 220 days, 09:51:07 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Mon Jun 21 19:00:39 2010  
3 109 days, 15:10:44 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Fri Jul 10 00:29:42 2009  
-> 4 11 days, 05:28:18 | Linux 2.6.18.8-x86_64-li Fri Jan 28 09:14:53 2011  
----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------  
1up in 98 days, 09:42:27 | at Wed May 18 01:28:29 2011  
no1 in 225 days, 17:42:27 | at Thu Sep 22 09:28:29 2011`

The justification for deploying to another server instead of keeping this one came from the fact that I wanted to switch to a 32bit OS and also wanted to run Nginx as a front end proxy for the sites I was hosting to get better performance from its caching module.

I saw a article on Dvorak Keyboards today and i had to give them a try.
(btw, this article is also being typed on a querty keyboard, it wasn’t that easy to pick up after all.)

I knew about Dvoark for some time but I have never bothered to try it before, but I was sold when I read that when using Dvorak, 70% of the keystrokes were on the home row as opposed to 32% with qwerty. Also, to improve the speed that people type, the vowels are on one side of the keyboard so that you can alternated from right and left hands when you type words with alternating vowels and constants.

Getting your SyncML phone working with Ubuntu just got a lot harder in their newest release, but fortunately it is still possible with a bit of work. In the latest release, they moved from libsoup 2.2 to 2.4 and didn’t leave the old version in the repositories, so to get it working, you need to download the .deb packages for karmic and install them side by side.

• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/libsoup2.2-8
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/libsyncml0
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/opensync-plugin-syncml

When installing libsyncml0, i had to install libwbxml2-0 which can be gotten from aptitude. Also there are a couple of other programs you should also get.