5 Items for August 2008
Django 1.0 alpha 2 released!
Django 1.0 alpha 2 was released and contains some nice updates like GeoDjango, Jython compatability, and pluggable file storage. This is the last alpha before the first beta comes out on August 14th. I'm super excited to see 1.0 land.
Amazon Web Services announces Elastic Block Store (EBS)
EBS removes the scary part of EC2 by providing persistent storage (think virtual hard drives). They can range from 1 GB to 1 TB, offer point in time snapshots (differential backups) saved to S3, lazy loading of existing snapshots, striping across EBS volumes, and probably more I didn't discover. Overall it seems like a nice addition to the rest of the web services.
Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds
Excellent article by Steven Levy on Neal Stephenson — in general, and about his upcoming "cinder block", Anathem. Anathem sounds like a very interesting novel and I look forward to reading it.
Using Gmail's SMTP server from Django
Ever since changeset 5144 Django has had the ability to send email directly through Gmail with a few extra settings in your settings.py file. I recently set up a server using Ubuntu and had no intention of receiving email on it, but I did, however, want my website to ...