Andy McKay's blog

Pleased to say that DjangoSki picked up a couple of good speakers.

Andy Smith is a developer at Google, where he works on Google App Engine. He'll be speaking on Google App Engine and how to develop apps for it. Also he'll be talking about the status of non-relational backends for App Engine. A handy person to be sprinting with.

Michael Richardson is one of the brains behind Urban Airship and Bac'n.com. He'll talk about django-piston and building an API in Django which Urban Airship use to do cool things for the iPhone.

Also pleased to note that Rob Hudson is making his way up from Portland. Rob is the writer and maintainer of Django Debug Toolbar. Possibly the most useful debug tool you'll ever use in Django. As a connoisseur of fine Portland beer, I hope you'll be buying him a beer.

At the beginning of the year I had one MacBook power adaptor.

It was starting to get frayed around where the cable leaves the block and it would cut out. Time to buy a new one.

A few months later, lose it on the way to Kenya. Time to buy a new one.

Get into the office one day, it goes bang. Go to the Apple store and complain, get a new one (free at least).

Get a new MacBook because the old one dies. Now have two, great.

House gets burgled and all power supplies stolen. Down to zero.

Time to buy a new one.

Please make them cheaper Apple.

This morning we found our garage door forced open and lots of stuff gone missing. Of course most stuff was backed up offline, but the most distressing part is that the Time machine hard drive was taken. We might have lost about a year of photographs of our kids (the rest is backed up elsewhere). That's the hardest part to bear.

Anyway if you are trawling on craigslist or eBay and see some of these things, give us a yell. A Mac Pro and a Lacie hard drive should be pretty uncommon.

White MacBook laptop
Mac Pro tower
iMac 24"
Mac Mini
Lacie hard drive 

Dell 24" WPD Monitor

4 gig iPod Nano (DNA2 engraved on back)
2 gig iPod Nano (DNA engraved on back)

Digital Canon Rebel EOS with Canon Flash and Tamron Telephoto lens

Sony Handycam

If you are person who did this, please return the hard drives from the Mac Pro or the Lacie hard drive.

A new version of the Django documentation iPhone app has been pushed to iTunes. Updates are:

• Updated to 1.2 alpha 1 documentation
• App now remembers the page you were last on and re-opens it at the start.
• Code samples when page is rotated widen.
• Some copyright notices added.

Thanks to sponsorship from the Python Software Foundation we've got some free tickets to give away to people from charities or non-profits.

Do you know someone who uses Django in a charity? Or are you at a charity? Do you use Django or want to learn about it? Like skiing, snowboarding or just hanging out in Whistler? Then nominate someone, or yourself. We've got a limited number of tickets and time is short - so hop to it.

Fill out the form here.

Note: the image isn't relevant, but was one of the first hits on Flickr for ticket. It's much colder in Whistler.

Update: people chosen and contacted.

Over the Christmas holidays the DjangoSki changed location from one hotel in Whistler to another. This was the reason for the registration and hotel information going offline over the Christmas holidays. We've got a new hotel sorted out and the conference will be at the new location, a few minutes down the road.

So we went for plan B, one of the other hotels. It's a good hotel with other benefits for example: they don't mind external food coming in, a kitchenette in the room, washer and dryer etc. In fact this hotel is directly on the Creekside chair. You can go directly from the conference room, walk to the hot tub, past the barbeque to the chair lift (or some combination of that).

The reason? During the process of sorting out the contract with the original hotel the contract changed quite dramatically against us. We proceeded hoping that the pre-registration numbers would solve that problem. As it turned out it wasn't enough and the amount of money that we were putting up for the conference was so large to be a really, really big concern for us. A conference is a risk, but we are a small company and the risk was too large.

We are sorry about the inconvenience and there's no more changes now, it's full on to the finish line of a great conference in Whistler. We think we've contacted everyone involved who's booked a room, but if this does affect you, then please contact us immediately.

Details are up on the DjangoSki website of the Legends hotel.

Registration is now open for DjangoSki. Early bird tickets are on a simple first come, first served basis and registration is here.

With our three keynotes set up and all the hairy contracts signed away, all that's left for us to do is plan the rest of the conference. And let it snow, snow and snow so that we've got a good base of snow ready for the conference.

The next date to worry about is in about 3 weeks time, which is the deadline for any scheduled talks. We've got a couple of interesting case study talks lined up and still looking for some good introductory talks eg: Introduction to Django, Pinax, Django-CMS and so on.

Been putting quite a few posts about DjangoSki up, sorry about that. It's very exciting for me and been quite a bit of work. Normal business of ignoring the blog and going back to Twitter will resume shortly.

For our final keynote I'm pleased to say that Matt Berg will be speaking at DjangoSki.

Matt Berg is the ICT Coordinator on the Millenium Villages Project at Columbia University. As part of that project he's been building technical systems in developing countries. He's involved with RapidSMS and projects include work in Kenya, South Senegal, Malawi and Rwanda that help children with malaria and malnutrition. And it's all using open source software and Django.

Not only does Matt do interesting work that is helping people right now, but he passionately believes that he can use Django and other technologies to make a difference. His passion and dedication is infectious, as you'll find out.

We have room for other speakers at the conference, so we'd like to call for other speakers to submit proposals to speak at the conference. Please apply here or see details here.

We are excited to announce that Jacob Kaplan-Moss will be giving one of the keynote talks at DjangoSki.

It's almost impossible to be around Django and not know who Jacob is. He's one of the original founders of Django, is on the foundation board, is the co-BDFL of Django and is the co-author of The Definitive Guide to Django. Let's face it, if it's got something to do with Django, Jacob has had some influence on it. Currently Jacob works at Revolution Systems where he gets to do lots more Django.

After missing Jacob at DjangoCon in Portland, it will be certainly good to have him around in Whistler. Perhaps even get some sprinting on Django 1.2 (which will be out a few days after DjangoSki). Jacob writes a great blog and is a great speaker.

I bet you've always wanted to parse your djangopeople.net account into JSONP so you can use it somewhere else on the web. Well your wait is over: djangopeople-jsonp.appspot.com will do just. Some examples of some famous and not so famous Django people. (and of course mr nobody).