As you can read, I’ve been traveling around quite a bit lately. This means I haven’t been checking the comments on my blog, which means quite a bit of spam has been entered. I am blocking the spam via akismet, however, it is still recorded in the database. Being somebody who hates cluttered desktops, you can imagine how I feel about having a lot (447) of spam. Well, since akismet flips the is_public switch True for good comments and False for bad comments, that makes a really easy query in mysql.

I’m in Tibet right now, so will keep this somewhat brief. For the next few hours I’ll be sitting in this dingy internet cafe in Lhasa updating my blog with my travels. I happened to look down and on the monitor it says “works with windows vista”. I find this quite humorous, of course it is going to work with vista, it is a normal generic monitor. Anyhow, I guess there is a reason for marketing. Back to writing our travels.

One of the biggest things I regret is not utilizing Xen more. I’ve finally been admitted to Amazon’s EC2 Limited Beta, just two days before I leave, so not enough time to actually do anything fun. However, I think Xen is an ideal infrastructure aid for SMEs in particular. The cost of technology is continuing to decrease, which means bigger servers cost less. This is great for the small/branch office. Let me explain.

This will be my last post from Taiwan, and I’m placing it in my tech section. Shortly I will be flying to Hong Kong, and then traveling into China. I’m not bringing my laptop with me. I’m always a little wary of using public computers, especially in many of the poorly run internet cafes. Often the logged in user is the administrator, and we all know the computers are obviously crawling with worms and keyloggers. What can I do?

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of meeting up with some of the OpenMoko guys. You’ve seen me write a little bit about this project, but meeting them and actually getting to play with a device was quite enlightening. Most foreigners in Taipei take taxis, but not I. I already had an idea how to go to FIC headquarters, yet it was – rough. I jumped on the right bus, going the right direction, yet didn’t really know where to get off. In my broken Chinese I started talking to a group of high school kids, who somewhat pointed me in the right direction. At one point we were coming up to a light and a lady just said: “get off, go down that road.” I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus. …

You can easily see that I am a big Linux fan, I’ve mentioned this over and over. I’ve also mentioned that I’m finishing up my MCSE, which started as a dare with my buddy, Ian. In the process of studying for my MCSE I’ve developed a certain amount of respect for Windows Server 2003, yet I’ll comment more on this later. What I really wanted to write two paragraphs about was an interesting discovery I made today. I happened to stumble over to Microsoft’s hardware site, and noticed in my little Server Spy monitor that it was running IIS/7 – the first time I have seen this anywhere. Upon further investigation I perused their GoLive program, which details several ways to test …

The buzz of Computex is finally wearing off, so I’ll finally scribe my account of the event. YS was kind enough to go with me, we actually called it a date. The scene was quite similar to the trade shows we saw last year, however there seemed to be fewer people. This might be because we went on the final day, although we suspect there weren’t that many people because there aren’t “sweet” deals to be had. Regardless, there were several main “halls” filled full of stuff. The first three (two were in one building) weren’t particularly interesting. I mean, there were some cool displays and lots of technology, but nothing that left me thinking “oh, that’s …

Today on Linux.com, Liferea was mentioned I find this particularly because I’ve been using Liferea for quite a few months, and haven’t been able to find anything that better suits my needs. It sits quietly in the corner until a new RSS is available, and slightly changes color. Plus, it integrates wonderfully into GNOME. Well, the Linux.com article does a great job summarizing the reader, so if you are in the market, I’d take a look. For posterities sake, I took a screenshot of the Linux.com feed of Liferea, in Liferea.

I generally like Firefox, and generally like Google. But having Google suggest enabled when I search for things is annoying, at least on my rather small laptop screen. Mostly it is because my internet right now is pretty average, so I try to cut down on any extra traffic. Anyhow, I didn’t even both Googling how to do this: Type in ‘about:config’ into your address bar and type ‘search’ in the top filter bar. Look about half-way down for this:

This is fairly well documented in the Django docs, so I’ll be brief. This is the the bit of search code I use in almost all of my Django sites, and it works great: def search(request): from django.db.models import Q q = request.GET.get("q", "") if q and len(q) >= 3: clause = Q(dirtword__icontains=q) \ | Q(description__icontains=q) \ | Q(tags__name__icontains=q) site_search = Dirt.objects.filter(clause).distinct() else: site_search = Dirt.objects.order_by('?')[:100] return list_detail.object_list( request = request, queryset = site_search, template_name = "dirty/search.html", template_object_name = "dirty", paginate_by = 20, extra_context = {"q" : q}, ) …