Computer Bug

My workstation

2011-07-17T04:43:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
This is my small workstation.

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

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Canada Day Celebrations

2011-07-17T04:22:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]

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Eiffel's Cosmic story

2011-07-04T23:12:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Very few people know that when it was built, Parisians did not like the iron tower. It was approved for demolition and sold as scrap. It was retained for scientific research purposes, and now became a tourist attraction.

But this tower attracted more than tourists! Dr. Wulf thought it could attract radioactivity which was actually cosmic rays increasing with height! Following is a very interesting read on how Cosmic rays were discovered.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=paris-city-of-light-and-cosmic-rays-2011-07-04

Source: SciAm

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Spring is here ... at last

2011-05-14T06:39:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]

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duck family

2011-05-07T05:17:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Spotted near Zehr's

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townhouses

2011-04-28T04:01:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]

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new grocery store

2011-04-28T03:28:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Freshco opened near our house. This store is located at the cross of Westmount & Ottawa street. This same building housed PriceChopper till last week.

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A view of Phillip Street

2011-04-27T23:55:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Phillip street runs adjacent to my office. This was shot after the rain.

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Spotted Canada Goose

2011-04-27T05:29:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) is a wild goose belonging to the genus Branta, which is native to arctic and temperate regions of North America, having a black head and neck, white patches on the face, and a brownish-gray body.
[From wikipedia]

It is seen in this time of year in Canada.

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Spotted Canadian Goose

2011-04-27T02:22:00.001+05:30

Sent from my BlackBerry

Snowfall 2011_04_17

2011-04-17T22:41:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]

Snowfall in Kitchener-Waterloo today.

Daksh's first ever!

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Snowfall 2011_04_17

2011-04-17T20:20:00.001+05:30

My first snowfall in Canada and Daksh's first ever!

See the full gallery on Posterous

Personal Book Publishing : Advanced Windows Setup

2010-12-17T08:10:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Last time I described how a basic windows setup can be created. That can be used to create a DocBook XML file and convert to PDF in an easy way. Since my requirement was to also generate HTML and ePub, that setup was not sufficient. Also note that I always preer and suggest open-source tools to be used.

For this advanced windows setup, I have installed Dobudish. This provides the complete setup to work on DocBook. You just need to download the archive and extract in a folder. Say your new book name is "New Project", then go to the install folder and give the command:

generator.bat new_project create book

This will create a new DocBook XML file of the type book in the directory documents/new_project/input/ . You can create the project of any suitable name using this command. This is just a template file. You need to open this file in a text editor or XML editor and fill in the content. You can even use Jaxe (in earlier post) to edit this. Or you can use any other good editor like Notepad++ to edit. This is your choice.

Here I would like to tell you that you need to maintain the structure of this file. The tags are not to be removed. If you need to add more paragraphs, for example, you need to add a pair of <para> tags, just like it exists already. If you use a good XML editor like Jaxe, you need not worry about this. Once you have done editing the XML file and your book is complete, you can use the following commands:

generator.bat new_project pdf
generator.bat new_project html
generator.bat new_project epub

To create PDF, HTML and ePub automatically. The output files are located in documents/new_project/output/ . The output documents are very pretty. I have been using Jaxe along with Dobudish and am extremely happy with the results.

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Crossposting Tips

2010-12-16T00:42:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]
Out of fun, in the past, I had created accounts for blogging on various hosting sites, ranging from wordpress to xanga. Now all that is unmanageable. Same is true for microblogging sites.
Now I want to consolidate them and make my content available everywhere. Solution is to cross-post the articles so that it is posted on one site and linked back to the original site. So, I created my own hosted wordpress site where I have extreme control. Then use different tools to distribute this content.

Two wordpress plugins come handy: twitter tools and posterize.

I configure posterize to post to my posterous account when I publish any post. From posterize, the post is distributed to my various blogs on wordpress.com, tumblr.com, blogger.com etc. using its autopost feature. Full details here: http://blog.prateek.in/2010/12/how-my-blog-posts-flow/

Twitter tools plugin is used to create a status update carrying only the title of the new post. This update is taken in ping.fm using RSS feed and the ping.fm distributes the status updates in its own set of microblogging networks. More details here http://blog.prateek.in/2010/12/how-my-status-update-flows/ . Remember to use bit.ly to shorten the URLs automatically before posting to twitter.

