Make Smarter - GeoDjango, Karmic, HTML 5

First up in Make Smarter this month is a good GeoDjango tutorial by the folks at Linfiniti.com. This tutorial doesn’t assume Django knowledge, so it’s a good introduction to Django as well, from installation (Ubuntu/Debian centric) to making your first project. I’ve been wanting to break into Django, and this will be a big help.

Unless you’re living under a rock (or you’re one of the 99% minority that doesn’t run a Linux desktop) you already know that Ubuntu 9.10 is out. I run Ubuntu on my workhorse machine at home and I’m running the latest Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) on my netbook. If you want to check out the Linux scene, check out the Ubuntu Karmic Koala Bible, a 54 page PDF create by makeuseof.com. It’ll guide you through choosing an Ubuntu edition to geek stuff like setting a swap strategy.

As HTML5 support improves in every browser (including IE to a small extent), getting a handle on what’s new is a good idea. Tech Radar has a high level overview of HTML5, including using html5shiv to get IE to recognize HTML5 elements. In the web development area, Six Revisions has an interesting post on 5 technologies that will keep shaping the web in 2010, HTML5 being among them.

InfoQ has an interesting presentation entitled Five Considerations for Software Architects. For the impatient, those are economy, visibility, spacing, symmetry, and emergence.

And last but not least, Free Geography Tools links to A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping by Tomislav Hengl, which available as a free download, including the datasets used in the text.