Creating A Base Debian System

We will create a Qemu machine and install Debian Lenny on it first:

# Download Debian image
wget http://debian.osuosl.org/debian-cdimage/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-504-i386-businesscard.iso

# Create base VM image
qemu-img create -f qcow2 debian.qcow2 2G

Our disk image will have a 2 Gigabyte size limit. You can pick a different size if you need.

Now we need to power on our VM and install Debian:

# Install Debian
qemu -enable-kvm -k tr -cdrom debian-504-i386-businesscard.iso -hda debian.qcow2 -boot d

You don’t need to allocate a large swap disk, 128MB should do just fine for a file/web server. Also I wouldn’t bother creating a seperate partition for /home/.

Next let’s log in as the user (www here) we have created to make final changes:

# logged in as user
dpkg-reconfigure console-data
aptitude install ssh sudo
echo "www ALL=(ALL) ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

At this point you might want to take a backup of debian.qcow2. (Even though we will open it only read-only from now on)

Creating The Actual VM

To save time and space we will use copy-on-write disks and re-use debian.qcow2.

# Create the actual VM's disk
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o backing_file=debian.qcow2 actual.qcow2

Actually we are done. You can log in to your VM using the following command and start installing/configuring/running:

qemu -enable-kvm -k tr -hda actual.qcow2 -net user -net nic \
                                         -redir tcp:5022::22 \
                                         -redir tcp:9080::80

A few things to note about the command above:

• -enable-kvm is meaningful only if you have kvm kernel module installed. It improves performance a great deal, so it’s highly recommended.
• You probably need to change -k tr according to your keyboard’s layout.
• We are setting up two TCP redirections. 22 is for SSH and 80 is for HTTP. You can add more ports if you need.

Finally, I suggest you to prefer SSHing your VM instead of logging in directly:

# SSH into the VM
ssh -p 5022 www@localhost

I hope some of you find this useful.

No related posts.

By community support, I mean free software support provided by the user community. Every successful project has some form of communication; mailing lists, forums, IRC, wikis, etc. And the preferred language is almost always English. Simply because you can reach more people. People who can use your code. Who can test it, file bugs, send patches, etc. It is the logical thing to do. But in the spirit of freedom, I think nobody should be forced to use a certain (natural or programming) language for something they have created.

Real Communities

I think having local communities is a great idea. I don’t know, because we don’t have any in Türkiye². So I am just guessing they should be cultivating and fun at the same time. We do have many local pseudo-communities though. There is some activity, people come and go, some of them stay much longer than the others. But they never progress towards a community. I think this is because they make the fundamental mistake of localizing community support. They translate documentation intended for highly technical people and create new channels that no advanced user will bother to participate. In short, they attempt to sidestep the language barrier.

If want to be a programmer you need to know English. It is not optional. It is not a requirement of being a good programmer. You are at most an excellent script kiddie without proper English skills. Obviously, knowing perfect English doesn’t make you a great programmer instantly. It will increase the resources you can access dramatically, though. And most importantly it will give you the chance to know more about what you don’t know. Stay in your little world to play with your mates who know just as little as you do and you will never improve.

A Foolish Endeavour

Some people, who spend time with these pseudo-communities, know English well enough. They are probably acting with good intentions when they provide support in their native language. But they are actually wasting their time. Having been solved one specific problem doesn’t make the other person a better programmer. On the contrary they are giving local users another reason to avoid solving the real issue. The function of a community should be supporting each member’s continuous improvement. That doesn’t necessarily mean solving their technical problems for them³.

What is wrong with asking questions in a native language if on a local channel or face to face with local people? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It would be silly to speak another language there. But if you really want to improve, you can tap into a greater source of information. It is your choice. Pseudo-communities will only take you so far. Because they are only generating more newbies, and not supporting newbies become experienced users. Do they produce anything but empty talk?

Why should a local community produce anything? What should the product be? I will probably write another post about this soon. But feel free to post your ideas and critics in the comments.

1: Obviously, it only makes sense if your native language is not English.

2: I would very much like to be proven wrong on this one. If you know any, please write a comment and don’t forget to include a website and date of the last meeting.

3: Also note that there is a difference between helping someone solve a problem and solving the problem. Spoonfeeding does more harm than good.

