During your day to day conversation with your friends and family members, do you find yourself talking about work or life in general in a negative manner? Do you tell others that something or someone is preventing you from moving ahead and fulfilling your dreams? Do you tend to hang out with people who share your (negative) opinion about work and life? Can you keep a conversation with anyone without eventually dragging your audience into the “painful state” that your life is?

I meant to write about the Django Debug Toolbar before but other things kept getting on the way. Basically, if you work with Django then you’ll appreciate this “configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response and when clicked, display more details about the panel’s content.” [caption id=“attachment_875” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Django Debug Toobar”][/caption] Imagine working on your application and being able to get a list of all of its settings, HTTP headers, display GET/POST/cookie/session variables, templates and context used and their template paths, SQL queries including time to execute and links to EXPLAIN each query, list of signals, their arguments and receivers,… want more?

It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of Radio Tray 0.5.1! I have been following the development of this tiny streaming media player from the very start and even cloned it so that I could play with it on BitBucket. After a while I approached the developer, Carlos Ribeiro, and asked him to take a look and all of the stuff I had done. I also suggested that he starts using Mercurial instead of Subversion to make easier for people to clone the code and submit patches in the near future.

[caption id=“attachment_866” align=“alignleft” width=“225” caption=“Beer Heaven”][/caption] There is a place where the beer flows like wine. Where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. It is true! I have seen it with my own eyes! No, it is not Aspen, CO. It’s a little Russian liquor around the block from where my dad lives, with walls completely covered with… you guessed it, beer! Armed with a plastic basket and the eagerness of a kid turned loose in a candy store, I worked my way through the aisles, jaw dropped to the floor and eyes fixated on the smorgasbord of colored bottles of different shapes and colors, trying to figure out the optimal battle plan.

[caption id=“attachment_860” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“Django 1.0 Website Development”][/caption] Back when I purchased my ebook version of “Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide“by Daniel Arbuckle, I also snagged a copy of “Django 1.0 Website Development" by Ayman Hourieh. Once again, I have to tip my head to the folks at Packt Publishing for their decision of selling ebooks and not password protecting them, giving you complete control over your purchase!!! You can alsocopy text from it, which makes your life really easy when you’re following along and want to copy some of the code being described!

Crayon Test by PauS It was with great anticipation that I headed down to Duke University North Pavillion to listen to Frank Wierzbicki's, lead committer for Jython, presentation on Selenium and Sauce for this month’s TriZPUG meeting. Having used a few other tools to automate web application testing/QA, I felt that it was time to revisit Selenium and see if there was anything new worth checking. I must say that the combination of Selenium and Sauce make up for a killer toolset for anyone who has to deal with supporting a web application across multiple platforms and browsers!

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“500” caption=“Prayers by Xerones”][/caption] When it comes to distributing source code, specially python code, I really wish there was a concise and detailed best practice guide for using distutils! Don’t get me wrong, the documentation is pretty good and covers a lot of ground, but what I really want is a standard “template” if you will, that python developers can take and do some minimal modifications to customize it to their needs.

Work has kept me really busy these days but I still managed to update the following appliances: http://bit.ly/Transifex Transifex (Devel): transifex revision **1453 **(log) http://bit.ly/DjangoDevKit Django Developer Kit (Devel): django 1.2 revision **12842 **(log) mod_wsgi version 3.2 Just update your existing appliances to get these updates and feel free to drop me a line if you need anything or, better yet, want to land a hand. :)

[caption id=“attachment_813” align=“alignleft” width=“243” caption=“Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide”][/caption] It is very rare to find a book that covers testing in the software world. Testing is something that authors will briefly mention on programming books and if you’re lucky you may even find a couple of lines of code related to the subject. So it was with great excitement that I purchased “Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide"by Daniel Arbuckle!. For the longest time I have wanted to start wrapping my code in testing functions so to improve the quality and reliability of what I write here at work.

[caption id=“attachment_845” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“LXDE in the Google Summer of Code”][/caption] In case you missed it, the LXDE project is taking part of this year’s Google Summer of Code! I’m also very excited for the invitation to participate for the first time in the capacity of mentor! "LXDE is an energy saving and extremely fast and performing desktop solution. It works well with computers on the low end of the performance spectrum such as new generation netbooks and other small mobile computers.