July 2008


Free Safari Bookshelf for Quebec Residents

Peter Zion, 30 July 2008

If you’re like me and you live in Québec, you probably spend a lot of time complaining about taxes and how you never seem to get much from it. However, if you’re in high tech or simply like woodcuts of bizarre animals, you’ll be happy to know it’s not all a waste: Québec residents have free access to the Safari Online Bookshelf, a vast, fully-searchable library of high-tech and business books provided by O’Reilly Media through the Québec library system. Safari is an extremely valuable resource for anyone working in high-tech and otherwise carries a fairly steep monthly price tag.

If you are a Québec resident, here are the steps to follow to obtain access to Safari through la Bibliothèque nationale du Québec (BNQ):

  1. If you haven’t already, obtain a library card. In Montréal, you can do this by going to the main library building at 475 de Maisonneuve East (corner Berri) with Québec ID and an “official” bill (eg. Hydro Quebec; I think Bell is OK too) and standing in line for a while. They’ll give you a card with a “Numéro de client”; make sure you pick a “Mot de passe” before leaving.
  2. Go to the BNQ website at http://www.banq.qc.ca
  3. On the right side under “MON DOSSIER” enter your “Numéro de client” and “Mot de passe” and click “SOUMETTRE”
  4. Along the second row of menu choices at the top of the page, click on “Ressources en ligne”
  5. Along the left-hand list of menu choices click on “Livres électroniques”
  6. Right in the middle of the page click on “Safari tech books online” or “Safari business books online”

Happy reading!

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Take a few minutes to marvel at all the code you didn’t have to write.

David Carney, 11 July 2008

The subject of this post is taken from a Django tutorial. If you’re like me, you haven’t tinkered with many web frameworks and you’ll be absolutely delighted at what’s out there. In the past hour I’ve installed Django, run through the tutorial, and setup a (basically) functional site, along with a custom poll and administration console.

What I love is that that the object/database model is defined in only one place; making and synchronizing changes is dead simple. Want to create a new object and, perhaps, a parent-child relationship? No problem. How about type-checking? Oh, that’s done too. Care to customize a form? It’ll take 60 seconds.

I’m sure that there are many other frameworks that would equally impress me. For now, however, I’m going to dig into this one a bit more. After having worked with Perl/Mason and raw PHP, Django is a godsend.

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