No Open Blockers

Credit to Jaap A. Haitsma’s WPTouch blog entry for first mentioning this plugin (at least, the first place I saw it, since it seems to be making rounds on other blogs as well). With the simple activation of this plugin, your blog gets automatic formatting on mobile devices. Once it was installed I took a quick peek on my iPhone and it looks awesome. Very cool stuff for such a simple installation.

I recently came into some new hardware, an Alienware M9700 laptop. The thing is a beast, both in processing power and sheer size. Disappointingly, Dell seems to have tainted Alienware, as what would normally ship as a clean, optimized installation is now cluttered with shit.

I have unavoidable needs for Windows on this box, so I decided to dual boot it. With as new as the hardware is, I figured XP would just be asking for trouble, so I decided to go with Windows 7. I figured with both the newness and hype of Windows 7, it actually contained drivers that were written this millennium.

When I first booted into Windows, I noticed the sound card wasn’t detected. It wasn’t hard to spot, as the system tray icon was huge due to the 800×600 resolution it was running in since the video card wasn’t detected either. Amazingly, the network cards were picked up, which didn’t really matter since Alienware doesn’t have Windows 7 64-bit drivers for… well, anything.

Seriously Dell, what did you do to that company? I used to have nothing but great things to say about them.

Dejected, I rebooted into my Fedora installation disk. A few minutes later, I was listening to music and trying to not go blind at the 1920×1200 resolution. Both of which worked fine out of box. And for the record, my video card is an NVidia GeForce Go.

This makes my head hurt. This laptop is for my wife, who is non-technical (that’s putting it mildly). If I were to sit here down to do the installation with both the Windows and Fedora installers, it’s pretty clear she’d end up with a much more usable system running Fedora. Apparently, when the people on the commercials were saying what they wanted in Windows 7, no one mentioned drivers.

I’ve been getting into Django recently. I’ll go into it more in another entry, but I ran into a small issue where my database seemed to get out of sync with my model. Running syncdb didn’t throw any errors, but when I tried to access the model from the server I’d get an error about “no such column”, even though I could see it created in the generated DDL.

It took me a bit of digging (in other words, it wasn’t in the tutorial), but there’s a manage command to reset the database for a particular app. Running that and re-syncing my database got me moving again.

python manage.py reset [appname]
python manage.py syncdb