No related posts.

New Example Project

There is a new and improved example project. It is designed to be some sort of documentation at the same time. When you run the example project and visit different pages you will see, for each examle, Python code, template code, text of rendered result and finally the result embedded.

If you have Pygments installed all the code will be nicely highlighted.

Fieldset & FieldsetMixin Improvements

Fieldset definitions are validated now. An exception will be raised if all of your fields are not included exactly once.

Template strings that are used by as_table, as_p and as_ul methods are now class attributes. You can simply override them instead of writing your own as_* method.

FieldsetMixin provides a fieldset_dict attribute. This dictionary has slugified fieldset names as keys and Fieldset instances as values. Your fieldset declarations can still be accessed from fielsets attribute.

Rendering Improvements

There are two rendering related improvements: individual fieldset rendering and renderform template filter.

Fieldset objects have as_table, as_p, as_ul methods just like forms. Errors from hidden fields are handled correctly, but you still need to call non_field_errors() to get the top level errors. Also it is template author’s responsibility to make sure all the fieldsets are rendered.

If as_* methods are not enough for you, with renderform filter you can render your forms or Fieldsets through a custom template. It works like this:

{{ form.fieldset_dict.mytitlerenderform:"myapp/mytitle_fieldset.html" }}

If you call it without an argument formfieldset/form.html template will be used.

Related posts:

1. Working with files in Django – Part 1
2. Working with files in Django – Part 2
3. Working with files in Django – Part 3

It’s good to see CherryPy project is pretty much alive. It’s a web server and a web framework and more. Check it out if you haven’t!

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The final model has some minor artifacts (especially in concave sections) but very nice looking otherwise. I wonder how well it handles complex geometries and deep cavities.

They say, in the project page, there will be a Linux-based demo released in a few months. You can leave your e-mail there if you want to get notified.

Related posts:

1. Morphing Characters In Real-life Footage

I have stumbled upon STATE via sjjh today. Check out the demo.

I wonder what will be possible next? Hopefully not immortality. There are too many cool things to discover before.

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This might sound nice at first. If you are pirating music, movies or whatever, and feel guilty, this way you can say I'm paying my tax, therefore my conscience is clear. Pirating is suddenly legit, content is finally free as in free speech. Moreover there is a good sum of money in the Piracy Tax pool now. Yay! We saved the music industry (or content producers in general)! No, you didn’t. You just eased your conscience.

Let’s get real. Suppose you passed the bill of Piracy Tax at the parliament and a good number of people are paying this tax. That’s just one part of the equation. How will this money be distributed? What will determine the relative share between artists? Do we need distributors anymore? Do we even need producers anymore? And most importantly when you cap the total amount of earnings, will this have any negative effects on creativity? And finally which problem exactly is this Piracy Tax solving?

In the comments of Serdar Kuzuloğlu’s post, several people stated that it should be trivial to gather reliable statistics on downloads. This is not true at all. Even if there was a single distributor (I hope we agree this is undesirable) there will be statistical errors. No system is 100% reliable. But HTTP, i.e. web sites are especially not suitable for transactional operations. Aside from this fact, there will likely be a dozen of services. Are you just planning on adding the figures to calculate the final share? How about the differences in these services’ reach? Don’t you think simply adding the figures makes the system easy to game?

Something everybody seems to forget is there will be always piracy a.k.a P2P¹. It would take you to the wrong conclusion to assume everybody is the same. Not everybody is using Windows, not everybody has Flash, there are even people who doesn’t have a graphical browser. Do you even know what a text browser is?² It is not wise to ignore these people because they are the minority. These people are Internet residents, like it or not you are just tourists. They have practically invented the Internet. So please don’t make the mistake of ignoring the possible effects of technologies like tor and the culture of FLOSS.

