Peterbe.com

I've never really needed it but I've been looking for a tool that is super easy to use that quickly looks up the location of an IP address. The super easy tool is called hostip.info and this is what happens when you do a lookup on www.peterbe.com's IP at http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=80.68.212.7 :

Country: UNITED KINGDOM (UK)
City: (Unknown city)

Cool. I'll remember that till next I really need this. I discovered hostip.info by reading this cool blog by Corey Goldberg

I just read the feature article "Command line programs are classes, too!" by Doug Hellmann in the January 2008 issue of Python Magazine about his program CommandLineApp and I've tried it out on one of my old Python programs where I do the opt parsing manually with getopt. The results are beautiful and quick. It's sprinkled with Doug specific magic but I quickly got over that when I saw out easy it was to work with. There are still a few questions of things I didn't manage to work out but that will unfortunately have to wait.

If anything, the worst thing about this library is that it's not part of the standard library so either you have to tell people to sudo easy_install CommandLineApp in the instructions or include it yourself in your packages if you prefer to ship things with a kitchen sink included.

If you want to check it out in action, either subscribe to the magazine (and support the effort) or just download csvcat

I'm not a political editor and I can't confirm the validity of these statistics but if they're at least close to true it's a hell of a scary picture of the injustice in the Israeli/Palestine conflict.

Israel receives $6.8 million per day in aid. I doubt that all of that money goes towards building better schools for Israeli families.

Today I'm celebrating the Chinese New Year with a big dinner in Chinatown in central London. I love the Chinese people, their food, their culture and am perpetually interested in learning more about them and their ways.

But we mustn't forget that this otherwise great country also has a very very dark side which we must never accept or forget: The Persecution of Falun Gong.

Didn't the nazi persecution of jews teach us anything? Are you aware that Falun Gong practitioners are imprisoned, bullied and tortured? Do you know that this oppression is fully sponsored by the government and not rogue individual groups?

I was made aware of this website (warning: graphical content) and this video just a few days ago. I'm fully aware that China is a big country where many "bad" things can happen due to the sheer numerical chances with such large numbers and such many different internal cultures but that's never an excuse for this barbaric behavior.

Think about it. Remember it.

I've installed a lot of Zope instances on my laptop since version 2.7.3 and out of curiosity and desperate need for more hard drive space I thought I'd log rotate them all with the standard Linux logrotate program.

Before doing the log rotate, the total size of all my event.log files came to about 290Mb! After running logrotate (twice of course to go from event.log.1 to event.log.2.gz) the total size become 20Mb. Not a huge significance in the world of gigabyte hard drives but at least something.

I don't shop from Ocado anymore but maybe I should start doing that again. The reason I only tried it once was that I wasn't able to find as many products on their website as I needed plus if you're not a big family it often doesn't make sense to buy too much fresh food in one go.

They're cleverly keeping me in check by sending sporadic emails very rarely about changes to their features and other bits and pieces. I'd call it "spam I don't mind" and I don't get annoyed when I get them because they're so rare. And here's one that arrived the other day which I actually appreciate a lot. Basically, they've gone out of their way to improve their image on the environment to send me another email. It's well phrased, humane, well layed-out and informative.

Keep up the good work guys!

Now I realise why I'm taking a serious look at new "shorthand frameworks" like Django and Grok rather than Twisted, Plone 3 or Zope3: Because of jQuery! The Javascript framework which makes writing normal Javascript a joke.

Ever since I discovered jQuery I haven't looked back. Seeing "manual" Javascript code makes my crinch. By jQuery'ifying a pile of pure Javascript code you can go from 100 lines of code splashed with semi colons and for-loops into 20 human-readable lines. There's lots of magic which I guess you've just got to get over and accept but what's so brilliant is that stepping out of the magic into the wild is so damn easy and near. My only regret is not using jQuery since the day it was released. Now I've been using it for at least a year and can't see any reason for using anything else.