I will honestly say that I do not like this current arrangement, but currently, this is the solution I have. I will think of cleaning all this up in near future. Thanks to posterous and bit.ly for making it possible.

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Personal Book Publishing : Basic Windows Setup

2010-12-15T22:50:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]

If you do not have time or courage to explore more elaborate options, Jaxe is for you. It is no frills excellent XML editor. When you start the editor, it presents an option to create a document of one of supported types. Docbook is one of the options. It is simple and straightforward, without any distractions.

What I really love about this editor is its XML capabilities. The editor knows from your document types what tags can be nested where. It helps you insert the allowed tags for that section of document, so you rarely make mistakes. Even after making a fool-proof correct XML (DocBook) document, you can validate the XML and be double sure. While inserting tags, it also presents options on that tag. You can even import any existing DocBook XML file and validate it.

Other stellar features include a built-in spell-checker, Equation editor and help to insert images. What I found lacking was: a simple icon which inserts the basic constructs like ordered lists, unordered lists, bold, italics etc.

Once your document is ready, In the file menu, there is a clear option to export to PDF. It cannot get simpler than that. What I found lacking was the missing option to generate HTML and ePub. However, PDF was my primary requirement and it did the job well.

This tool is excellent choice for quick work, no fuss solution. However, for making HTML and ePub output, I needed a more elaborate solution which I will describe in the follow-up article.

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Personal Book Publishing : Introduction

2010-12-15T22:46:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]

Last week somebody asked me that what tools to use for writing a small book. Since this is not going to any publisher, the idea is to publish the book on the Internet. It is just a hobby thing, running ~30 pages. In normal case, since it is just a hobby thing, I was about to recommend her to use MS Word and get on with it. But I wanted to have a second look and understand whether it would be a good option for publishing on the web.

Since I have not checked this area in last few years, I thought it wise to just research what is the current trends and softwares available for the purpose. My basic requirements are simple.:

A simple to use methodology which does not daunt the author. It should not distract the author by providing unnecessary options and it should not be difficult to learn.

Since the book is intended for web reading, it should support output in PDF, HTML and ePub. For MS Word documents, readers should have this paid software installed. Moreover, people may read documents in e-book readers where you cannot install softwares.

It should be future proof. Few years ago, documents were written in wordstar and books in ventura. Now, it is hard to find readers which can open those documents.

I evaluated following options:

MS Word: Yuk. I won't go for it. Large document support is pathetic. I is WYSIWYG, so the author gets distracted by the many options. No open support, you need to microsoft purchased software installed. Even OpenOffice is better than this. Although, if I had to write a letter or a 4-page article, MS Word would be my first choice.

OpenOffice Word: Has good PDF output support. Low learning curve. But then it is WYSIWYG. It is better with most type of home documents.

LaTeX: I love this from my college days. It let me focus on the technical things, and took care of every aesthetics by itself. Good thing is that it can produce excellent PDF and HTML very well. But I am not so sure about ePub. The math presentation is excellent. However, I see it having a slightly higher learning curve. huge community support. Usually popular with UNIX community.

Lout: A newer sibling LaTeX. I like the easier syntax and nice output styles. But lack of community support and tools make it prohibitive.

DocBook: This is an open standard. It is supported on windows platforms as well as UNIX. Has native Unicode support. It has huge number of output options, including PDF & ePub. Huge community support and best of all, it is future proof! It is very easy to explain to new user and there are good XML editors available. DocBook files are normal text files encoded with HTML-like tags. It has very intuitive XML syntax and lot of tools available. The input XML files are passed through a series of tools/programs to generate final output. That sequence is called a toolchain.

As much as I love LaTeX, I would still go with DocBook now, for the sake of ease of use, output formats and future compatibility. DocBook files are normal text files with HTML like angular bracket tags. In follow-up article, I will explain how to setup a DocBook toolchain on windows.

The best thing (probably the deciding factor) why I prefer DocBook XML over other solutions is that it maintains clear differentiation between design and content. The author is only worried about the content and story. The design, layout and looks can be taken care by a different person and can be worked in parallel. This segregation of design and content is very important. And anyways, even if I love LaTeX, I have the option to convert the DocBook XML to LaTeX and use it.

I may have missed out several other good solutions, but maybe that is because I do not know them quite so well. I hope to enhance this post in future, if required.

