It is not very uncommon for me to receive some code requests from friends looking for a little help to “make something easier”. I’m talking about those pesky day to day things that after a while makes you go: “If I could only push a button and have it done!” This week I was chit-chatting with my good friend Evandro Pastor when he mentioned one of these situations that, according to him, makes his existence miserable.

Lately I have found myself spending more and more time playing with Inkscape, the amazing open source vector graphic editor! The main reason being that my oldest daughter has shown interest in drawing and graphic design. Since we only run GNU/Linux at our house, I had to choose something that was open source and available for my distribution. My last attempt at anything remotely close to “art” was way back when in the early 1990s when a friend gave me a copy of Paint Shop Pro.

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!