Empty Thoughts

This Week in Django is a weekly podcast about all things Django. This week’s show is a huge show with lots of great features.

This is the second part of a two part series on Internationalisation. This week we are privileged to talk to Marc Garcia, Django’s Catalan translator, among many other things. Marc discusses the localisation side of things, helping us understand what’s required to get your web site localised.

Additionally, we also talk about QuerySet Refactor branch having been merged to trunk.

Finally, we have a special full length song by Django’s own Adrian Holovaty. It’s amazingly beautiful, so I encourage you to stay tuned for it.

Note: We apologize for the occasional audio drops during the interview with Marc Garcia. That’s just how these things go when calling across the globe.

Also, We’ve modified the compression scheme a bit, so let us know if the sound is better or worse.

Please see the Show Notes below for all the pertinent information and links

Downloads

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MP3 Edition (49.5 MB, 1:12:02, MP3)

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The Enhanced Podcast version contains screenshots and easy access links to all of the items we discuss throughout the podcast.

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Want to give us some feedback on the show? We’re always looking for ideas or suggestions that will help improve each episode. Please contact us at feedback __at__ thisweekindjango.com.

Show Notes

Big News (0:55)

QuerySet-Refactor Branch Merged!

As Malcolm Tredinnick mentioned on last week’s show, the Queryset-Refactor branch has been merged into trunk. Changeset 7477 makes that happen.

• Google Groups Announcement on QuerySet Refactor Merge

Over the past several months we have giving you a lot of information on the changes that contained in the Queryset Refactor modifications. We plan to get into those things more in next weeks show.

Adrian Holovaty Special Song

At the end of the program we will be presenting a special song by Adrian Holovaty. So stay tuned for that.

Special Feature – Localisation (5:21)

This week we are honored to be able to speak with Marc Garcia. Marc is the founder and CTO of Accopensys, a software development solutions company. Marc also maintains a blog called the The Best of Marc Garcia.

Marc has also been heavily involved in doing:

• many translations on Catalan and Spanish languages,
• main development of Spanish localflavor,
• development of Transdb (http://code.google.com/p/transdb/) that allows Django field translations on database, and
• development of some small multilanguage web sites using Django

On last week’s program Malcolm Tredinnick gave us some great information on internationalisation. This week we are going to get into localisation, which as I understand it is the process of translating a product into different languages or adapting a language for a specific country or region.

Translating Django

• Let us start off with looking at translating Django itself. What is the process involved for localising Django internals?

• What specific language elements cause you problems? Malcolm had touched on difficulty with pluralisation. Would you comment on that and possibly other areas that present special challenges?
  • Billions in America vs Europe

• What sort of resources are available to translators?

• In the area of translating Django, are there specific changes that you feel should be made in order to make the whole process better and easier for translators?
  • Django LocalFlavor

• Last week we discussed some problems with Django documentation and slang that is used, etc… causing problems for getting things translated. What perspective do you have about this?

Translating Websites

• Okay, getting in to translating websites. This is where most of our listeners would be most impacted. What are the steps for localising my application?
  • Django Internationalization Documentation
  • Django verbose_name Documentation

• There’s two template tags, trans and blocktrans for translating strings in the template. What is the difference between the two and how would you decide to use one or the other?

• What about translating database content? How is that achieved?

• I know that you are the developer of transdb. There’s also a project called django-multilingual. Would you discuss these?

• I recently ran across the django-rosetta project on google code. It is a very impressive admin screen for doing translation. Have you used this project? Are there any similar types of tools to assist translators?
  • Poedit – a cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor.
  • Msgfmt – a Unix utility that creates message object files from portable object files.

Miscellaneous

• Anything else that we didn’t cover that you would like to mention?

Community Catchup (48:49)

• Google Summer of Code 2008 for Django – we want to congratulate the individuals that have been accepted and wish you all the best with your projects:
  • Add Aggregate support by Nicolas Lara, mentored by Russell Keith-Magee
  • Implementation of more backends for the djangosearch API by Ben Firshman, mentored by Joseph Merrell Kocherhans
  • Automatic Generation of Models from File Data by Collin Anderson, mentored by Mark Choate
  • Rewrite the Django Comments Framework : Django-Newcomments by Thejaswi Puthraya, mentored by Jannis Leidel

• Related to the above there have been some interesting design discussions on the Django-Developers mailing list. If you want to provide your own input please check them out.
  • Aggregate Support to the ORM
  • Rewrite the Django Comments framework

• Django Search Projects
  • GSOC DjangoSearch Project
  • Brian Rosner’s Django-Search Project

• An Interview with Malcolm Tredinnick and An Interview with James Bennett – Two great interviews by the Shabda Raaj at the 42 Topics Blog.

• Software Internationalisation – Great followup by Malcolm Tredinnick sort of filling in the holes from last week’s show.

• New django-nyc Meetup Group – Kevin Fricovsky and Loren Davie announced that they are forming a meetup group for New Yorkers. If you’re in the New York City area, I encourage you to get involved.
  • django-users Posting
  • Google Group

Thank You! (1:05:50)

Special Song by Adrian Holovaty

Radiohead is holding a “contest” called Radiohead Remix, in which they’re inviting fans to remix the song called “Nude” from their latest album. They’ve released the raw tracks and are encouraging people to remix the tracks to create something different.

