Google Maps has your back: a cheap way to get to Europe. Note the trip time, though.

So I’m screwing around in Django, checking the admin interface for the Journal project I’m working on and making sure the views work properly. To give you an idea of just how convoluted my dev process is, here’s an example of what the user will do:

1. Copy the text of a news story out of an InDesign file. (Assume Windows; I don’t see the Journal getting a Mac anytime soon.)
2. Paste into Django admin form. Hit the “reflow text” button to eliminate errant line breaks.
3. Add other data (head, deck, photo, etc.).
4. Submit the story.
5. Once the issue’s been published, the story will show up on the website with all the niceties: paragraphs automatically added, HTML entities for smart quotes, etc.

What I have to do to test all this:

1. Copy the text out of InDesign.
2. Switch to the VMWare server with my Ubuntu VM.
3. Make sure VMWare Tools is open.
4. Paste text into SciTE.
5. Convert to Unicode, because the InDesign smart quotes are still there.
6. Recopy and paste into Django admin.
7. Add extra data, submit.
8. Story shows up in template, but Unicode smart quotes and such haven’t been converted.

A long walk to get to the punchline, but hey. Anyways, at some point I’ll have to gin up a custom filter to do the HTML entity replacement, a task I’m not looking forward to so much, but then these little details aren’t always fun.

Speaking of a long walk to get to the punchline, here’s the joke: so all this stuff involves Unicode, right? I’m looking into Django’s Unicode handling, just to see what I’m in for when I start coding this puppy, and I run into a lot of posts about how Django’s not so good at telling MySQL to create tables in UTF-8 instead of Latin1. Several patches are submitted to solve this problem, which all refer to another patch for subsequent character encoding issues, which finally leads to a patch about MySQL version checks. Turns out the UTF-8 changes didn’t work with older versions of MySQLdb, so the version check was changed to reject versions of MySQLdb that were previously okay.

I don’t blame you if you don’t see the punchline coming: the version check patch is what caused my last stretch of problems when setting up my dev server. So it turns out I might want revision 4724 after all, for more proper Unicode handling with MySQL. It hasn’t been a problem yet (the db seems to be storing my smart quotes just fine even though they’re technically Unicode) but if it becomes a problem… er, do I cue Alanis Morrissette yet?

So I’ve been reading The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, specifically the part on maintaining a proper vertical rhythm. The method detailed on that page for maintaining a faux baseline grid seems great on the surface, but appears to fall prey to certain problems with headers that are larger than the body text size but smaller than the baseline grid division. Let’s say you’ve got 12px body text, 16px headers and an 18px baseline grid. One of two things happens:

1) the header keeps the standard line-height (1.5ems = 24px) but gets additional margins to make the whole block divisible by the baseline grid interval (so 24px header line-height + 12px top margin = 36px), which is fantastic so long as all your headlines are only one line (48px two-line headline + 12px top margin = 60px = DANGER WILL ROBINSON), or;

2) the header’s line-height shrinks to the baseline grid interval, which results in horribly crushed text (16/18 = a line-height of 1.125em, compared to the body text line-height of 1.5em).

So it seems like the system only works if you become a headline Nazi: everything must fit on one line or you risk a firing squad! Unfortunately, this just isn’t an option for the vast majority of sites, which are either community-based and won’t tolerate such exacting restrictions, or else are run by media outlets that still prioritize print over web. That isn’t to say that this is strictly a web problem; the math doesn’t work out regardless of whether you’re defining a grid for print or the web. It’s just that it’s much easier to institute draconian controls in a print environment than in a web environment. So sadly I have to abandon baseline grids for a website I’m currently working on.

We are nearing the end of March and against all initial expectations, Nintendo Wiis are still hard enough to find that small groups of people are lining up outside stores whenever they hear of a shipment. To put that in perspective, last Monday marked four full months of Wii scarcity. What’s the deal? All we really have are sales numbers, and they are astounding: 2.3 million Wiis sold since launch in North America, compared to just over half that figure for the PS3 over the same time period (the two systems were launched at the same time). Overall 6 million Wiis have been sold, versus 2.67 million PS3s. The real question, however, is how difficult is it to produce 6 million consoles in four months? Or, more to the point, is Nintendo’s production capacity saturated?

