Blackkettle

I’ve just kicked off a new project, and because I’ve been looking for an excuse for a while, I thought I’d give Django a try.

Python was an interim language which I toyed with a while ago, but I discovered Ruby before I got that comfortable with it. Nevertheless, I did enjoy it, and I am familiar enough with it that the language barrier wasn’t an issue. After a couple of days, it became clear that Django just wasn’t cutting it – I’ve reverted to Rails as a result. There were two main problems I had which made me shift, and I don’t think it’s just me being stuck in my ways.

The first of these was that Django doesn’t have anything like Rails’ migrations. These are an absolute godsend, to the extent that on the past couple of PHP projects I’ve been shanghaied into, I’ve duplicated their functionality as much as possible. They save me so much time and hassle.

The second is the half-hearted nature of Django’s testing framework. Admittedly, I was using 0.95 rather than the development version, but it’s really quite paltry compared to what you get out of the box with Rails. I just couldn’t get comfortable in the same way as I found I did quite quickly when I first started learning Rails.

It’s quite possible that these problems will go away by the time Django hits 1.0, or even that they’re addressed well enough in the development version that I’d be happy with that. I have serious reservations about learning a framework with a development version, though – it’s too easy to stumble on a dev bug and not know if it’s a fault in your own code.

I’ll probably come back to Django at some point – it’s got a lot to recommend it – but for me it’s just not quite there yet.

Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed: The Economics & Emotion of Global Warming

The conversation in the comments on this blog entry is almost a perfect example of what I don’t understand about the current debate about climate change. On the one hand, we have a fairly large body of evidence to state that we may be causing climate change through our actions, and that this climate change may become irreversible.

On the other, we have a counter-argument saying that because it might not be us, we don’t need to worry. Sometimes an economical backup is thrown into this, saying that to do anything would be too damaging to the global/local/whatever economy.

Surely the downside of irreversible climate change is so bad that we can’t possibly take the risk?

Release The Music » Sign our petition

I’m really not one for political canvassing, but this is important. If you’re in the UK, please go and put your name to this petition.

A little background, if you’re not aware. A government report looks set to recommend that copyright on recordings is not extended from the current 50 years to 95 years. This is in direct opposition to the stated position of the major record labels. There’s a little more info here.

I can’t see a rational justification to extension at all, but the music lobby is powerful. By adding it to the petition, your name can be used to counter their argument.

releasethemusic