PyCon Is Coming ...

Incredibly, PyCon 2009 is already looming. The call for papers should be opening soon, and the conference needs volunteers like never before. I've just finished an article on that topic for Python Magazine, but that won't be published until November, so keep your eyes on the PyCon blog for more news.

Don't You Hate It ...

... when you [use a well-known search engine] for advice about a problem and the first hit is something you wrote several years ago? Either you should have remembered you've had that problem ever since you first wrote about it, or you should have remembered how to solve it.

Holden Web on Django Trunk Again

The main holdenweb.com site is fairly simple, so I figured it would be a short job to migrate it to the latest version of the Django trunk (r8301 when I started). While I felt it was unlikely I'd unearth any errors it's the least I can do to help the developers as they charge towards the first release candidate for 1.0.

It turned out to be relatively simple, but with an unanticipated glitch. Having made what I thought were all necessary changes, most of which simply involved altering

from django import newforms as forms

to

from django import forms

I tried accessing the site and got a lengthy traceback terminating in

ImproperlyConfigured: Error while importing URLconf 'urls': cannot import name newforms

This would have been fine, except that the traceback didn't actually give me any information about the module that was causing the problem. Ultimately I traced it to the registration add-on, which needed the same change making to it as did my own code.

I'm pretty impressed, even on a small site, that such large changes to the code needed such small changes to my application before it worked. Kudos for code quality to the Django developers. But it would be nice if the error message could be more informative.