My sacrifice!

The other day I was driving around Ljubljana with my friend Bostjan when the song below came up on the radio. “Just listen to this,” said Bostjan. And I did. And now I can’t get it out of my head.

The song was a big hit in 1999, somewhat before I was interested in this kind of music, so I do not remember it. Maybe that’s for the better as I can listen to it now and I can understand its meaning and power.

It’s actually amazing how much history is behind this song. You can read all about it in its Wikipedia article. The most amazing thing is that it’s being played on graduation ceremonies on Zagreb’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, as that was the first thing I thought when I heard it - how this would be amazing to hear on my graduation (if I ever graduate).

You can read the original column by Mary Schmich, the lyrics to this song, on the Chicago Tribune’s website. Read it. Again. Remember it. Live by it.

Scorpions - You and I

I lose control because of you babe
I lose control when you look at me like this
there’s something in your eyes that is sayin’ tonight
I’m not a child anymore, life has opened the door
to a new exciting life

I lose control when I’m close to you babe
I lose control don’t look at me like this
there’s something in your eyes, is this love at first sight
like a flower that grows, life just wants you to know
all the secrets of life

It’s all written down in your lifelines
it’s written down inside your heart

You and I just have a dream
to find our love a place
where we can hide away
you and I were just made
to love each other now
forever and a day

I lose control because of you babe
I lose control when you look at me like this
there’s something in your eyes that is sayin’ tonight
I’m so curious for more just like never before
in my innocent life

It’s all written down in your lifelines
it’s written down inside your heart

You and I just have a dream
to find our love a place
where we can hide away
you and I were just made
to love each other now
forever and a day

Time stands still
when days of innocence are falling for the night
I love you girl I always will
I swear I’m there for you till the day I’ll die

You and I just have a dream
to find our love a place
where we can hide away
you and I were just made
to love each other now
forever and a day

I’m sure some of you remember the girl who tried to buy her MacBook Pro by selling the space on the back of the screen for 50$/square inch. A genius idea!

Well, her name is Leah Culver and she is the lead developer behind Kevin Rose’s latest startup Pownce. She’s using Django for Pownce’s backend and I must say, I was quite surprised and impressed to see a girl behind the project of this magnitude. At the same time, when you think about it, being anywhere close to Kevin Rose anyone is bound to get into Web services business.

Anyway, I’ve downloaded the latest Systm episode (thanks to JAnez for pointing it out) and was blown away! Leah is a guest host with Systm’s David Randolph and is helping him “crack” the brand new iPhone, right in front of the Palo Alto Apple Store (latest Diggnation was filmed there too - get it here). Although the iPhone is thought to be “sexy” it is nothing compared with how sexy Leah is!

I mean, she’s every geek’s dream: smart, funny, cute, knows her way around computers and is actually writing code!
I have yet to meet someone like that. Sure, there are more and more girls at FRI every year but how many of them are real coders, can sit down behind a computer and don’t get up until the problem is solved, can go to a party and talk about latest and greatest JavaScript trick and gets all excited about new features in Django? Huh?! How many?!

I rest my case.

I would love to see Cyberpipe girls get more involved into building a community of girls who are interested in computers, either hardware or software. Maybe just organizing meetings, lectures and workshops and getting them to work together. I think this could influence more girls to actually creating something cool instead of just getting through college hardly knowing that there’s anything else than Windows and Java.

More Leah Culver links:
Photos at Flickr
Leah Culver’s Stupid Blog
Leah@Powce

… having one of these little buggers in every room you might need a computer in.

I can imagine so much uses for it… web terminals in Kiberpipa, thin (ltsp) clients all over Kiberpipa, thin (ltsp) clients all around the house, audio input and output everywhere and with USB webcams video too, put a web interface on all of them and you have remotely controlled audio/video input/output device that you can stream video and audio to and from, etc.

I could see this as a very nice progression towards “thin clients @ home” concept. Having to manage only one server, although more powerful and expensive, instead of 4 or 5 computers would greatly reduce my headaches. If everything would run on a terminal server than these things are just about everything you need. Just connect a touchscreen/monitor+keyboard+mouse, boot it over the network and you’re good to go.
There are only two things I would like to see this Jack PC to have:

1. Wireless connectivity (power can be supplied by small power adapter, I don’t mind)
2. Composite video output (TVs and such don’t have VGA/DVI inputs yet)

Wishing for a composite video input or even Firewire… it is a dream but that would be pushing it.

Check out the resellers’ and manufacturers’ websites for details. A little bit pricey but impressive. I wonder… how could I convince them to sponsor Kiberpipa with, lets say, 30 of this little buggers?

