Halfapenguin.com
halfapenguin

So a new website design and piece of backend software is being written at the moment,

So expect to see new and innovative content soon

I've noticed that its been a while since i've written on here. I haven't entirely appeared out of the woodwork just yet, but i'll be writing more often and putting up a new version of the Halfapenguin software in the next few weeks.

So, i've been a bit lackadaisical about updating this blog, technically, visually and actually in the important bit the content...

Its been so long in fact that the cookie that lets me log in without my password had expired.

So, i'm going to be a bit more talkative about whats on my mind, some of it may be abstract, some may be technical, and some may be just fun...

Also i may have to rewrite part of this interface, it could do with a few usability updates...

So watch this space... or don't, free will is generally approved of, even if you are a republican on this blog.

I've been listening to people claim that 30 mpg and greater is impressive (for reference my 10 year old Chrysler V6 convertible still has an EPA rating of 28-29mpg), the cutting edge of Volkswagen, the Polo Blue Motion has a fuel efficiency of 74 mpg.

There is one caveat to this, it is diesel based, given far more cars in europe run on diesel, which gets more fuel efficiency per gallon of fuel.

If it were to be sold here, current prices put regular gas at around 2 dollars, while diesel is 2.9 dollars. Equivalently this would mean on a cost comparison the equivalent of getting 51 miles per gallon... still very impressive.

However despite it having 99 grams of CO2 per km, while the Prius is ~102 grams/km, its being kept out due to failing to meet fuel efficiency standards. These are the same standards that SUVs are exempt from...

Django 1.0 has now been released, and now my django based blogging software has been updated to meet the changes.

I've also updated the djwhitelist application which i'll get round to releasing very soon, once i've tested it with the latest django openid implementation.

I'm not sure how i feel about the changes in Django 1.0 with the structural changes, it may break my like of having all the details in one place, however design purity would require it to be separate.

The next project will be written with the intent to explore a few of the new features in Django 1.0 including the new file handling and caching facilities. I'll do a write up once i've done some more digging.

I've just noticed that when i post something to the front page, it doesn't automatically update, which is correct behavior, however the sidebar notices there is an entry on this day (even if according to the cache its not live yet.

I'm going to have to tweak some code to neaten this all out.

As of today, in theory if i choose to, i should be able to post from my normal blog to livejournal :)

I'll clean up the code a bit, and post it for download in a few days, should work for any python situation.

Okay it may not be a volcano, but its a pretty dawn, and today was a pretty morning...

Exceedingly shiny, and they came in about a week and a half from England to the states.

It was very easy to do from flickr, however i found it easier to upload a new photoset from my iphoto library to flickr and then pass that directly into moo since they didn't save my basket overnight.

Yes, as of 8 minutes ago, i'm officially over the hill...

Admitedly thats a slight fib, because i'm kinda celebrating my first birthday of the rest of my life, and i wasn't born in 1900. In this day and age twidlumpty six is perfectly respectable and i plan on being annoying, frustrating, and occasionally helpful for many decades and possibly another century to come :)

Happy Gemma Day Everyone :)

(it may not be a hat, it may not even properly balance, but its got a festive penguin on it, its on my head, so thats a good enough reason for me :P )

With a little tweak of my pinging code (courtesy of foozia.com) i can now alert Technorati as to when my blog is updated.

As the more observant ones of you might have noticed, Halfapenguin has been a bad blog recently mostly due to the fact that messages about python errors, are not very interesting blog reading.

After consulting,
my astrologer on these things (apparently its a bad month for new or complex endeavors).
my shaman (my site was tricky to find)
my geek cohorts (you are running with how much ram?)
my mechanic (you have a dying solenoid block)
and the good book (don't panic),

I proceded to do some bug fixing, and as a result, any time you see a picture, its now being brought to you by an lighttp server, and rather than using preforked apache, you are being shown pages by worker apache.

In theory i should now have a more stable platform, and so hopefully we wont be seeing too many more server crashes.

Had a slight problem with the backend database, back and operational now...

Big update for halfapenguin today,

• Beta of the new theme, i'm going to do some more modifications before i consider it complete


• OpenID logging has been implemented


• Commenting has now been enabled


• Comments and openid logins tie into the alpha release of djwhitelist, a module for rating of individual comments to determine if a certain unique identifier (gathered by either openid or conventional)

Thats it for now, but hope to see people actually commenting from now on.

I was just thinking, looking at the iphone, as a piece of technology, aside from apple's attrocious implementation of AT&T, trying to violate the principle in europe of subsidised phones and other attendant problems.

(Currently not an apple fan, i'm eagerly awaiting the gPhone this week).

At what point can i start having copyrightable ideas about iphone like concepts... it all started with the apple patent application for the ability using an iphone interface to be able to rearrange buttons with fingers (aside from being a terrible exploit of the "process" patent), got me thinking.

If a person, say Tio Holtzman, discovers (probably in a drug induced stupor) the "Holtzman Effect" or rather a method of manipulating super strings to produce interesting spacio-temporal effects... and then someone, named Norma Cenva, comes along and takes the work (saves a couple of planets from bad math), and proceeds to produce a Foldspace engine, based on the initial equations and techniques of the first, in our system of patents, who owns the right to the foldspace engine? The kamakaize inventor who stumbled on the equations or the intuiative genius who took a badly implemented invention and built something truly amazing out of it?