I suppose I should update everyone out there about what I've been up to lately. It seems strange to me that I post article much less frequently now than I did when I was a full-time university student. You'd think I'd have a whole lot more time to blog about whatever I've been working on. I suppose I do indeed have that time, it's just that I usually like to wait until my projects are "ready" for the public before I write about them.

The biggest reason I haven't posted much of anything lately is a small Twitter client I've been working on. Its purpose is to be a simple, out-of-the-way Twitter client that works equally well on Windows, Linux, and OSX. The application is written in Python and wxPython, and it has been coming along quite well. It works great in Linux (in GNOME and KDE at least), but Windows and OSX have issues with windows stealing focus when I don't want them to. I'm still trying to figure it out--any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Chirpy currently does nothing more than check your Twitter accounts for updates periodically. It notifies you of new updates using blinking buttons (which can be configured to not blink). I think the interface is pretty nice and easy to use, but I am its developer so it's only proper that I think that way.

Anyway, that project has been sucking up a lot of my free time. It's been frustrating as I build it in Linux only to find that Windows and OSX both act stupidly when I go to test it. That frustration inspired me to tinker with a different approach to a Twitter client. I began fooling around with it last night, and I think the idea has turned out to be more useful than Chripy is after a month of development!

I'm calling this new project "Tim", which is short for "Twitter IM". This one also periodically checks your Twitter account(s) for updates (of course). However, Tim will send any Twitter updates to any Jabber-enabled instant messenger client that you are signed into. If you're like me, you have Google Talk open most of the day, so you can just have Twitter updates go straight there! You can also post updates to Twitter using your Jabber instant messenger when Tim is running by simply sending a message back!!

The really neat stuff comes in when you start to consider the commands that I've added to Tim tonight. I've made it possible for you to filter out certain hashtags, follow/unfollow users, and specify from which Twitter account to post updates (when you have multiple accounts enabled). I hate all of those #FollowFriday tweets... they drive me crazy. So all I have to do is type ./filter followfriday and no tweet that contains #FollowFriday will be sent to my Jabber client. I love it.

More commands are on the way. Also on the way is a friendly interface for configuring Tim. Getting it up and running the first time is... a little less than pleasant :) Once you have it configured it seems to work pretty well though.

If you're interested in trying it out, just head on over to the project's page (http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/twitter-im/). Windows users can download an installer from the Downloads tab. I plan on putting up a DMG a little later tonight for OSX users. Linux users can download the .tar.gz file and install the normal Python way :) Enjoy!

Update: The DMG for OSX is a little bigger than I thought it would be, so I won't be hosting it on bitbucket. Instead, you can download it from my server.

Don't forget to read the README !!!

I'd like to take this opportunity to officially announce my latest little side project: django-ittybitty! Some of you out there might not find this to be a useful application, but I hope others will enjoy it.

Many of you are familiar with the URL-shortening sites like http://tinyurl.com/, http://is.gd/, http://cli.gs/, and whole slew of others. These sites are all fine and dandy, right? Wrong! What happens when those sites have downtime and potential visitors to your site never get to your site because the URL-shortening site is down? You lose traffic. That's not good, in case you were unsure about it.

That is why I made this application. It allows you to have short URLs for any and every page on your Django site. No more need to rely on 3rd party servers to translate short URLs to real URLs on your site. So long as your pony-powered site is up and running, your visitors will be able to use URLs generated by this application to get anywhere on your site. All you need to do to make this work is download and install the application, add a middleware class to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES, and then use a simple template tag to generate a short URL for any given page.

django-ittybitty will keep track of the number of times a particular "itty bitty URL" has been used to access your site. I suppose some people will find that useful, but it's hardly a true metric for your "most popular" pages.

The algorithm behind this application is very simple, but it can potentially handle around 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 shortened URLs in 64 characters or fewer, neglecting the 'http://www.....' for your site (good luck getting your database to play well with that many records, much less storing them on a server :)).

For more information, please check out the project pages and enjoy:

• http://code.google.com/p/django-ittybitty/
• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-ittybitty

For those who are interested, here are some code samples for how to use django-ittybitty:

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load ittybitty_tags %}

{% block content %}
<a href="{% ittybitty_url %}">Link to this page!</a>
{% endblock %}

or:

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load ittybitty_tags %}

{% block content %}
{% ittybitty_url as ittybitty %}
<a href="{{ ittybitty.get_shortcut }}">Link to this page!</a>
{% endblock %}

or:

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load ittybitty_tags %}

{% block content %}
{% ittybitty_url as ittybitty %}
{% with ittybitty.get_shortcut as short_url %}
<a href="{{ short_url }}">Link to this page!</a>
<a href="{{ short_url }}">Link to this page again!</a>
<a href="{{ short_url }}">Link to this page one more time!</a>
{% endwith %}
{% endblock %}

Enjoy!

I just love the Django community. So many good times. I hope that the rest of you find some form of entertainment in the next part of this article.

This morning I woke up to a humorous post by Eric Walstad on the django-users mailing group. It discussed a story about his 9-year-old daughter who has seen the light with Django. She apparently fully understands what Django is capable of and how amazing it truly is. Here is her version of what Django, embodied as a "critter," can do:

Django is a computer programming critter. He is loyal only to computer programmers and does all their work. He types with the ball on the end of his tail, at the speed of light. He beeps when his work is done and when you take him home, he flies around the house, doing all your chores. He's a helpful little fellow.