In any case, statistical errors are unavoidable. I would suggest 3% is an acceptable error margin. Then what happens to the independent artist or the small production company that should have 0.25% and ends up having 0.025% share? Is this fair now? The pirate tax pool would likely benefit the big players and crush the independents. Big players have already been employing portfolio management strategies, independents just can’t do that. It is naive to think Piracy Tax could sweep so called low-quality productions away and elevate finer artists. It will be exactly the opposite.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. (George Bernard Shaw)

Piracy Tax will severe the already severed bonds between the artists (the producers of art) and us (the consumers) even more. When we buy a DVD or CD it is not just bread on the tables. It is also sending the message “I like what you do. Here, I even choose to give my hard earned money willingly to support your art”. Emphasis on willingly and supporting art. It’s not a passive action like listening to the radio. You (consumer) take a conscious step. Your contributions are small materially, but it should mean something to the artist even at the individual level. We need art. It is not just listening to music or whatever. But we need art to compete in the neverending race of civilization. No art, no culture. No culture, no civilization. Lack of civilization is inevitable slavery. So, we need to learn to support our artists willingly and directly. Piracy Tax is an obstacle for this social goal.

What about opting-out? If I opted out will I still be able to use legal download services? If I am not allowed to opt out but I continue pirating³ your download statistics will be further skewed. If this is being done to free the content then why do we have to give up our freedom⁴. If this is being done to increase the profits of content industry… Well, then it makes sense.

If the free market is a bad idea, why don’t we shift the whole economy to a controlled market? With pirate tax in effect, content industry’s income is not only centralized but falls under government control. The government controls the art. I don’t like that idea. Art should be free. In short I don’t think Piracy Tax is the way to go.

What Is My Proposal Then?

I have been thinking hard about Pirate Party and the problem of piracy. The question is not what should we do about piracy? Unless you want to treat the symptoms. The question is how will content industry adapt to the information age? We adapted to information age quite well, didn’t we? Why can’t they do the same? I don’t want to believe they are so stupid that they don’t really know how. As far as I can understand they don’t want to change. Because change has a price. And they don’t want to pay. They want us to pay the price for them stagnating like that. Let’s stop beating around the bush and see it as it is.

Smart artists are already making the move. They let you download their movies and songs for free, and find other channels of monetization. Lots of concerts for example. Not necessarily huge stadium concerts. If you take all those middlemen out of the equation you don’t have to be all that popular. All in all, it is much better than continuously whine about piracy.

My proposal is not to engage ourselves with Piracy Tax⁵. There has to be a better solution. At least a solution that doesn’t necessarily make big players more powerful than they are. Let’s support far-sighted artists who take the steps to adapt new conditions for now. And continue to discuss alternatives.

1: I know piracy doesn’t equal to P2P. It is possible to share content legally via P2P networks. Also P2P is not the only channel you can distribute pirate content. I just think they are interchangeable in the context of this post.

2: It does matter. Let’s not go to the extreme. It would be a waste of time and energy for me to even subscribe to a web based service. Torrents are much easier and flexible for me. And I have a graphical browser with Flash capability.

3: See 2 above.

4: Money can buy freedom, any objections?

5: I would like to remind those who would suggest Piracy Tax as a temporary solution; laws might end up being in effect for too long.

Related posts:

1. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
2. Working with files in Django – Part 1
3. Working with files in Django – Part 2

An Example

After you copy renderformplain folder somewhere within your PYTHONPATH, add "renderformplain" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting to be able to run the example.

Let’s say you have a model File:

   1 class File(models.Model):
   2     name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
   3     path = models.CharField(max_length=250)
   4     size = models.IntegerField()
   5     last_modified = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.datetime.now)
   6     created = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.datetime.now)
   7     permissions = models.IntegerField()

And a form FileForm:

   1 class FileForm(forms.ModelForm):
   2     class Meta:
   3         model = File

Now assume you are using django.contrib.formtools.preview.FormPreview to review entered data before saving. In your formtools/preview.html template, instead of rendering the form as an HTML form, you can render it in plain text like this:

{% load renderformplain_tags %}

{% plainform form as plain_form %}

<h1>Preview your submission</h1>
{{ plain_form.as_table }}

<form action="" method="post">
  {{ form.as_hidden }}
  <input type="hidden" name="{{ stage_field }}" value="2" />
  <input type="hidden" name="{{ hash_field }}" value="{{ hash_value }}" />
  <p><input type="submit" value="Submit" /></p>
</form>

This will render the plain_form just like a normal form, except all fields will be replaced with read-only plain text.

