April 2011 Archives

Recent press articles like indicate that today’s users of smartphones are effectively under possibly real-time surveillance for their whereabouts. This, in my opinion, greaty diminuishes the value of such gadgets, as that is a gross invasion of privacy. It does illustrate, however, that free software projects for mobile devices really need a push, and that the users should insist on rooting, or jailbreaking, their phones to gain the ability to install their own operating system software. Now we “only” need viable operating system software for our phones, but on that front, things look a little dim.

After the downturn in the OpenMoko project, the best bets may be a community-administrated version of Android, or a current version of SHR, if Google should obstruct the creation of a “Community-Android”. But in the longer run, there’ll be no alternative to having fully-open operating systems for mobile phones, like we already have on the desktop or on server. Let’s hope that the developers achieve that before companies manage to finally lock down all devices.

After writing how to Install Plone4 on Debian/Lenny, I thought I’d follow up with an update for Debian Squeeze (please look into the upper right cornder), which is what I’m currently using.

The good news: After having many software packages updated on Squeeze, You basically don’t need much extra software to run Plone4. Install some required packages. using apt-get or aptitude. The following set should get you started, although it will pull in a significant number of dependencies:

# aptitude install python2.6-dev python-virtualenv python-setuptools build-essentials

After that, you simply create your virtualenv, like before:

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages vplone

and populate that:

$ source vplone/bin/activate
(vplone)$ easy_install PIL paste lxml ZopeSkel

Now you create your Plone buildout directory along the lines outlined on plone.org, but you can, of course, substitute plone4_buildout for the plone3_buildout (both should work).

I personally prefer to have a local versions.cfg, too, so I change my buildout.cfg to read eg.

extends = 
    base.cfg
    versions.cfg

and fetch an appropriate versions.cfg from http://dist.plone.org/release/. After that, you should be ready to run your buildout and get the ball rolling, like eg.

(vplone)$ buildout
... lots and lots of output clipped...

Watch out for any error messages which might be flushed out of the terminal window by the dumping of the eggs list.

Yesterday, I went to the Python BarCamp. In the process, I discovered the collaboration tool etherpad, which nicely complements PasteBins (eg. http://pastie.org, http://pastebin.ca/, or http://pastebin.com/). The session protocls have their own etherpad page.

The disscussions covered a broad range of subjects, including how to interface with modules written in C, practical hosting questions, several talks on testing, the small high-performance web server Tornado, and the latest developments in Django, now in version 1.3. Regarding Django, the speaker highlighted a number of new features which were being implemented by using mixin classes. Although some quantitative analysis would be required to really assess this development, I had some strong repercussions about the Zope2 development that eventually caused the initially painful, but highly liberating, Zope3 development.

For everyone interested, the event continues to this evening, so hurry if you haven’t been there yet. You should already be in or near Cologne, though, due to the limited time remaining.