By : Shabda Raaj

(A story about Captcha, and why they do more bad than good. You may also like Parable of the Nowfollow)

Part 1: Captcha and Spammers

In a time not so long ago, and not so far off existed a country called Theweb. It was a well populated place, populated with upstanding citizens who called themselves Webpage, and lived together in harmony.

For long there was no conflict in Theweb, but where happiness resides can evil be the far behind? The evil S.P.Ammers infiltrated Theweb. They were able to bend a Webpage to do their bidding.

Of course the ...

By : Shabda Raaj

James Bennett is the release manager of Django, and a long time contributor. He works on Ellington, a CMS designed for news organizations. His book, Practical Django Projects, is being published by Apress, and is scheduled to hit bookshelves in June 2008. He graciously agreed to be interviewed at the 42topics.com blog. His blog, The B-List, can be found here.

Shabda: Would you tell something about yourself, how did you get started with Django, and what other OSS projects are you involved with?

James: I got into Django fairly soon after the initial public release; I'd been doing ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Malcolm Tredinnick is a core contributor to Django, and was the driving force behind the Queryset-refactor branch of Django, which adds important capabilities such as model inheritance. He has a long association with OSS, and contributed significantly to GNOME and Django. He graciously agreed to be interviewed at 42topics blog. Malcolm's blog, Defying Classification, can be read here.

Shabda: Would you tell a few things about yourself, how did you get involved with OSS and Gnome, and with Django?

Malcolm: Here are some recollections I've written about: 1 and 2 Short version; started using Linux in university as ...

By : piyush

Part 1: Webpage and the Umans

In a time not so long ago, and not so far off existed a country called Theweb. It was a well populated place, popluated with upstanding citizens who called themselves Webpage, and lived together in harmony.

Each Webpage knew some other web pages in Theweb, and though well of them. You could ask a Webpage if they knew another Webpage, and they always replied truthfully.

Next to Theweb existed another country called Realworld. Its citizens, called Umans started to trade with Theweb, and Webpages. When Umans wanted any information, they traded with Webpage which ...

By : Shabda Raaj

In the glorious tradition of the internet, where we generalize from way too little data, I am going to tell you exactly why people start startups. Of course, I have no experience, on why people make this trade of security for adventure, apart from my own, and a few other very early stage startups. So yes, this is a personal story. This is why I, and everyone I know started a startup.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Widely respected for their engineering talent, and amazing hacker culture, Google is never credited for the amazing marketing they do. When we look for the companies which have done a great job at marketing/branding, we think of Guiness, Apple, or Ikea. Today I want to talk about the marketing lessons we can learn from Google.

It is all about the ROI.

For Barcamp Hyderbad, Google let us use its offices. They generally let you use their premises for hacker events. Let us calculate the ROI for Google for allowing this event.

This event was on Saturday, so cost of ...

By : Shabda Raaj

I posted five things I hate about Django, so as a penance, I will of course have to tell the "Five things I love about Django".

The Admin interface rocks:

I have demoed Django to a fair number of People, and when you write a few lines in models.py, and then show the auto generated Admin interface, this is a jaw-dropping moment. Happened with me every time I introduced Django to someone. In Barcamp Hyderabad 05, people could not believe this was so easy, and asked if there was some more code behind this.

Of course Admin is much ...

By : Shabda Raaj

The five things I hate about * meme seems have died down, and memes, should not be allowed to die.

Of course I love Django, and have bet very heavily on it. But we do not know a topic, until we know it warts, so here you go. The listing is in no particular order, so sorry no numbering.

Ajax with Django is hard:

Most of the Django Community has decided that bundling Javascript helpers with a python framework is bad idea. Though I can understand the reasoning, (argued here and rebuttal), that Javascript is so basic that you can not ...

By : Shabda Raaj

I wrote a new tutorial on building a search engine using Appengine, and Yahoo Search API here. This uses pure Appengine API, and not Django, and is a tutorial on how to use Appengine without Django.

By : Shabda Raaj

With launch of Google Appengine, there has never been a better time to start a startup. Let not the lack of a business plan or a pitch hold you back. Go to our web 2.0 startup pitch generator, and get your own, custom, startup pitch. Hurry only 24192 available.

The original source for this was written by Nathan and was in Perl. Of course we needed a web2.0 logo for such a marvelous piece of code. This comes from web2.0 logo generator.

The source for this is available here

By : Shabda Raaj

I have posted two Tutorials for Using Django with Appengine.

• For people who do not know Django
• For people who already know Django see what we build in this tutorial

And here a few good links about the topic.

• James Bennet tells exactly why Appengine and Django are not so good together.
• Ian Bicking has an interesting take on how Appengine can change the economics of Python hosting.
• The guys at Joyent reading my mind on why I or you can not deploy any production site on Appengine. (Hint. you mean I can never move away, without writing half my ...

By : Shabda Raaj

We are hard at work building 42topics.com, and are looking at the best places to deploy this. So when I heard about Appengine, with out of box Django support(gasp!) I was delighted. After using it for a day, and posting a tutorial, I am so disappointed.

Peeves in no particular order.

• Appengine is a very constrained environment, so out goes any chance to run background jobs.
• The ORM-API is very similar to Django, but yet the Django API is much better. modelobj.filter('attr =', value1).filter('attr2 =', value2) or modelobj.filter(attr = value1, attr2 = value2). Putting entity level ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Google launched their EC2 competitor, Appengine yesterday, and all hell broke loose. And in about 24 hours, the 10,000 accounts were used up. Currently it is tied to only working with python, and Django 0.96.1 works out of the box. <!- - more - ->

The Good

• Python powered. Django works out of the box.
• No sysadmining chores.
• Promise of infinite scalability with no configuration. (Ah!)
• Free for now.

The Bad

• Python powered, if you want to use ruby/java/php, sorry you are out of luck.
• Your code is tied to Google. You might be able to reuse most of ...