Anyway. Try renderformplain and tell me what you think.

1: I will tag releases. Check out the repository for tags.

Related posts:

1. Working with files in Django – Part 1
2. Working with files in Django – Part 2
3. Working with files in Django – Part 3

Psychic support is what people are looking for when they expect others to just know their development environment and their code. If one doesn’t supply enough information on the problem, no matter how good a hacker the person on the other end of the conversation, it becomes a silly guessing game. So the following list is actually about avoiding psychic support and similar situations.

What Not To Ask

• Don’t ask to ask! Just ask your question. Don’t ever say “I have a question about X, can anybody help me?“. Even worse is “Hello! Is anyone there?“.
• Don’t ask for competency. It’s unkind to try testing people whether they are worthy of your question or not. This’ll only decrease your chances to get an answer.
• Don’t ask what’s already documented. This is the most frequent and the most disturbing problem in IRC support channels. Django is exceptionally well documented. Nobody wants to parrot docs just because you’re too lazy to read them.

Psychic Support? You’ll Have To Wait… Long.

• Ideally you should supply related code with your question. But it’s understandable for beginners to not know what to paste. Even so it becomes annoying when the person asking the question has a you-dont-need-to-know-that attitude. If you know so much, why are you asking here?
• Don’t paste in the channel. It’s unreadable, I can’t copy & paste it for testing and worst of all you’re flooding the channel. If it’s more than 1 (in writing one) line, use a pasting service.
• When pasting tracebacks always use the plaintext version. Don’t insist it’s plaintext when you have selected it with mouse from an HTML page and copied. Instead use Switch to copy-and-paste view link right next to Traceback header. Django is civilized.

Hit-N-Run

• This is an unsolved mystery. Enter the chat room, send your question, leave as soon as you see it on screen… If you don’t get an answer immediately, don’t get discouraged. If there’s no activity, your message will be noticed when others check their clients¹. If there’s activity and your message gets scrolled, you can repeat your question in reasonable intervals². If you don’t have time to wait for and work through answers, you should postpone your question. Better not waste somebody else’s time for nothing.
• IRC support is for practical problems. So if you are asking a question; please be kind enough to try out the proposed solutions and tell us about the results. Asking the same question again and again, even tough somebody has suggested a solution, won’t help you much. Instead try building on the topic, interact with whoever has joined the conversation and give feedback for their answers.

A Winning Effort Begins With Preparation

• Django runs on Python. Python is a dynamic language. Just fire up the Django shell³ and try out different possibilities. Make this a habit and you’ll see it is much more effective to run a couple of commands than asking someone else to guess their result for you.
• Again, read the relevant docs before you ask. Don’t expect the title of a documentation page to be your exact question. Just read whatever you can find on subject. If people see that you’ve done your homework they will be willing to give you more attention.
• Google your question. If your question is generic enough there is probably a blog post about it somewhere. StackOverflow has quite an impressive repertoire of Django related questions as well. In fact I suggest you to use SO for your non-trivial questions.

1: Some of us have work to do you know.

2: Reasonable depends on the number of messages and the number of joins/leaves. In my opinion you should wait 5 minutes at least.

3: Use manage.py shell command to enter the Django shell.

Related posts:

1. My PyCon APAC 2011 Presentation: Optimizing Media Performance with django_compressor
2. Working with files in Django – Part 1
3. Working with files in Django – Part 2

from django import forms
from formfieldset.forms import FieldsetMixin


class MyForm(forms.Form, FieldsetMixin):
    # Fields etc...

    fieldsets = ((u'Fieldset Title',
                  {'fields': ('foo', 'bar', 'baz'),
                   'description': u'This is the description for fieldset.'}),
                 (None,
                  {'fields': ('some_field',),
                   'description': u'This fieldset has no title.'}),
                 (u'Fieldset With No Description',
                  {'fields': ('some_other_field',)}))

Then you can render your form with fieldset enabled methods:

<form method="POST" action=""><table>{{ form.as_fieldset_table }}</table></form>

It is far from complete¹, but feel free to download and play with it.

1: Not released yet.

Related posts:

1. Working with files in Django – Part 1
2. Working with files in Django – Part 2
3. Working with files in Django – Part 3