In a recent revision of Django (not exactly sure which) my patches for my tickets #3160 and #3162 were added to the trunk.

After all these years of hanging around open source, I have finally made a code contribution which has made it into a release. The contributions are very small, but I hope they will be my first baby steps.

Yay!

A friend works at the Telegraph and was foolish enough to turn to me for pithy quotes and hard-hitting telling-it-like-it-is sycophancy about the iPhone this week. You can read his excellent write-up replete with my laser-guided soundbites in his article "The remote control for your life." How long have I dreamed of becoming a mindless talking head, now I can die happy. Oh wait, TV next.

Cambodia and Vietnam are fantastic places, really very friendly and beautiful. I found them to be much more chilled than Kenya, cities especially. Ho Chi Minh is on the cusp of modernisation, though currently quite ramshackle. Phnom Penh is colonial splendor and Buddhist architecture. Out of the cities, both countries are lush and very flat (at least in the southern areas, the Mekong etc).

The hard work cycling from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh then down to Kirirom national park was over surprisingly soon. It was hard hot work, but the challenge was excellently well organised with regular stops breaking it down into manageable chunks.

After the cycling, it was lovely to visit an Oxfam-funded community project doing forest management, ecotourism, etc. We met the people, saw their work, and they asked for our ideas. It was extremely interesting. It's easy to think that western charities are just wallpapering over problems, but this project had become an integral part of the community of a few thousand people, improving livelihoods directly through jobs and indirectly through things like resource management (rice, forests, etc).

Sadly Louise dislocated her knee in a surprising and unfortunate accident, really just walking through a car park. She needed to be taken to a clinic for attention, but was soon able to walk on crutches. She has been in a lot of pain though and unable to do many of the things we had planned.

Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm and Angkor Thom are just amazing structures. Far superior to any other ancient stuff I've seen, though my record isn't the most complete (no pyramids, no Taj Mahal, no Great Wall). It was a bit of a shame to run around them (all three in one day, no time for any of the tens of others). Ta Prohm (the one with the trees growing over the walls) especially was an exercise in capturing as many photons as possible before legging it. IMHO Angkor Wat does deserve it's greater familiarity over the other temples, it's just incredible. Photos soon (I have 1Gb of images).

At the end of our time in Cambodia our guide talked to us about the Khmer Rouge. He had himself grown up in a children's commune and lost his parents to Pol Pot's regime. The discussion made me realise that almost every Cambodia of our age or above must have been terribly affected by the four years of genocide. Cambodia's future still hangs in the balance. Angkor provides a huge opportunity, you have only to look at the sparkling Siem Reap airport to see that Cambodians are rising to the challenge, but there is still much rot in the political system and our guide could not rule out future violence.

Returning, we had a five hour layover in Kuala Lumpur. KL is kind of like an entire city made out of the same stuff as Canary Wharf, though much more bustling. It's very shiny and new. We didn't have time to dig deeper unfortunately, but we were able to get off the plane, through immigration, on to the train, into town, transfer on the tube equivalent, look around a little bit, have supper, get the LRT and train back, back through check-in and immigration in under four hours. Louise's wheelchair did help things though.

Louise's knee was a shame, but she fought through it and keep going, unfortunately though worries about her exact condition meant we weren't really going to be able to relax in the way we'd wanted and coming home seemed more sensible. Believe me we fought it while it looked like just coming home to go to hospital, but without our personal physician (the group doctor became our doctor) and the group to keep spirits up, a week in Siem Reap looked increasingly like hard work. We went to the local A&E today and got everything checked out, we're both happy to be back and not too sad.

The group we were with came from a range of backgrounds, but really there were just lots and lots of really great people. I've come away with 35+ email addresses. The whole experience was immense fun, seeing places, meeting people, a lot crammed into a tight schedule, and we're exhausted at the end.

Rich and I went to see Kraftwerk at I ♥ Techno this weekend. It was awesome. They had the robots, the glowing grid suits, the german accents, everything. The most impressive thing about their show¹ I think is the quality of the visuals. They have such a clear brand it's not even true. Each song has a visual theme, often using lyrics displayed in huge pixelated text (by huge I mean like six inches a pixel). I thought it was cool. If you know it and like it too I recommend buying the Minimum Maximum box set for some lovely 12" photographs of their shows.

Tonight I was inspired by their set, I created a minimal track in Live. Nothing great, but I just bashed it out, which was fun. Then I wrote a sketch in Processing which draws and animates regular polygons. This was also a lot of fun. I was moderately successful with both projects in a short space of time because I've invested quite a bit of time thinking about basic music and computer graphics in the past. I have never reached great heights in either field, but I can knock out something basic quite easily now.

The music will need more forming (intro, bridge, etc) before it's suitable to upload, but the sketch is pretty much done. I'll try to put it up sometime tomorrow.

1. As opposed to the music, which is obviously awesome, greatest band ever and I don't say that lightly.

I've started work on a new, quite large Django project. It will be six weeks until I've implemented everything in the specification, so I wanted to get in early with some tests.

Building on the code and ideas of Hugo, Ian Maurer and Sune Kirkeby, I created a simple Python module that provides:

• A testenv_setup method that modifies the database settings in the current DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to point to a in-memory sqlite database, installs a specified set of models into that virgin database and changes the MEDIA_ROOT to point to a folder in /tmp/.
• A testenv_teardown method which cleans up the temporary MEDIA_ROOT.
• A unit test base class (derived from unittest.TestCase) that uses testenv_setup and testenv_teardown.
• A new handler, TestHandler, derived from WSGIHandler which allows the user to construct requests to the Django processing framework very easily (e.g. get_response("/my/url/")) and returns the original objects created for the response and allows exceptions to bubble rather than just pushing back the HTML only. This facilitates easy test writing. Of course the HTML is there too, and, like Sune Kirkeby, I push it into a BeautifulSoup object for handy parsing.

The result is a simple module that can be used to create either doctests and unit tests that test both models and views. I prefer doctests, because they just seem more pythonic to me. Unit tests are great, but there's a weighty Javaness to them, they're more clunky to write, which is critical. Doctests are also a better fit for Django's model magic. Because of the DB settings monkey-patching, unit tests must import the models after setUp, within each test function. This just adds tonnes of lines of cruft. With doctests, I just have a block of imports at the top of each test docstring.

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Last updated at 5:27, Thursday January 8th, 2009. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are GMT.

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