This means that GeoDjango will be part of Django 1.0! This is another great addition to this fabulous framework. It changes and extends Django's ORM so that it supports GIS types in multiple databases. Of course, that primarily means support for OpenGIS types in MySQL and PostgreSQL and querying them via Django's ORM.

Now, if they'd finally land aggregation support, I'd be totally happy with Django 1.0!

I've been using 64-bit systems exclusively for a while now (Windows XP x64 for daily work and Windows Vista x64 as my gaming system), but Apple made the braindead decision to let iTunes v7.7's iPhone 64-bit support only run on Windows Vista. Well, unfortunately, all my business data is on Windows XP and there's no way that I'll downgrade to 32-bit and loose support for my 4GB RAM.

Turns out, there's really no technical reason for not having iPhone support on Windows XP 64, unless you have a phobia of editing MSI files with Orca. Here's an excellent write-up.

I wish I could be there :-).

Brian Rosner posted this update in the Django users group. This means that Django just made a big step forward!

This PHP RFC contains a proposal for closures, lambda functions and callables in PHP. Looking at the rest of PHP, the syntax seems to be in the same style, with a new reserved word "use".

The RFC has been accepted and the code is in PHP's trunk. Well, it was about time, right?

Of course, PHP will still helpfully truncate your 64-bit database id columns by converting them into floating point numbers, if you're using a PHP version compiled on a 32-bit system, but of course not on a 64-bit system, because it wouldn't be PHP if it behaved the same on two random computers. But now you will be able to do that with real up-to-date, all-the-hype scripting language style in PHP 6.0 ;-).

I didn't touch my newsreader in a while and promptly I missed quite a bit of interesting things. Here are the most important:

Django

Large file uploads: Revision 7814 finally lands the patch from ticket 2070 and finally allows Django to handle arbitrarily-sized file-uploads.

Ruby's security vulnerabilities

Man, I'm late to that particular party, but some serious vulnerabilities have been found in the main Ruby interpreter. Unfortunately it seems that the official maintainers messed up as well and only 3^rd-party patches are available right now, because there's no known stable release code in the codebase that a quick patch release could be based off.

I think the most important lesson that can be learned from this, as Simon Willison points out, is that you need to keep release tags around in your SCM system, but also that you should never blindly trust any part of a system. At least it makes me wonder what surprises lurk in the Java VM or CPython.

Diablo III

Has been announced. Userfriendly pretty much hits the nail on the head.

I just watched a presentation about the impressive JavaScript support in Netbeans 6.1.

I have to say that I'm really impressed with it. There's a project (the Ajax Toolkit Framework) in Eclipse incubation that promises to provide pretty much the same capabilities for Eclipse, but it's not there yet. ActiveState's Komodo has some good support, but it's not really free (there's a free version without debugging support).

The only problem left now is that Netbeans' is missing a widely advertised Python plug-in, so I don't know if good Python support is available, but if it is, then it would be enough reason to leave Eclipse+Pydev behind. I'll try JPyDbg and see if I get anywhere.

If you want to know if your country is corrupt, you look at the global integrity report.

One more reason to support Obama for America: he wants to build a database that lets every citizen, every news outlet and anyone else track every dollar that goes through congress. Well, of course, it probably would miss a huge chunk of "secret money", but it would be a step in the right direction.

Germany is currently missing from the report, though.

Awwwww... I was so going to enjoy the show and now they've ruined it for me :-(

Dave Winer blogged about campaign conference calls a few weeks ago. These give the "real media" people access to the managing teams of the candidates in the presidential race. He put up a recording of a Clinton campaign call.

This is one area where direct access means: having access to a lot of information that falls through the cracks, because CNN would never report on it, or the New York Times would never print it. It seems that we have again stumbled upon something that can be disintermediated by the internet. I, for one, would love to hear the spin that the campaigns put on recent events without the additional spin and filters that the main-stream media put on it when they decide what to report. Simply because I

• care a lot about politics and

• more importantly: it's an area where in my opinion the media has time and again proven that they don't serve society in any kind of meaningful way besides dumbing down the process

In particular, listening to the one recording from the Clinton campaign that Dave has put online so far, the key difference is that the campaign perceives the journalists as intelligent people and talk to them like they are. What a huge change to their normal mode of communication that is. I'm anxious to hear the new recordings that Dave put up on Pownce today (no need to check, though, they're private items). He also said that there will be a public RSS feed with enclosures soon, because he found a media partner that will provide the recordings.

I hope! I sincerely hope that something similar can be established in Germany in time for the next elections. I would have loved to have this kind of information back in 2005 when Angela Merkel became chancellor.