So Adrian sat down and did his own jazzy acoustic mix, and we asked him if we could play it for the show. His remix is called “Nude (jazzy acoustic),” and if you like it, please vote for it.

• Nude (jazzy acoustic) Song and Voting
• Check out my Radiohead remix – post by Adrian Holovaty giving more information on the song.

More Information

Keep track of Brian Rosner at his website

This Week in Django is a weekly podcast about all things Django.

SPECIAL FEATURE – Internationalisation

This is the first part of a two part series on Internationalisation. This week we are privileged to talk to Malcolm Tredinnick, Django core developer. Malcolm educates us on what internationalisation is all about, how it is implemented in Django, and some of the areas that can be improved in the future.

Additionally, we also discuss a lot of changesets in the Queryset Refactor Branch, and a couple of blog posts from the Django community.

It is our longest show yet, but definitely worth your attention. This is a must listen podcast.

Please see the Show Notes below for all the pertinent information and links

Downloads

AAC Enhanced Podcast (79.3 MB, 1:41:32, AAC)

MP3 Edition (69.8 MB, 1:41:32, MP3)

OGG Edition (56.8 MB, 1:41:32, Vorbis)

The Enhanced Podcast version contains screenshots and easy access links to all of the items we discuss throughout the podcast.

Feeds Available

iTunes Feeds are available. By subscribing using the iTunes feeds the podcasts will automatically be downloaded for you when we release them.

iTunes Feeds

This Week in Django – AAC Edition

This Week in Django – MP3 Edition

Regular RSS Feeds

This Week in Django – AAC Edition

This Week in Django – MP3 Edition

This Week in Django – OGG Edition

Give Us Feedback

Want to give us some feedback on the show? We’re always looking for ideas or suggestions that will help improve each episode. Please contact us at feedback __at__ thisweekindjango.com.

Show Notes

Special Feature – Internationalization (1:39)

Malcolm Tredinnick, Django core developer, joins us to discuss internationalisation. Malcolm has often played the role of expert on internationalization / localization issues, speaks several languages, and works closely with the Django translators.

To learn more about Malcolm Tredinnick, be sure to add his blog, Defying Classification, to your RSS feeds and listen to our interview with Malcolm on This Week in Django 13

• Django Documentation on Internationalisation

• What is the difference between internationalisation and localisation?
  • Plural Forms

• Python 3.0 will feature full unicode support. What does that mean for Django? Will there be any benefits?

• I attended a discussion by Tim Bray, who I suppose is a recognized internationalisation expert, and by the end of the discussion I felt like the idea of creating truly internationlised applications is somewhat hopeless. What are your thoughts about this?

• How does translation support appear to the end-user in something like Django? (how they set which language to use, what Django does, etc).

• Justin Lilly, a Django user and rabid fan of the show, wanted to ask, “I’m curious how many different ways there are to declare gettext-like things.. ugettext, gettext, (as a commonly used alias).. any more I don’t know?” So what about it? What’s the differences?

• What is the difference between unicode and utf-8? Is there a difference?

• What sort of things do developers need to watch out for when writing code for an international audience?

• What are some areas where Django’s support is a little weak and can be improved?
  • The Babel Project
  • Django {% blocktrans %} Template Tag
  • There’s an internationalization component in Trac

• What can we do to improve the support in third-party applications for Internationalisation?
  • People learn differently so maybe we need to explore as many ways as possible to educate people. We can use things like tutorials or screencasts.
  • James Bennett’s apps are internationalised.

• Goal is to get Django to pass the Turkey test yet, but it’s a goal.

• How do you handle sorting in Django?

Tracking Trunk (59:37)

• Updated Markdown Filter to Support v1.7 (7423) – From the mailing list, “Additionally, the encoding argument has been removed from both markdown and Markdown. Markdown expects unicode (or ascii) input and it is the users responsibility to ensure that’s what is provided. Therefore, all output is in unicode. Only markdownFromFile accepts an encoding.”

Branching & Merging (1:01:57)

• QuerySet is no longer customizable (7426) – The backends need to override the Query class instead.

• Detect infinite loop in ordering self (7429)

• Added way to specify related names when using Abstract Base Classes (7432) – From the docs, “To work around this problem, when you are using related_name in an abstract base class (only), part of the name should be the string '%(class)s'. This is replaced by the lower-cased name of the child class that the field is used in.”

• Internal optimizations in the Insert and Update methods (7437) – used for internal methods within Django.

Community Catchup (1:24:12)

• Django question of the day: two apps, relating them – Great post by Clint Ecker asking how people handle two apps that need to have dependencies on them.

• The limits of Django – Interesting post by Alberto García Hierro where he discusses the process he used to optimize queries. His final solution ended up being a C library. The post received tons of interest and he provided a followup, The limits of Django: the answers, where he addresses some of the questions he received.

• DjangoSites.org gets OpenID support.

Thank You! (1:38:43)