Actually, we’ve been using Django a lot on our company to develop certain web products (mainly those that require an extensive admin interface, that Django provides right there on the spot). Overall, we’re platform agnostic but we try to focus on some key technologies to create expertise and advanced know-how.

Cal Henderson, Flickr’s author, went to Googleplex in Mountainview during the Djangocon to show his side of the story — why he “hates” Django and frameworks alike.

Most of the presentation is mostly making fun of it, not exactly complaining. For instance, he says that in real languages (like in Perl) you can format your code text as an ‘S’ while on Python you can’t as it needs the tabs to define scopes. Another funny one is him pointing out that Python developers usually use soft spaces rather than tabs which wastes a lot of disk space.

Overall, the presentation is just a chill out ending for the day but there’s a couple of things that are actually true and need to be pointed out.

The tipping point of a framework — when it begins to deter productivity — is when you need to cross its well defined bounds that speed up the execution of common tasks. This is where frameworks (Rails, Django and many others) can learn a lot. They’re quite modular already but they should be way more. The idea is to easily replace bottlenecks by code that addresses the specific needs and nothing more.

This problem mostly concerns medium-sized applications. Small size applications are fine — put a couple of application servers and it runs fine. Large size applications have tons of layers (Squid, memcached, MySQL clusters, etc..) before actually touching the application server. Medium sized applications, on the other hand, don’t benefit from the hardware resources available to large applications and are way more demanding than their counterpart small-sized ones. Handling 100/150 requests per second without growing horizontally might become a tough task, even worse if you can’t rely on caching mechanisms due to application specific requirements.

Making (white-box) frameworks more modular, ie, layering the architecture in such a way that it’s easy to define the entry points and simply replace them, might be one step in the right direction.

P.S. - Shredding inefficient pieces like REXML is definitely another step in the right direction.
P.P.S - Nothing against REXML’s author, he has contributed way more to Ruby than I did. But it’s darn slow, despite not being its fault — parsing XML using an interpreted language such as Ruby is by nature not that efficient.

Richard Stallman is the creator of the Free Software philosophy. Whether you like him or not, he has contributed to significant advances in the IT industry in general and to the development of important Free Software in particular (most notably, GNU tools and Emacs).

He’s a strange mix of a geek and a nerd. I’ve seen him live and I can assure that. Whether you like the person or not, the persona has done significant things.

But sometimes radicalism throws reason away. In his quest to destroy all the living proprietary software (in the same way that religious people fight the evil) he’s become the enemy of himself and of his very own ideologies. Every time he speaks, a kitty dies and someone around the globe stops using Free Software. No, really.

The last one comes in regard to the so-called cloud computing. Generally speaking, we’re talking about web apps like GMail, YouTube, Flickr and others. According to him, “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign […]”.

I use GMail. I guess that makes me stupid. Moreover, I’m a pawn at the hands of a huge marketing campaign. Perhaps I didn’t make such decision while at my full capacity.

Let me tell you something Mr Stallman. First off, nowadays you do more harm to the Free Software community than you do any good at all. Relax, get your retirement ready and get a ticket straight to Miami Beach. You’re gonna love it and it’s damn time. Secondly, please respect the freedom of choice. The freedom to use whatever we want to use. Also, the freedom to turn software into a usable tool and not an object of worship. Appreciated.

Bottom line: Free software doesn’t need proprietary software to fail so it can thrive. Both can coexist.

If you’re developing something from scratch you’d rather use libxml, Gnome’s XML C parser. But if you’re using a third-party software that uses REXML you’re stuck to it. Well, kind of.

rexml-dropin is a newborn project that wraps around REXML but uses libxml instead. It’s still under development but it’s quite promising. It’s been successfully used with xmpp4r, a Ruby XMPP client.

Rails Footnotes is a plugin that adds some useful information to the footer of a page while in development mode. It lets you take a look at the SQL queries that were performed and also explain or trace them; it gives you access to the session and cookie variables; the request context and some other stuff.

If you happen to also use Mac OS X/TextMate you’re also entitled to an extra goodie: direct links for opening the view, the controller and the layout in TextMate.

[bash]
alias scpr="rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh"
[/bash]

Now, restart or initiate another shell session. Instead of using scp just use the alias scpr that makes use of rsync to resume your transfer. The cream on top of the cake is the global progress bar!

If you're using the i18n/l13n Globalize plugin for your Ruby on Rails projects and you need to escape something from being translated in the middle of a sentence, you do not need to split it and then concatenate it as follows:

You can simply use Ruby's sugar candy to the string format function.

Just make sure your translators don't mess up the %s placeholder.

Usually, they resort to replicating a page of a bank, PayPal, whatever, and put it on a different URL. People are lead to believe that they're actually logging in to the target website and they capture your authentication information.

This can be easily overcome with a little bit of precaution — make sure you're buying the milk from the milkman, i.e., reassure you're logging on the right website.

The newest approach, that I've just witnessed through the means of an email inbox assault, goes a little bit further in order to outcome this smartness one might use to unveil the scam. They exploit the original website to their benefit.

On this case, I received an email proclaiming to be from Paypal that said my account had limited access and I had to login. I wondered about it being a scam attempt but, nonetheless, checked the URL. Guess what? It started with https://www.paypal.com. It was even on an SSL encrypted HTTP channel. What could it be?

Now, if you've used Paypal before, you'd notice that many redirects occur between sign in and landing pages and also from external websites. They could have taken two approaches to pass the landing page around: by the means of a cookie or passing in directly on the URI. They took the second option. What happened was that the attacker simply replaced the redirect parameter with his own target website, misleading people into believing that everything should be fine.

The URL looks like this (if you haven't read the whole post, please realize this URL is a phishing attempt! Be careful).

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ssr&return=http%3A%2F%2Fpaypal-us.6s.pl/?cgi-bin.webscrcmd=_login-run.webscrcmd=_account-run.CaseIDNumberPP-046-631-789

As one can see, Paypal will freely redirect to the attacker's website.

Be careful.

Update - Phishing, of course. Typo fixed.

iPhone 3G with GPS starting at $199. Unbeatable.

Mine will be ordered whenever it's available at the Apple stores.

It's fast. Damn fast. It's slick. Responsive. It has a nice theme. And tons of useful plugins that I can't live without like Firebug and WebDeveloper.

Firefox has always been my browser of choice on Windows and Linux and holds a very important place in what regards to web development on Mac OS X. But now I'm considering making it my default browser and displacing Safari. We'll see how things turn out.

Bottom line: a competitive market is wonderful.

After having used it for over a week, I must conclude that OpenOffice.org 3 beta is quite an achievement. It's faster, it now sports an Aqua interface (lovely for us, Mac OS X users), it's simple yet beautiful. It's more solid than ever before and comes with a full range of functionalities that the common user will certainly put to good use.

It still doesn't grasp to the extent of Microsoft Office's plethora of functionality, but it's definitely more than enough for the average Joe. Don't expect complex financial plugins to be available, but you're welcome to start programming your own. It's still a remarkable achievement in the Free Software world.

Congratulations to Sun and to the OpenOffice.org team.