References:

http://www.latex-project.org
http://www.tug.org/

http://www.openoffice.org/

http://www.danielstender.com/granthinam/2152/

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lout

http://www.docbook.org/

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yet another test 2

2010-12-15T22:38:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही
]sorry, please ignore this.

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Another test post

2010-12-15T22:03:00.001+05:30

[ Crossposted from अनकही ]please ignore.

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How my blog posts flow

2010-12-15T20:33:00.001+05:30

Main source: http://blog.prateek.in

Cross posted to: Posterous

As Status Update From Posterous --> Twitter (via autopost)

Twitter --> Ping.fm (via Rss import)

then

Ping.fm --> BrightKite

Ping.fm --> Plurk

Ping.fm --> YouAre

Ping.fm --> StatusNet

Ping.fm --> Identica

As Blog Entry From

Posterous --> Facebook page (via autopost)

Posterous --> wordpress.com (via autopost)

Posterous --> blogger.com (via autopost)

Posterous --> tumblr.com (via autopost)

Posterous --> typepad.com (via autopost)

Posterous --> xanga.com (via autopost)

via Posterize

Testing of my Blog

2010-12-11T21:22:00.001+05:30

please ignore this

How my blog posts flow

2010-12-11T21:20:00.005+05:30

Main source: Posterous

As Status Update From Posterous --> Twitter (via autopost)

Twitter --> Ping.fm (via Rss import)

then

Ping.fm --> BrightKite

Ping.fm --> Plurk

Ping.fm --> YouAre

Ping.fm --> StatusNet

Ping.fm --> Identica

How my status update flows

2010-12-11T21:20:00.003+05:30

Main source: Twitter

From twitter --> Facebook page (via twitter facebook app)

Twitter --> Ping.fm (via Rss import)

then

Ping.fm --> BrightKite

Ping.fm --> Plurk

Ping.fm --> YouAre

Ping.fm --> StatusNet

Ping.fm --> Identica

Update Distribution Scheme

2010-12-11T21:20:00.001+05:30

Often I want to write a blog or status update at one place and want to distribute this update at various sites. This can range from very simple to elaborate schemes. I earlier used friendfeed for this purpose but now they are no longer reliable after acquisition. Usually it is a good idea to update the same post to multiple blogs so that if one is not available, other source is able to take over. Or even just to maintain backups. Also, each blog location has its own community tied to it. Similar thing is true for twitter and facebook page. These are dominant update sharing networks and they have different purpose.

Simple Scheme

Requirement: I want to blog at a single location and update my other blogs, on wordpress.com, tumblr.com and blogger automatically. Also, I want to status update on twitter and my facebook page with the title of the post.

Solution: Use http://Posterous.com ! Write the blog at posterous, one single place, or send update via email! Setup autopost on posterous for my other blogs: wordpress and blogger. Also, for my tumble blogging site on tumblr and of course twitter and facebook page. Once my post is updated on posterous, I can see the content automatically posted everywhere. I do this because I do not have to worry about SEO and branding and stuff like that. It is all personal. This is just an example, posterous supports many other networks like linkedin, google buzz etc. So, it is as below:

<pre>

Posterous ------> Blogs --------> Wordpress.com

--------> blogger.com

Tumble blogs ---------> tumblr.com

Status Updates ----------> twitter.com

----------> facebook.com

</pre>

SEO Friendly Scheme

Requirement: Someone loves their privately hosted wordpress for its flexibility and SEO capabilities. They do not want to make posterous as their primary blog. Then how to distribute?

Solution: Use http://ping.fm ! Update your private blog at any site. Feed the RSS of your main blog to ping.fm. Add your target networks to ping.fm for update. Ping.fm can update more than 30 networks and is equally good in that regard. Best part: all the links to post go to your main blog.

<pre>

Main Blog ------> Ping.fm --------> Blogs --------> Wordpress.com

--------> blogger.com

--------> posterous.com

Tumble blogs ---------> tumblr.com

Status Updates ----------> twitter.com

----------> facebook.com

</pre>

Complex Scheme

Requirement: For my college alumni community, I needed something more complex. There are two set of information: blogs/status updates and discussions/mailing lists. They have to be consolidated seperately. All discussions in forums or yahoogroups have to be consolidated to be consolidated in one google group. Also there are several blogs.

