kaleissin

So, yesterday the Relay Museum (at http://dev.relays.aldebaaran.uninett.no/ currently) was ready to be used by others than myself, so I announced it on various conlanger hangouts, including here. But, it had been a very busy week, something was bound to go wrong sooner or later and so it turned out that I had used the wrong gmail-address. I found the working gmail-address, tested that it worked, and went about changing the announcement everywhere (bleh!)...

And today I received an email from gmail that the working account (calsbot) had been disabled. Reenabling it might, if I read their help-pages correctly, be possible in 24 hours... In the meantime I can't read anything that has been sent to that address. And I really shouldn't send anything from that address either so I have quite a few places on the web to fix, and and a new address to find.

This was right out of the blue. I've re-read their terms of service and I can see no reason at all for the account to be disabled. The mind boggles and if this were a comic, I'd have the world's biggest question mark hanging over my head right now. It might have been hacked of course but that's no real worry as I never re-use passwords.

I was planning on setting up my own email-server anyway but still...

This is a post made for testing Y! Pipes.

I've toyed around with Y! Pipes before, wanting to combine several feeds into a single super-feed. However, it's been rather hard to get the super-feed sorted on date. A feed of feeds isn't very useful to me if I can't see what items are new, so it's been on the back-burner for a while. Now, apparently, it supposedly sorts on date, even for mixes of atom-feeds and rss!

This post has tags that will be filtered on in a pipe, I'll update with my conclusions later.

Edit: seems to be working, yay! Check out the conlang-pipe!

I just put my nano-tools for Django up on Google Code.

What does it do? A lot less than some other django-apps I've looked at: it started out as a place to store utility-functions and then grew a module to handle user registration, in a much simpler fashion than django-registration. Then it grew a module for news/blogging, which is simpler than even the example of a blogging-app used in the documentation for Django. I expect it to grow other nano-sized modules in the future.

But: now it's out there, for anyone to play with.

In The Python Property Builtin the property() builtin of Python is demonstrated in Django. An attribute in a model is replaced in various ways by more and more fancy properties. It's a well made article but unfortunately attributes in Django models is not the right place to show off property().

Try replacing an attribute with a property(), then try to order by that property: SomeModel.objects.order_by('property'). I sure have never seen that error-message before.

This is yet another example of leaky abstractions in fact: the attributes in a model are just wrappers for fields in an underlying database. The propertyfied attribute is no longer a wrapper of the field in the database, hence order_by(), which wraps ORDER BY in an SQL-database, have no field to order by, the abstraction leaks, the exception is raised and hopefully your code is in a CMS so that you can quickly get back to what works.

Should it work? I don't think so. It would take a bit of magic, and magic is not pythonic, which is why Django has already been through one, humm, successful witch-hunt.

CALS, the Conlang Atlas of Language Structures, is hereby in open
beta. That means, there are still things that could be better, but
it's good enough to start using.

Go to: http://cals.conlang.org/

Report bugs and ask for enhancements and changes at Bugs and features, not here.

Happy conlanging!