Ruby on Rails looks tempting too with its own nifty magic but I'm just afraid the step into "raw mode" is going to be too big. Like Plone, if you just do what you're told you can do you're getting brilliant results but anything more exceptional than that and you're back to more trouble than if you had done it without a framework.

My personal current dilemma is that I can't decide which on to invest in fully: Django or Grok. Grok seems technically superior but Grok as a community is where Django was a very long time ago. I'm going to try to master them both and some point in the future drop one of them. This is what I did when the Javascript frameworks came out. I eventually gave up on Prototype and Mootools and put all my effort into jQuery instead and I'm glad I did.

If you like Dilbert there are now a bunch of really nice widgets of different sizes that you can put into your Netvibes, MySpace, Facebook or Blogger. It's just a flash widget that shows the latest Dilbert plus an ability to see past ones. It looks very promising to me. I like the fact that these are coloured whereas the same strip on www.dilbert.com is black and white.

I did load one into my Facebook and one into my Netvibes start page but because it's flash and takes several seconds to load it slowed down my Netvibes front page so I'm kind of putting that on hold.

Clearly web services has taken off in the world of network plumbing and the higher level equivalent for non-programmers is widgets. I don't think Youtube was the first to do it but was clearly what proved it to be a working idea in the mainstream.

Ever since I blogged about losing my mobile phone about 25 people have emailed personally (mainly for India) asking me if I can help them find their phone or block it (no, I'm not joking). Clearly they think my personal website gives the impression that I am able to do this. Either that or they're neither reading nor looking at what this site offers. Right, so I just received this:

Hi ,
     I was at yoga yesterday at the lochend community center in edinburgh with  
my friend samantha,my friends mum doreen and her son and 2 cleaners.Before yoga 
i had put my phone next to my friends phone on top of a cupboard.Ater yoga i 
took my phone and put it in my pocket,me and my friend and my friends mum's son 
all went through int oa little room and played hide and seek in the dark.A 
little while later about 20 mins i realized that my phone was not in my pocket 
:(. i only got it for christmas this year :O

Everyone looked high and low but couldn't find it.
What shall i do ?
Can you replace it with a new one?

Email me back on Dancingdizzy13@aol.com

Please hurry !!!! x

So, if anybody has seen a mobile somewhere in the Scotland area that belongs to Dancingdizzy13 then let me know. Perhaps I can replace it.

UPDATE

You'd think by writing this it'd put off people from contacting me about lost mobile phones but this arrived a few seconds ago:

my mobile phone NOKIA N73 was stolen.how to find my mobile phone?please help me
Imeino:353641013194935
Name:Yuvraj.D.Sisodiya
Contact no:09879531575,09725041575
  i am live in india(gujarat)  pls sent me your mobile no.pls quickly your email.

UPDATE 2

It doesn't stop. Today's harvest of stupidity:

Subject: my nokia mobile 2310 thefted

Name:p. vishnu vardhan babu
adress:6-8-9,ravindranagar,nalgonda,a.p,india.
mobile no:9966519774
IMEI NO.:355532010272527
missed date:22/2/08
model:2310 nokia

This time it's an e-commerce site called Comfy-Feet which seems to have been developed with Frontpage 5.0 and that doesn't surprise me at all.

I remember hearing somewhere that turnover on e-commerce and "good design" don't have any relationship. In other words, just because you're making an e-commerce site prettier doesn't mean you'll sell more. Well, I beg to differ that that rule must have some extreme exceptions.

A few quick things you immediately notice:

• Why two large Union Jack flags?
• blue text within black text making you think they're links
• no consistent layout when you drill down into various pages
• title tag doesn't even include the word "Comfy-Feet" just "Buy: Shoe Insoles, ..."
• If you add something to the cart, the click the "Back to store" button they ask you which site you want to go back to.
• I don't think a single page I clicked on was without error message in the validator

Actually, I feel a bit guilty for complaining about this site since it's probably as far from corporate as possible can be. It was one of few decent sites I even found that sells insoles with a decent range. I just hope these guys didn't pay anybody (lots of money) to work on this. If not, I'm sorry. If so, get a better web designer company next time!