Had a bit of play with Django today, just messing around really. It's really good in some ways and a bit of a let down in others. For example the model and generic views is great, but I still have to write templates. Sometimes I even have to write form tags! Forms can be easily derived from the model. Django doesn't generate forms for you because it lets you control the presentation. Big whoop. I much prefer InfoCMS's method, give you a default presentation which is fairly simple and semantic HTML (i.e. divs with sensible class names) and then let you create XSLT templates to modify form presentation site-wide. This can be sticky if each form is different, but how often does that happen. Maybe you have big form and condensed sidebar form and a special case or two, but that should be OK if you write modular XSLT.

I might have to find a way to make the form generate-validate loop a bit more straightforward. The nice thing about Django is that the API is just below the surface, so it would be fairly easy to build this kind of functionality (I think). I'll probably never get rid of the templates though. This is mad, Django has this great model for plugging apps into sites. Make a new app, say a blog or a forum and you can have urls branching off the app base URI. Whether my blog is at /blog/ or /journal/ doesn't matter, the url patterns after that are the same either way. So someone else writes a forum module and a third person writes a simple wiki, I want these and my blog on one site that has a consistent look and feel. But the other guys have used different form HTML from me. I have to go through each of their templates and overwrite them! Great when the next update comes out and there's a tonne of new fields etc.

Nah that sucks. Django does have template inheritance, so all that's needed possibly is some agreed best practice for template layout. Always have a base template, a form template, etc, every app author uses these, knowing that the site admin can create their own localised versions with whatever HTML they like.

Went to the Web Frameworks Night tonight to learn a bit more about some of the most interesting framework projects. As creator and sole hacker on InfoCMS and as somebody who realises how silly it is to reinvent the wheel, I thought I owed it to myself (and my clients) to show up and learn some stuff.

The three frameworks presented where Catalyst, Django and the now quite famous Ruby On Rails. Each was interesting, I arrived late for the Catalyst talk and was least interested in it due to it's Perliness. Django was what I really wanted to learn about, but it was also interesting to listen to Matt Biddulph discussing Rails development. We also got to see inside the in-development BBC programme catalogue app, which knows all about pretty much every show the BBC has done since 1936. That alone was worth the bike-ride.

As I said it was Django that I wanted to know more about. Django is Python, full stack, has a nice OR-mapper and lots of bits of pieces that I have or have tried to build into InfoCMS. It doesn't have Rails or Zope 3's test-driven development, which is a big blow. It doesn't have XSLT as an output layer or much in the way of TTW tools for building sites as far as I could see. Test-driven development is something which I've totally failed to bring into InfoCMS, but the other two are core goals. However, though Django may lack some core things I want from InfoCMS, it does seem to have a very similar set of goals. Minimal code, maximal reuse. High level of component sharing and nice things like automatically generated admin interfaces, Ajax, etc.

They've all got bloody template languages though! Gah.

Anyway, I've been thinking I'd like to rebuild InfoCMS from the ground up in Python for a while. It's a pipe-dream because I'll never get the time, what with running two start-ups and that. However, I could steal a third or half of the code I need from Django :-). Both the website and Simon stressed it's modular nature. Don't like the view layer, throw it out. Simon also said that they're not afraid of breaking backwards compatibility and that as they've only been open source since July, now is a good time to get involved and potentially shape the project dramatically. I might just do that.

The after party pub mission was also really interesting. I got talking to this guy, an alumnus of Media Lab, Berkeley and Ludicorp! Every cool idea I threw at him he bounced back without even trying. He referred to Cal and Tim by first name. He's consulting at Sony on generative stuff and toys for Playstation etc. I talked about Generator X and the generative art scene, he knows Casey Raes. He mentioned mixing and mash-up tools on Playstation, I counter with Ableton Live, Sony are working with them. I mentioned an interesting new book, Rules of Play, it was written by his old business partner. It was a funny conversation. Mainly because he was a really nice and down to earth guy, at the same time as being a name geek, just back from OSCON. It was pretty exciting to be honest.

Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan have just formally launched the $100 laptop project at WSIS. This is a really amazing project initiated by the One Laptop Per Child organisation chaired by Negroponte with research being performed at the MIT Media Lab which he also heads.

Listening to the webcast it's evident that they've set themselves such a huge list of things to have, it's just incredible that's its so cheap. Governments will have to buy at least 1m units, but for that they get a machine which has a dual-mode sunlight-readable display, wifi on such low power that it can still be used to provide a mesh node when the machine is turned off, a power budget that can be provided by a crank, and in multiple colours (probably).

CTO Mary Lou Jepsen said "We basically reinvented the laptop" and it really sounds like it.

Behaving as an ebook is really important because they're selling it to governments as a "trojan horse." Buy this which will last five years instead of five years worth of books at $20. Selling through book channels means that it must at least replicate all that a book can do. The dual-mode display runs at 150dpi in black and white mode and Negroponte says one minute of cranking should give over thirty minutes of reading.

The device will use open source software, probably Linux, probably provided by Red hat. OPLC are promising that it will support every single language, even small ones. This is important too as it allows language networks to grow. The internet has a huge English language network, which means the language is very strong. Unless they eventually move on to digital media, languages risk death.

Thailand and Brazil are the most eager countries to adopt at the moment. The plan to launch in six large countries first, two in Asia, two in Africa, one in mid-east, one in South America. Smaller countries hard because of sales force issues!Negroponte thinks that perhaps the UNDP could help with smaller countries later. On the subject of why not try to do this through industry because of the great difficulty of dealing with governments, Negroponte argues that education is a public good. He needs to take the hard road because they can't be seen to sanction governments not being the providers of education.

Could industry compete, creating an even cheaper laptop in the long run? Alan Kay and Nick Negroponte would love to see it!

Alan Kay say it's a "Platform for content," and warns that we're focussing on the machine when the difficult problem is really the support structures around the machine, training teachers, delivering content and so on. It's good to hear him say this. Listening to the entire webcast in fact is reassuring, this is being run by a group of people who have done non-for-profit projects before, know the pitfalls and are bursting with ideas to get things moving forwards.

Negroponte would like to see a time when American and European kids sponsor kids in poor countries by buying them a unit and being paired up. I'd love to do this, send or perhaps even take a crate full of them to a group of kids. It's a great project and will surely have many positive and subtle benefits far beyond what people have envisaged so far. Interesting evidence of this comes from Negroponte's assertion that this is a platform to "learn learning", not just one topic, but the skills to educate themselves in later life.

Just got my copy of Richie Hawtin's DE9 | Transitions mix DVD. It's cool. It's a 96 minute mix, done in Dolby 5.1, but there's also a MP3 version for plain old stereo people, like me, and for putting on iPods and such and also a CD with a cut down 74 min version. "However you want to hear my mix, take your pick."

There's also a bonus live mix and a short interview with the Man of Plastik himself. He talks about his interest in the future of DJing. Describing how once software takes care of beat matching the DJ's role is to craft great transitions between tracks. This is really interesting to me. During my set at Norm and Ruth's party on Saturday, I didn't really build with the tracks I was playing. I did fairly basic chop-the-crossfader style mixing, unlike say what Liam Howlett achieves in his Dirtchamber mix or Soulwax or the turntablists and hip-hop producers like DJ Shadow do all the time.

Hawtin also talks a bit about how he put the mix together, creating it in Live and then mastering for 5.1 in ProTools. You get to see his studio and his Live session file, it's huge. After reading yesterday about Liam Howlett's use of a Roland W30, it's interesting to compare the different approaches of dance musicians and think about how I can repeat their practices.

BTW, I got the keyboard for my birthday in the end. I also got Resident Evil 4. So far the former has received about half an hour of my attention and the latter about 11 hours. I'm warming up to it :-).

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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