The obvious answer is yes, but dirty rumours still persist that Nintendo has been intentionally holding back stock to keep up the appearance of scarcity. This is probably due to early reports of stores being told to save up stock of consoles in order to release them all in big blowout sales, but that’s a different phenomenon than Nintendo itself holding back shipments. A forum post by a semi-anonymous Vancouver reseller suggests that Wii supplies will remain limited at least through mid-April, and that recent shipments appear to be older production units—perhaps early cast-offs from the line that have been fixed up to factory standards. The implication? “There were (sic) no/minimal new Wiis being produced at the moment. My guess is they are changing production method or the cosole (sic) itself.”

Is Nintendo indeed altering its production lines to meet new specs? Another rumour that persists is that Nintendo is preparing to relaunch the Wii in April with new colours and possibly DVD functionality (something that has been promised by Nintendo for some time this year). But does it make sense to relaunch your product when you’re still having trouble keeping up with current demand? Or is the stemming of supply lines evidence that Nintendo really is holding back stock? No one on the outside knows, of course, and so anyone still waiting for a Wii at retail prices will probably have to wait some time longer.

Which, to be honest, isn’t so horrible. It could be worse; there could be a huge library of Wii games waiting to be played. So far, though, I’ve found few games that seem interesting, and the ones that did pique my interest get mixed reviews—normally a welcome sight in an industry where you get attacked by thousands of fanboys if you deign to rank their favourite game below 9.5 out of 10, but not so welcome when nearly every Wii game seems mired in mediocre, or worse, significantly flawed territory.

In fact, the Wii game I’m looking forward to playing most? Half-Life 2. On my computer. Any day now…

Update: Gamasutra has quotes from the COO of Gamestop: “I think [Nintendo] intentionally dried up supply because they made their numbers for the year. The new year starts April 1, and I think we’re going to see supply flowing.”

It’s going to be awfully hard to say “Arcade Fire” and “indie” in the same breath from now on, because the first major revelation from this Billboard article about the promo effort for Neon Bible is that the album sold 92,000 copies in its first week of release, good for—get this—#2 on the Billboard 200. That’s not #2 on the Heatseekers chart or the Independent Albums chart; this is the granddaddy, the original, the one with Justin Timberlake and Fergie and those people. The Arcade Fire aren’t platinum artists—they’re already down to #18 this week, and will undoubtedly drop off fairly soon—but this has to be some sort of victory for whatever internet phenomenon you want to credit for the band’s popularity.

But much more interesting and surprising is what Merge has had to do to promote Neon Bible, an album that could sell more than the rest of Merge’s 2007 lineup combined. What happens when a medium-sized indie label has to start thinking about massive national marketing campaigns? Apparently it’s like teaching a very smart new dog old tricks, because reading quotes from Merge people about trying to convince the Arcade Fire to do ringtones or pushing for placement in Circuit City and Best Buy flyers, you’d think they’d been doing this sort of thing for years. I mean, not that anyone necessarily had any grand illusions about the likes of Merge and Matador operating out of some hipster-utopian warehouse loft in the slightly scuzzy part of town where all the cheap pubs are, but you do have to wonder if someone like Slim Moon of Kill Rock Stars has any desire to start selling ringtones of old Sleater-Kinney songs.

So I’m currently developing a site using Django, a lovely Python-based web framework designed for content-heavy sites like newspapers. To date, I’ve spent far more time trying to set up a proper development environment than I have actually coding anything; apparently my desire to “do things properly” has suddenly blown up into an obsession. One thing that quickly became clear in between setting up mod_python and using Subversion for the first time is that Windows 2000 is not exactly the best development OS for a couple of reasons, a major one being the lack of symbolic links. This makes keeping everything in a Subversion repository that much more difficult, so I figured, hey—forget Windows, I’ll just set up a dev server in Ubuntu instead!