Solution: Firstly, I have setup all forums/discussions to come to my gmail inbox. I have applied a filter there to forward those emails to my googlegroup.com com emails.

Then, all the blog RSS are mixed using rssmix.com (or similar feed combining service) to one single RSS feed. This is needed because ping.fm supports only one RSS as input. This input is fed to ping.fm and to several output netwrks from there.

Finally, I as admin update only on posterous and posterous distributes it to all necessary sites.

<pre>

Forums ------> Gmail --------> Google group

All Blogs ------> RSSmix.com --------> Blogs --------> posterous.com

Status Updates ----------> twitter.com

----------> facebook.com

Admin Posterous ------> Blogs --------> Wordpress.com

--------> blogger.com

Tumble blogs ---------> tumblr.com

Status Updates ----------> twitter.com

----------> facebook.com

</pre>

Nokia X6

2009-09-02T21:03:00.001+05:30

It has two most wanted features :

touch screen
apps/gadgets

Business Continuity and Browsers

2009-03-10T18:54:00.002+05:30

Browsers are increasingly becoming essential tool for business (if they are already not so). We find several good browsers on the internet: Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera and Chrome. All brosers are increasingly focussing on extensions, speed and other user features.

But business use puts some additional requirements on the browsers. How about 'disaster recovery'? If a PC crashes or simply browser install gets corrupted, how do we recover from such an event?

The most essential information contained within a browser will be the bookmarks and passwords. While it is easy to export passwords and even sync between several installs of browsers, the case is different in the case of passwords. As far as I know, among the popular prowsers only Chrome, IE and Firefox support exporting passwords (using extensions). Opera and Safari passwords can either not be exported or the solution requires an tool you need to purchase. Even then it is not guaranteed that you will be able to import it into another browser.

I find it very necessary to be able to export/sync passwords and maybe to import it into another browser.

No good service for book writing

2009-01-20T23:47:00.004+05:30

I need to prepare a small book for someone. So, I was looking for a tool which could help me achieve that online. I found wikis too unstructured and blogs only allowed chronological order, not book structure. I had very simple set of requirements:

WYSIWYG : I want to focus more on writing than on tags or markups. That is why I could not use LaTeX or HTML.
Online: I am on the move and I need the ability to be able to update the pages from anywhere. So, I cannot use MS Word (I do not like it anyway).
Allows structuring: Allows for Sections, subsections etc. Or perhaps I can create one page for each section, just like a wiki. But I want the ability to be able to sort the content. Move pages from one chapter to another etc. This is not so flexible in wikis. If page sorting can be done visually, it would be too good.
Add small external media: I may want to add some photos or diagrams in the book. Basic facility only is required.
Export/Print: In the end, when the book is done, I want to export the content as HTML or PDF so that I can print it offline or send to the publisher.

Now, I had such simple requirements and I could not find the appropriate tool for the purpose. Most tools did not fulfill at least two of the above requirements. the nearest thing I could find was wik.is service. But it still did not provide printing/export feature. Even Google Sites is not good enough. Google Notebook had the sorting capability I wanted, but it did not support chapters and sections like structuring. So, I am lost. If anybody knows a good service, please suggest.

Dell India does not support online payments

2009-01-20T23:33:00.002+05:30

I was surprized when I was exploring Dell India website to purchase a laptop. I was shocked that a company like dell still has not endorsed web based payment systems on its website! The horror is that you have to select the equipment, you prepare the shopping cart but in the end, they tell you to call Dell customer care center and they will take the payment details. Funny isin't it? They could simply take payment through credit cards. Moreover I trust secure payments than telling a human on the other end whom I do not know. Maybe some day dell will wake up and realize that they only have equipped some e-commerce giants on internet and forgot to learn the trick themselves.

At least I will not buy a dell laptop nor recommend anyone unless dell starts accepting online payments.

Why I find dell service pathetic

2007-06-29T19:41:00.000+05:30

I found the dell India customer care very pathetic. I will list down what all things annoyed me.

1. When I call to confirm the sales, there was a confusion between two salespersons to confirm th order. They were trying to race to confirm the order first. They called me up several times to get the order. It was very cheap and inconvenient.

2. While taking order, the procedure to book was insecure. The person taking the order can simply misuse this information. Very unprofessional. I would trust a security verified site much more.