That just about sums it all up! Django rocks. We already have Pony Power to get us through the day, but when you put Pony Power and the Django Critter together, this is what you get:

Oh man!! Can you feel it? I sure can. Django is amazing, and anyone who's not using it is missing out.

(disclaimer: the characters in the image above remain the property of their respective owners)

Pretty much anyone who's been doing any Web development in the last few years probably prefers to use Firefox because of the incredibly powerful extensions it offers. Among the extensions I hear most Web developers complain about not having in other browsers are Web Developer and Firebug. Several people feel that they could get by with another browser (such as Google Chrome) if it only had Firebug.

Well, my friends, the trusty folks who built Firebug actually offer their amazing product for other browsers! It goes by the name of "Firebug Lite." I'm not sure exactly how long this has been around, but the earliest date I can find suggests that it was released to the public in July of 2008.

I happened upon this utility while perusing Django Snippets the other day. A member by the username of jfw posted a middleware which injects the Firebug Lite utility into a response when you're not using Firefox and when your site is in debug mode. I've found it to be quite useful. I hope you all do too!!

One of my good friends has just notified me of some great news in Django land: aggregates are upon us! As of revision 9742, Django includes two new operations: annotate() and aggregate().

Ok, ok, so I haven't actually played with Django's new aggregation functionality yet, but I definitely will!! And I'm sure it will rock.

More information:

• http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/4081690312946cd7
• http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/aggregation/

Here are some screenshots of the Windows 7 public beta. I installed it in a VirtualBox virtual machine and allocated 600MB of RAM to it.

The new and improved sloading screen.

The login screen

Logging in....

The desktop.... and a fish!!

Your choices of Microsoft-sponsored security--the ones that will slow down your computer the most!

Oh oh!! It's Internet Explorer 8! Chews up my site like a charm.

Captionless taskbar icons until you hover.

The new Windows Media Player.

It's version 12!

Setting your desktop theme.

Minesweeper wants hardware accelerated graphics.... why??

The all-new Minesweeper.

I won!

Paint. Very perty.

The start menu.

Looking at all programs in the start menu.

Some desktop gadgets and the clock thingy.

Slashdot in IE 8.

Downloading Google Chrome.

What the....? Verifying application requirements??

Ahh... Chrome.

Control Panel--stupid people's version

Control Panel--all options

Administrative tools

Some things never change... but what's up with the 200MB partition??

First UAC popup...

Second UAC popup...

Installing Avast Antivirus.

Windows services.... there are a ton of these as usual.

Pong Service for Wireless USB??

Heh... Preliminary scan results show that malicious or potentially unwanted software might exist...

Oh, nevermind... Windows says we're good now.

Shutting down... took long enough to get a delayed screenshot. Could have probably shot 20 more.

Stage 1 of the sloading screen.

Stage 2 of the sloading screen.

Avast has started its scan.

1% complete... after a few minutes!!

Done! after about 30 minutes...

Third UAC popup...

Trusted publishers? These two screens kept coming up each time I would try to update Avast's antivirus database...

The Resource Monitor. I was doing nothing at the time.

Activating my copy of Winders 7

w00t. I'm legit.

Benchmarking my system.

My VM ranks in at a solid 1.0!

Details, details...

The classic Windows theme and a buffalo butt...

Why all the games?? Why not include something a little more productive??

I figured I should probably post something since I haven't done so yet this year. I've been making several changes to the site lately. Most of them are pretty subtle, but I hope they're useful to you. Updates include

• You can now send an article to some friends by clicking on the "envelope" icon in the top-right corner of each article. It's a pretty simple mechanism.

• You can save any of my articles to your hard drive for later consumption in the form of a PDF. Just click the "save" button in the top right corner of any article, and you will be able to view/save the latest revision of the respective article as a PDF. One thing to note on this, though, is that the program I use to generate the PDFs does not support the line numbers in code blocks. Sorry folks.

  For those of you who are interested, I'm using rst2pdf to generate the PDFs from my reStructuredText-based articles.

• I've removed the calendar from the sidebar and replaced it with my newest useless side project: django-bibliophile. It allows me to share my reading progress with my visitors, because I know you all care that much. I plan on officially releasing the project in the near future.

• Pagination has been implemented in parts of the article archive.

• I've added an "article distribution" chart when looking at a year's blog articles.

• Other random improvements.

I've released yet another absurdly useless application today. With all of my dirty finals lately, I needed something a little more leisurely to think about. I noticed that I put a lot of those funky smiley codes in my articles and whatnot, so I decided to beautify them a little by replacing the codes with emoticon images a la those silly forum sites I used to be crazy about as a kid.

It was nice to have a good 15-minute breather to work on this. Being such a quick application, I'm sure that there's a lot lacking in it. If you want more features or find a problem with it, just give me a holla and I'll try to update things.

Without any further ado, checkout the project pages:

• http://code.google.com/p/django-smileys/
• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-smileys/

B-)

I just had to come up with a blog post about these newly released bits of awesomeness!!

• Slackware 12.2 was announced this morning
• Google has launched two new Labs features for Gmail: a simple task list and the ability to send SMS messages within Gmail itself. w00t

I wish I had more time to report other important releases, but I must study!!!