Empty Thoughts

My good friend Justin Lilly just posted a great short screencast on using Vim macros. In the screencast he walks you through using the Vim macro commands to record and play back key sequences. Justin, several other friends, and I have been helping each other get the most out of . I highly recommend you take one minute and give it a viewing.

Since I forgot to blog about it earlier he has also created a excellent post on his Vim setup called Vim: My new IDE. If you’re into Vim or want to get going on it, this post contains an awesome collection of stuff that Justin has found useful.

Brian Rosner just released a new screencast and blog post, newforms-admin Migration and Screencast, that walks you through how to get started with migrating to NewForms-Admin from your existing trunk based code. The screencast and accompanying blog post are very well done. It’s great to get this kind of helpful information, especially from someone that knows so much about the internals of the code.

I highly encourage everyone to check it out, especially if you’re on the fence on whether or not the conversion is worth it. Brian shows how easy it is to get started.

We appreciate all the submissions to the Win Cool Stuff Contest. All valid submissions will be recognized on future episodes. Our winners will have the option of appearing on the show to discuss their winning submission.

In true Django fashion I created a Django application that was used to draw the winners. You can watch the screencast here:

Watch the winners drawn live

The winners are:

• The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right – Congratulations to Francis Cleary for his submission “Multiple view prefixes”.

• Django T-Shirt – Congratulations to Paul Kenjora for his submission “Adding Custom Actions To Django Admin Change Forms”.

Special thanks go to Apress and Eminent Consulting Group for donating the prizes.

Fabio Akita (not the Fabio) has an excellent interview with Adrian Holovaty, creator of the Django Framework.

I’ve been following Akita’s work for some time and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Recently he reproduced the original Rails screencast, to update it. I also enjoyed his two-part interview with Avi Bryant.

Even if you’re not doing Rails stuff, Akita’s feed is a Must Subscribe.

There’s been some buzz lately about Hobo, a plugin extension to the Rails framework that makes it easy to do rapid prototyping of web applications. You can find out about all of the features at the HoboCentral website. One exciting feature is the implementation of DRYML, a way of drying up your views and providing extendable tag libraries.

Check out the screencasts. They’re very well done. I haven’t been this stunned by a screencast since I saw the original DHH Rails screencast. It’s exciting times.

Ryan Bates provides an excellent collection of Ruby on Rails screencasts for free. If you have a couple of minutes, literally, please check out what he’s put together.

Some time ago I had envisioned producing something similar, but in no way could I have even come close to this. Ryan really nails it, with high production quality and keeping it concise. Show him some love.