3. The website which tells order status is incorrect and shows outdated information.

4. When I called up the customer care to ask the status, I was told that the order has arrived and is in warehouse. I was told that it would be delivered today but no one came.

5. When I call customer care, first of all the call is forwarded by the first receiver to the 'concerned' person. The 'concerned' person doesn't pick the phone 2 out of 4 times. When they do pick the phone, their attitude is to always postpone action. They say someone will call you in one hour but no one calls. Th keep people waiting and do not satisfy the queries.

6. The delivery control is disgusting. There is no tracking as to when the package will arrive. They waste or precious time of customers. because they have taken payment in advance, they simply ignore the customers.

I just can't believe how such a business can survive while being so inconsiderate for its customers. Maybe because of corporate customers who simply don't care. pathetic.

Google Summer of Code 2007

2007-03-18T00:39:00.000+05:30

Wow! Google announced launch of its much awaited Student Internship program - Google Summer of Code 2007. There are more than 30 high quality projects, including those from non-CS field. Some are from life-sciences and some from electronics field: gEDA software.

I am extremely happy to see gEDA project in the list, but I hate to miss Emacs in the list.

Creating Accounts

2007-03-14T08:28:00.000+05:30

Lot of hype about OpenID and it's use in simplifying accounts. I greatly appreciate that. Number of web services are increasing in number everyday and I am hardly able to catch up with their use. With each service comes another account which we need to remember. OpenID comes to rescue. Even Drupal provides a sharable accounts.

Even if we leave that apart, the login creation is a big hurdle to using a service. For many it is a traumatic experience. Sites which you never heard of will be asking all your personal information, just like credit card companies. Login creation must be simple and requiring minimum information. But many times, companies ask for all sorts of information for their profiling purpose, but in the process they scare away new users.

I recently created a wiki at Wik.is and I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of login creation. Just enter site-name, email and accept their ToS and you are done. Took maybe 15 sec! Can't become easier than that. I would highly recommend them. Besides the first step, their service looks good too! Talking of wikis, another good wiki service I would recommend is WikiDot. That reminds me. Where the hell did Jotspot go? After its acquisition, they never resurfaced.

Missing ical support in Nokia N73 phone

2007-03-02T23:23:00.000+05:30

Today I got my brand new Nokia N73 Music Edition phone. When I switched it on and tried few things, I said Wow!. What a phone! So many things to try out! I connected it to my laptop, sent messages, played few games, listened to music and things like that.

In idle mode, the phone shows a list of items from my calendar. So, I thought to add few appointments/reminders. And hey! they do show up nicely. Then I thought that let me import my full calendar from Sunbird . So I tried to sync it to my phone. Oh my God! The PC Suite software shipped with the phone only allows sync with only 5-6 applications! That is understandable: most guys support commercial stuff (Microsoft/Lotus) programs. But what I was looking for was a way to import an ical file into the phone's calendar.

Upon a little research, I found that this is not at all supported! I am amazed that a company like Nokia can overlook such an important detail! Phones are everybody's companion. And though many people would say that Mp3 player is most often used app (apart from voice calls, of course), PIM or an organizer is the other important app in there. Nokia itself places it on the main screen, but they forgot about ical. ical is to calendars what mp3 is to music players. Nokia always boasts support for open standards, did they intentionally miss out this one?

Drupal 5 beta

2006-12-07T12:07:00.000+05:30

Drupal 5 is out and in beta stage. Looks good. Has a lot of improvements and fixes. Detailed list is here. I am waiting for it to mature a little more and also want some more plugins to be upgraded so that I can deploy it and test it out. Excited about it.

Rich Text support in Drupal

2006-11-05T20:02:00.000+05:30

First and foremost, i will make it clear that I am a drupal fan. I have used it on a couple of sites and was taken away by the simplicity and ease of use. Things I appreciate most in drupal are is simple admin interface and the ease to add extensions. The themes are gorgeous!

Now the bad part... May be the only thing I do not like is its failure to support rich text editing. Not that it feels incomplete without it, its just that a lot of my users had been craving for this feature lately. I was wondering why it did not come built-in with this feature... Lately, I read about the ongoing debate on whether drupal should include this feature or not... or if yes, then in what form?

