The iPad seems to be all over the tech news, lots of excitement. While I can’t say I’m down on the hardware or interface, I’m extremely frustrated by the closed nature of these devices. And it’s not just that everyone seems to want an iPhone/iPad, it’s that every hardware company seems to want to be Apple these days. If computing follows this vector it will not be long until we find ourselves locked in the gaming console model where in order to develop on hardware that we own we must plead for permission and enter into some contract to do so. If the devices being produced by Apple are step forward, the cultural baggage that comes with them  is 5 steps back. It’s a shame that this concern is so difficult to get across to a non-developer, as it’s likely to have lasting implications on the future of innovation in computing. The equity gained in the past 10 years of open source culture is far more tenuous than I imagined only a few years ago.

Peter Kirn makes a far more persuasive argument here, http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/27/how-a-great-product-can-be-bad-news-apple-ipad-and-the-closed-mac/

A quick note on recursive models – when creating a relation such as a category nest, it’s really easy to create a scenario where loaddata fails to load. What happens is that the dependency instance may get listed after the child in the dumpdata output. With certain database engines that relation must be resolved at point of mention during import. The solution seems obvious when you hear it, but may not seem so obvious when you hit it – in the model do not specify the order as anything other than “created” or “id” and create the recursion in drilldown order. Given these two conventions, data should be able to load regardless of the database.  I ran into trouble using a title order to get an alpha sort in the admin and just didn’t consider that the meta order would be represented in the dump as well, though upon further thought it makes perfect sense.

class Category(KeenerElementsBase):
    """
    recursive category nest model
    """
    ...
    parent = models.ForeignKey('self', blank=True, null=True)	

    class Meta:
        ...
        ordering = ('id',)