The iBook has been brought from the dead thanks to some kind souls, Amedeo and Viorel. And of course there's a stack of work left from the two months hiatus I was forced to take.

Sorry for not responding to the comments and to the emails. I'll get back to the people who wrote me in a couple of days.

Here's some updates:

1. I have finally decided on a thesis subject. Details will be left for the moment, but it will be a web based application built with Drupal (of course), Python, Ruby and Solr / Lucene. Web 2.0 and all the buzzword yadda yadda.
2. I'm learning Ruby because of 1.
3. I'm investigating Solr, Twisted and EventMachine.
4. I've built a Solr php class which works with php 4 as well (the one on the Solr page is php 5 only). I might release it if the people from work allow me.
5. I've resumed work on the Simpy extension. Some first steps were taken into developing a osx dashboard widget. Right now there's latest items and a semi functional search.
6. Lazy registration for Drupal 5 is almost done.
7. I've ported memcached integration module to Drupal 4.7. I'll release it this week unless the other guy who also did this beats me to it. :)

Here's what I've been programming the last two days, with some help from Grivitei Pythonista and with Martin's ideas.

Take a Symbian phone and a bluetooth GPS receiver. Write a Python mobile program to take pictures and also, for each picture, the latitdude, longitude and other stuff, like cell id or some description.

Now, import that into Drupal using (preferabilly) some automated method (I chose to write a script which uses curl to simulate a user logging in the Drupal website and uploading all files in a directory). Activate the google maps module. A little setting here, a little setting there and voila, the mashup is done.

Curios? Here's a very early beta with some pictures taken around Domenii, Universitate and Brancoveanu: http://playground.417.ro/4.7. You'll have to click on a baloon and zoom to see all pictures as at the default zoom level pictures are behind each other due to the fact they were taken around the same place.

There are some bugs, such as the fact that Ion Mincu appears around Domenii due to some weirdness in the gps reading code. Don't mind those, it's a beta! :)

For info, I'm using a Nokia 6630 and a Hollux GPS Receiver.

Later update: Martin is in an upload frenzy. Check out his geotagged pictures here: http://www.notez.ro/map/node.

Azi instalasem Python pe NGage-ul meu, pe pc reuşisem să fac să meargă emulatorul, scripturile rulau, totul bine şi frumos.

Fericit, eram cu un ochi pe documentaţie şi cu altul pe SciTe până când citesc:

Note: Functions Image.open and Image.inspect and Image object methods load, save, resize, and transpose are not available for Series 60 1st Edition.

Cu alte cuvinte pot face o gramadă de chestii dar nu pot încărca o nenorocită de imagine. Deşi API-ul de Series 1 nu e atât de retardat incât să nu ştie să facă asta. Aşa că proiectul pentru facultate nu va putea fi făcut în Python. De ce au implementat funcţiile astea doar pentru Series 2 şi 3, este peste înţelegerea mea. Series 1 nu e chiar din epoca de piatră totuşi. O fi fost leneşi? :)

Îmi rămân ca alternative J2ME, C++ şi OPL. Şi nici una din variante nu-mi surâde prea tare...

Don't use the post url in a form like "/contact" because you will lose the post data. The correct way is "/contact/".

The reason this doesn't work is that when passed "/contact" you get a redirection to "/contact/", and all the post data is lost. For get, it works though.

Via Martin:

Alex and I have been talking a long time (since May of last year) about doing some "cool stuff" for the Romanian web but because of other commitments, the time just seems to have drifted away...but no longer...decisions have to made, action taken or heads will roll...we've chosen a development framework!

The requirements
~ rapid application development both for work and play
~ build stuff based on data structures but assume that the data structure and business logic will change (it always does)
~ if the data or logic changes, rebuild from scratch if you have to
~ put all the clever stuff into modules separate from the logic and the data that you can just plug in to the new data structure...
~ there should exist both documentation and a large community which actually responds both to newbie questions and esoteric or advanced problems
~ depth of knowledge pool in Romania
~ cool ajaxy plugins would be nice but not at the expense of the above

How we evaluated
~ we read blogs and other reviews on the internet and believed everything we saw - well - it's on the web so must be true...
~ we gave extra points to frameworks with cool videos of full enterprise applications being developed in a lunchbreak
~ the number of lines of code is really important (apparently)
~ if we really really thought it was important to actually try the framework to get a feel of its capabilities then obviously the videos/screencasts were not cool enough so it lost points...

The caveats
~ This is not a technical review...because I would sound oh so stupid if I tried... I won't go into CRUD, MVC (Model View Controller) frameworks, scaffolding, agile development or all the other technical terms - there are brighter people than me who have explained it better...
~ this is not an exaustive list
~ most of this is from memory so I have probably confused a couple of the frameworks - my apologies to all concerned - I will fill in later with links to comments/reviews I bookmarked at the time)

Am inceput sa studiez Django. Dupa primele ore petrecute in compania lui, imi place foarte mult.

Voi posta aici diversele mele experiente cu el. Pentru inceput, instalarea sub un Debian si configurarea unei aplicatii.

Pentru cei care mureau de ciuda ca nu pot merge cu telefonul prin oras si sa ruleze un server web pe el (oricare ar fi motivul pentru acest lucru) am o veste buna: baietii de la Nokia Research Center au portat Apache pe Symbian. Impreuna cu mod_python.

Nu-mi imaginez de ce ar vrea cineva sa ruleze apache pe telefonul mobil, dar probabil ca sunt multi de vreme ce Nokia a facut treaba asta. Sau nu?

http://research.nokia.com/research/software/mobile-web-server/index.html