I do not want to get involved in this debate, as there is heavy fire going on from both sides. What I would express here is my own opinion only. Drupal developers have a genuine reason when they say that none of the open-source options are stable and they do not want to introduce instability in the distribution. Moreover, this will bloat the distribution, which is remarkably small compared to its features. Both perfectly valid.

The same developers claim that its blog is its killing feature. And indeed, the integration of blog and other fundamental features of drupal are extremely well integrated. But a blog without aesthetics is not very nice. Compare it with wordpress, or even blogger.com. All offer basic rich text editing within blog posts. Why should drupal users be deprived of his feature? I cannot ask my users to learn tags etc just for blogging? They are familiar with MS Word and its clones. Why should the learning curve be so steep. I do not want to scare away my clients.

So, what is the solution? I propose that one should suggest using a WYSIWYG editor for blogs, which runs as a browser plugin. Something like performancing but with few tweaks. User must be able to select when he wants to use it or keep the text plain. Maybe, when the focus is in textarea, user can right click and select "Edit using rich text editor". The text area becomes disabled and a rich text editor firs up and it takes the current text as input and allows wysiwyg editing. One user has finished adding stuff, he closes the editor and the editor converts all its stuff into html code within the textarea. Not just drupal, all the blogging tools will benefit from it. It need not be bundled with drupal and its roadmap may be different from drupal's. This way, drupal developers will not be scared away by unstable code and users will not be scared away by the formatting tags.

But the big question is: will the users install a tool just to start blogging? I believe that they will, if they love blogging so much!

First impressions on Django

2006-10-12T23:32:00.001+05:30

I had used a few CMS and analyzed quite a few of them. Mainly I used PHP based systems. Lately I found interest in Python and Python based CMS. One of them particularly struck me: Django. It seems to be one of the best options available in Python domain. But it still isin't a version 1.0 . Though nowhere it says its beta, but still the version number doesn't assure me that its enterprise ready.

To be honest, Django is not a CMS itself but a framework for developing CMSs. One nice thing with Django is that its modules generate APIs automatically and can interwork seamlessly without interfering with each other. Moreover, a sufficiently complete collection of Django plugins can itself be a CMS! Isin't it wonderful? Framework + plugins + themes = very good CMS. I would probably love to see Django community expanding and more and more contributors developing modules and other addons for it. And, hopefully within next few months I would see a distribution of Django having Django core and some addons which could be deployed easily and used as a full-fledged CMS.

I won't be using Django for the time being (though I like it!) just because I do not have the inclination to code for each and every feature needed. If coding in Django is so simple and beautiful, then probably I will wait for it to mature a bit more so that it is easily deployable and maintainable by a novice user. I will list down a few points on what Django comunity needs to do to reach the status of Drupal or Joomla.

1. Themes support: Templates is not enough, there should be themes! That too a 2-level theme system would be best. First level is layout which can be attained through template system described. the second level should be colours. The same template should be able to come in several themes. the themes should be configurable by user in his profile.

2. Easy deployability: It should be simple enough to be easily deployed. At the most, the user should be asked to configure only 4-5 parameters and start using it. Rest could be configured using Admin screen. Moreover, it must be deployable on a shared hosting server without shell access or root access.

3. Automatic admin screen is probably the killer feature, no hassels. I would love to see one more level in between user and admin: moderator. So any user can create content, moderators can moderate content from any user and admin should be able to configure the settings for that particular feature.

4. Plugins for various features: A certain minimum list of plugins should be available for it to be called a CMS. I will go ahead and give a list of what I consider a minimum set:

Blog
Generic Node (if any user can edit any other user's node, it becomes a wiki!)
Feed generation (already available) and also presenting external feeds as HTML
WYSIWYG Rich-text editor
Basic AJAX supported features (live search, inline form validation, etc.)
Image gallery
Searcheable user profiles, personal details
Discussion forum
Comments on posts
Archive viewer
Form creator
Frontpage creator
Polls
Mail user through contact form
Attaching generic page (any user modifiable) to user to make a scrapbook
Word filers
Keyword cloud
vote on a node
create robots.txt, sitemaps & page headers automatically for search engines
Statistics and user tracking
A single page which shows all content generated and files uploaded by a user.
Invite users
Points to users based on activity he does
Buddy list

Well, probably I am going too far, but this is just one persons wish, to enhance Django to a full fledged system.