There’s a lot of useful, nicely designed, user proven, tested, stable, time saving, free or cheap services, programs, scripts, webapps and things alike in this world. And I could be using any one of them to get the job done well, effortlessly and on time.

And yet, for every useful, nicely designed, stable, free or cheap service, webapp and thing alike, I switch to “analyst/designer/programmer/engineer“-mode. All I can think about is how could I create an application with the same functionality and run it myself. I get so into it that I can see a solution for any specific sub-problem, feature and caveat.

I have a problem with not having total control over things I use and know I could create myself. On the other hand, I break that “personal rule” on daily basis - I have no problem using GMail for my main e-mail, no problem with using Google Calendar for time management, no problem with using Dreamhost for my domain and Django apps hosting, and last but not least using WordPress for this blog. And I use these tools on daily basis, some of them for 5th year and running.

But since I’ve started actively developing different web applications I find myself rejecting to use perfectly good, usable, tested, stable, time saving and free existing services. If I would have to pay for the service, then the whole “master plan” for building the service myself just jumps in front of me, leaving me troubled, knowing that I do not have the time and energy to create it properly, but still refusing to use the existing service.

For example: I’ve recently came to realize that I need a way to make my whole photo library available online with photos in full resolution, EXIF information, tagging, sub-galleries, custom access restriction with guest users & uploaders, with unlimited space and bandwidth restriction.
Great, I thought, I’m sure there’s something out there I could use. Well, finding something I could “agree with” is something totally different. Services like Flickr and Marela have bandwidth restrictions and do not offer “private-only” albums and advanced usage; open-source scripts like Gallery2 and others are something I despise for their extremely bad user experience; html-generating desktop applications are fine when you want a single gallery with 20 photos, but when you have gigabytes of pictures like I do, those end up useless too.

Then one day, Fry, a colleague from Kiberpipa, pointed out a professional-oriented photo hosting service called SmugMug. I’ve checked it and it was all my dreams come true! Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, access restriction, style skins, no ads, everything! Sure, you have to pay a subscription fee of $40 USD/year for Basic, $60 USD/year for PowerUser or $150 USD/year for Professional account, but there it is - hassle free, worry free, free backups, everything now and ready to use. But…

There it comes, the engineering part of my brain, telling me “why should you pay for something you know how to create and maybe do a better job in making it the way you like it?”.
And the whole process of figuring out all the details and stuff is started and cannot be stopped. Sure, I would have to have a hosting for 50GB now and 150GB in a year, but that’s doable. Sure, I would have to keep extra backup of it somewhere if something goes wrong, but I can do that. Sure, it will take me 2 months to build the basic functionality and design the way I want it, but other projects can wait.

That’s all fine and groovy, but I still have 50GB of photos I need online access to, a way to restrict access to, a way to have someone pay for the download or just give someone a glimpse of what I can do. And I need it now! But my cursed engineering mind wouldn’t let me! :(

But then again, I’ve been a programmer for far less time than I’ve been a looser dreamer. That might just be a reason I’m good at being a looser dreamer and can actually do it on time (for a change).

As a user and developer of a range of open source applications and frameworks there are issues I and others have to face on daily basis. Badly designed GUI, bad exception handling, instability, a huge pile of dependencies, bugs that call them selfs features, slow and inaccurate operation, unreadable fonts, huge memory leaks, outdated documentation, etc.

And after 4 years of exclusively using Free and Open Source Software I’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s always something fundamentally wrong with each application I use. And I’ve gotten used to the fact, that there are often some thing one has to do to make a desired application work the way one wants. And that’s OK.

However, I’ve never experienced that the documentation, that I was using as a reference while programming, was to up to date. Until yesterday.

I was working on a web application for a friend and I was using Django, as usual. I was just about to finish writing data models and was trying to validate them. And the validation kept spitting this out:

'module' object has no attribute 'DecimalField'

Each time I’ve looked at the documentation I was increasingly sure I must be loosing my eyesight or something. I was sure the documentation says “DecimalField” and have checked the syntax a dozen times.

I was just about to quit and sleep on it (it was 4:00 in the morning after all) I figured that if there’s likely to be a bug in Django then someone had to experience it before me. I’ve headed to Djago-users Google Group and searched for the “DecimalField”. What came up was a post by my Google Summer of Code mentor Malcolm Tredinnick. Apparently there were some changes in how Django core handles floating point numbers - 24 hours ago!

And as it happens my Django-trunk checkout was 3 days old and did not yet include the already-documented feature of “DecimalField”. This has never happened to me before. Actually the opposite is more often true - the documentation being a few major versions old. “Keeping up with the development” has a whole new meaning for me now.

I just wanted to pay my respects to the devoted developers that make my job so painful on daily basis. :)