Five hours later, the sun is up and I want to stab my eyes out with a rusty fork. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING? I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT LINUX! I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT VMWARE! WHY AM I SUCH A FUCKING TOOL?!?!? I keep forgetting to sudo commands, VMware’s bitchy about mouse focus, postgresql doesn’t want to install properly, nano won’t let me select text to copy (if it even has a copy function—all I see is an option to cut lines into a buffer), the apache files are scattered all over the fucking place, and oh did I mention that I still don’t have Django up and running yet? After five hours of wasted time and effort? In a tiny 800×600 window because every time I change the Ubuntu VM config to give me more resolution options, I lose them in the next reboot? At this rate I’ll need to find new hobbies to quench my latent masochism, like taking baths in boiling water and slamming my hands in doors. Maybe I’ll feed my eyeballs to a rabid dog while they’re still attached to my sockets.

Please, the next time you see me, punch me in the face and tell me never to touch Linux again. (At least, until tomorrow, when I bang my head against Apache configs for several more hours before I go binge drinking tomorrow night.)

8am update: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. So when Django says “yeah, you should probably use the development branch,” they really mean “FUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOU!” But thanks to this guy and his backwards-compatible patch, I finally have a working Django. I still feel like punching myself in the face, though.

Update 2: The patch didn’t work, so I just rolled Django back to an older revision and everything works now. Phew!

Dear Sony Online Entertainment,

When I say “uninstall Planetside,” it means “please delete anything and everything relating to Planetside from my hard drive,” not “please remove the Start Menu shortcuts and leave 3.5GB worth of game files on my hard drive so I can delete them manually.”

Even in defeat, Planetside is stubborn and annoying.

Update: Here’s the plan. Pretty much what the Globe heard last night. Man, does the map look shiny (yay Spacing!).

The Globe and Mail edition coming out in a couple of hours has the best guess on what the TTC has in store for us when it unveils its new LRT network plan at 10:30am:

…the centrepiece is a $2.2-billion, partly underground line along Eglinton Avenue, from Kingston Road in the east to Pearson Airport in the west….

—An $835-million line along Finch Avenue West, from Highway 427 in Etobicoke to Finch subway station on the Yonge line;
—A $675-million line on Don Mills Road, from Steeles Avenue East to the Bloor subway line;
—A $630-million line on Jane Street;
—A $555-million line from Don Mills Station that runs along Sheppard Avenue East to Morningside;
—A $630-million line on Morningside Avenue that continues onto Kingston Road;
—A $540-million waterfront west line.

Stay tuned.

A dire affliction is spreading throughout the North American honeybee population, and it’s bad enough that the continent’s food supplies may be in danger:

It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a “tremendous pathogen load”, the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.

The mysterious syndrome has an official name: colony collapse disorder. Europe is beginning to see similar signs of bee population decreases, and while some theories have been suggested as to the problem’s cause—unseen side effects of agricultural pesticides, for one—the emergency working panel convened to study the population collapse has no concrete answers. Colony collapse disorder is a recent phenomenon, with colony declines first occurring last fall; as a result, many states are still measuring the full impact of the losses, with some beekeepers reporting losses of up to 50% and others up to 95%. With the numbers all over the place and the cause uncertain, colony collapse disorder could be a major problem this year for parts of the agricultural industry that rely heavily on honeybee pollination.

Tonight I resurrected the old Queen’s Journal site I designed way back in 2001. Some lessons gleaned from the experience:

1. Keep all your path and app variables in ONE file.
2. Never use absolute paths.
3. Developing a PHP site for IIS is akin to shooting yourself in the face with backslashes. Christ on a stick. Apache only, please.
4. Oh yeah, you need to use the $_GET and $_PATH arrays now. You knew accessing GET variables directly would break sooner or later, right?
5. Never underestimate the importance of having an administration interface. ANY administration interface. At all. Beats making fifty text files an issue.
6. Designing a CMS without a database is like running a marathon with a broken leg: I guess I could do it, but you’d have to hold me at gunpoint. Or give me a server with just Access and no MySQL. You know.
7. Seriously, keep all your app variables in one file. What the hell, me from six years ago?

In summary: friends don’t let friends develop their first PHP site for the campus newspaper. I knew my code was a rat’s nest but I didn’t realize just how horrible and messy it all was until I tried to read it all just now. No wonder the Journal kids couldn’t get my site back up and running after the server died a year ago; this just strengthens my resolve to get the Shameless site moved over completely to Django.