I don’t think its too late to provide some predictions for 2008, so here are mine.

3D Printers
We are going to be seeing a lot more on the subject, although they have been out for a while I think this is going to be the year that we are going to be hearing alot more about 3D printers and 3D printing methods, and seeing a lot more things they can do. Also the price will drop I am sure meaning that there are more around to play with.

Phones
I think the phone market will see some much better models this year, coming from the increased R&D that the iPhone would have produced. Touch screens are already advancing as proved by new models from Samsung, and software will bound to improve. Microsoft will lag behind as usual. The Samsung model SCH-W559 I am particularly interested in checking out as it has a vibrating touch screen (called VibeTonz) that provides feedback to make it feel like a mechanical device.

OS X viruses or worms.
Apple and OS X are proving increasingly popular due to ease of use and maintenance, but these increase in popularity could mean that we see an increase in nefarious activity on the platform. This is might not be as bad as it seems, it is built on quite a stable secure platform and will lead to increased security on applications and service running on the system.

Facebook backlash.
Facebook is not the elegant social networking site it once was. Too many applications, services and third parties are in on the act and now it looks like a complete mess. It might be just me but it also seems that the hosting is always one step behind. I have heard that the next release they are working on is for collapsable menus and for hiding things, but I have already taken off information from the service.

For once BBC news comes up with something interesting, a list of 100 things that you didn’t know about 2007:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2008/01/100_things_we_didnt_know_last_3.shtml

Some that I like include:

Newcastle is the noisiest place in England.
Only about half of China’s population can speak the national language, Mandarin.
There is mobile phone reception from the summit of Mount Everest.
Denmark is the happiest country in Europe; Italy the unhappiest.
Cats can be police constables

Incidentally I am now posting this from the latest version of MarsEdit to which I have just upgraded. Best blogging software I have found yet.

I have finally got around to upgrading my HTC S620 phone to Windows Mobile 6 now that its a free upgrade from HTC.

Of course I didn’t bother to backup the old SMS that I had on it, but ActiveSync took care of the contacts, calender, email etc with no problem. Now I have to go through the painful business of installing software on it. So here are my picks at the moment:

• Skype
• Google Maps
• TCPMP

Now I just have to get some other applications together that I like.

Here’s a list of 30 helpful tutorials and/or articles on the Django web framework. This was written as an answer to the Top 30 Ruby on Rails tutorials and it is really helpful when you are learning Django. Hopefully this will help it get even more support.

read more | digg story

I have been using hellahella using paster serve and I must say the performance was terrible. I don’t think that it is mean’t to be run for any length of time which is at odds with hellahella, the web interface to hellanzb, which is.

I have documented before that I am using hellanzb to manage my nzb files, and hellahella makes it even easier and with integration with http://www.newzbin.com it is even better (how about one click downloads, unrar, par, and ready to view - yes I have it!)

So I wanted to run hellahella using Apache2 on my Debian box. Luckly just as I wanted to do this a new FAQ was put up on the Pylons web site on how to achieve this using mod_python (which I also wanted to use). Pylons is a web framework for python and it seems quite good too and I got alot of help from the very helpful pylons-discuss group on groups.google.com.
So I setup Apache2 or rather Debian did using apt-get, and I got a fairly normal install. If you haven’t used version2 of apache before the configuration has changed somewhat and all the config files are now split. At the same time I also installed mod_python using apt-get and as this is rather well documented I am not going to write it down here. Now all we need do is follow the first part of the instructions on the Pylons site:

1. Install hellahella (I assume you are running hellanzb already otherwise go and download and install it) and make sure it works with paster serve hella.ini
2. Make sure mod_python is installed and enabled.
3. Save the http://projects.amor.org/misc/svn/modpython_gateway.py script as wsgi.py in your mod_python python directory which is /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/mod_python/ on my system.
4. Create a project directory. I used /www/hellahella
5. Create startup.py file in this directory with the following information:from paste.deploy import loadapp
   app = loadapp(”config:/www/hellahella/hella.ini”)
6. Create a link to your hella.ini file: ln -s /etc/hella.ini hella.ini
7. Go into your apache2 sites directory: CD /etc/apache2/sites-available/
8. Create a new site: vi hellahellaSite
9. And input the following information:
   

   VirtualHost 127.0.0.1
   ServerAdmin tim@timc3.com
   DocumentRoot /www/hellahella/
   SetHandler mod_python
   PythonHandler mod_python.wsgi
   PythonPath "['/www/hellahella/'] + sys.path"
   PythonOption wsgi.application startup::app
   PythonOption SCRIPT_NAME /
   ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
   Alias /stylesheets/ "/www/hellahellaMedia/stylesheets/"
   Alias /javascripts/ "/www/hellahellaMedia/javascripts/"
   Alias /images/ "/www/hellahellaMedia/images/"
   LogLevel warn
   CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
   /VirtualHost

10. Remember to change the ipaddress 127.0.0.1 to whatever ipaddress or domain name you need.
11. The to a level above your doc root: CD /www
12. Then create a link from the public media files for hellahella to a directory here: ln -s /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/hellahella-0.1dev_r782-py2.3.egg/hellahella/public
13. Rename public: mv public hellahellaMedia
14. You might need to chgrp and chown the files under this directory.
15. Then enable this site: a2ensite hellahellaSite
16. Restart apache2: /etc/init.d/apache2 stop; /etc/init.d/apache2 start
17. Then test.
18. And it should work aslong as hellanzb.py is running and hellahella is setup correctly.