Just got through installing eclipse on an Kubuntu Hardy box, and got the following error during the splash screen:

Could not initialize the application’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the application and fix the problem. If you continue to use this session, you might see incorrect application behaviour when accessing security features.

The solution seems to be to create the directory: ~/.mozilla/eclipse

The corresponding bugs where the above solution was found:

• Ubuntu bug
• Eclipse bug

Bill Gates was on The University of Texas at Austin campus a couple weeks ago to talk about "Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back." While unable to get a ticket to see the talk in-person, I did watch the live webcast (archive now available). Below is my summary of his talk with a couple of my own comments mixed in.

Bill opened his talk with the mentioning of the incredible advancement of computing. How computers are getting smaller, how the number of transistors on processors are doubling, how more natural computing interfaces are on the way. He talked about how TV delivered over the internet is going to revolutionize that field with a level of personalization and interactivity not seen before. He mentioned how the IT field will be changing as much of the system administration work done by humans today will be taken over by software systems that monitor and fix the systems automatically.

Bill talked about how the software industry is still in its infancy and that while user interface tools, such as touch screens and tablet pens, are cheap, the software to effectively make use of these tools is still very far behind. Now, if you are a fan of Ray Kurzweil and The Age of Spiritual Machines, as I am, this might not surprise you. In his book, Ray details the exponential advancement of computers and mentions that while we might have computers with the computing power equal to that of a human brain by 2020, the software to utilize that power will likely lag by at least a decade.

Bill also talked about how computing and software is becoming a more necessary tool for all branches of science, and played a short video showing visualization of mouse-brain scans. Research today is requiring increasingly large amounts of data and computation, and Bill mentioned that he would like to get more of Microsoft's software into the hands of university researchers. He announced a program called DreamSpark, which allows students free (as in beer) access to Microsoft development software, including Visual Studio and Windows Server. However, at the end of the talk when a student asked Bill about the openness and availability of Microsoft's 3D visualization software to the world of academia, Bill responded that Microsoft's products might not fit all of their needs but that Microsoft wants to make sure that all of their software available to researchers. So Bill says that he wants to make this software available, yet if I go visit the DreamSpark website I see only mainstream products like Visual Studio and nothing at all that looks aimed at helping university researchers.

Another interesting topic was Bill's discussion about Microsoft's research department and how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping people in poor countries. Bill talked about how he would like to see computing become available to everyone, including the poorest two billion people of the world. Traditional products and business models for the rich countries of the world are no good in the poor countries of the world. For example, personal computers, no matter how cheap you sell them for, are useless in places with zero literacy, training, networking, and electrical power. Starting this summer, these kinds of issues are what Bill will be focusing his attention on, as earlier in the talk he announced that he will be shifting his work schedule to work full time for the foundation and part time for Microsoft.

Bill stated that medical research for issues faced by the poor countries of the world is currently in an extremely sad condition. There are millions of children per year that die from diseases that are non-existent in the rich third of the world's countries, yet no one is willing to help because there is no profit to be made. For example, ten times more money goes towards researching baldness than towards researching Malaria, which, unlike baldness, kills millions each year. Bill mentioned that with no money driving innovation in these areas, it is going to take government policies, philanthropy, and people with values to take the initiative.

Bill went on to talk about a specific instance of how groups at Microsoft are making a difference. Ideas such as "Digital Green" where Microsoft is going around to small towns making videos of the successful farmers. TVs and DVD players are then brought to the town centers where others can learn techniques from the successful farmers. Bill mentions that this "Farmer Idol" has created a healthy competition between the farmers, where everyone wants to outdo the others so they can be included in the video. The program has resulted in significant productivity gains for these communities.

Bill concluded his speech by telling the audience of computer science and electrical engineering students to help keep their awareness of the world's poorest third of the population and that with some special effort, they can help with the problems those people are facing.

Afterwards his speech, Bill answered several questions about open source software, the decreasing number of people entering the computer science field, the work of his foundation, software in micro devices, and Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.

Again, the video of the speech is now available, so check it out if you are interested.

Currently, the bzr-svn and bzr-gtk plugins are not available in Gentoo’s package directory. Fortunately, there is exists a bzr Gentoo overlay. If you’ve never used an overlay before, it’s a way to override or add packages to Gentoo’s standard package directory. In this overlay there are a couple common plugins, as well as a patched version of Subversion that is needed for the bzr-svn plugin.

Current packages in the overlay:

• bzr
• bzrtools
• bzr-config
• bzr-dbus
• bzr-gtk
• bzr-rebase
• bzr-svn
• bzr-vimdiff
• paramiko
• subversion (patched version needed for bzr-svn)

Steps for using the overlay:

1. As usual, update your portage tree
   

   emerge --sync
   

2. Make sure you have the following line in your /etc/make.conf
   

   source /usr/portage/local/layman/make.conf
   

3. Get a copy of the overlay from launchpad
   

   bzr branch lp:///bzr-gentoo-overlay
   

4. Make sure you have the path to the overlay set in /usr/portage/local/layman/make.conf
   

   PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/path/to/bzr-gentoo-overlay"
   

5. Now you should be able to update your system, pulling in updates to any currently installed packages from the new overlay.
   

   emerge -uav world
   

6. emerge any of the new packages you want that are now available from the overlay. Note: If you install bzr-svn, make sure to re-install Subversion so that the patched version is used from the overlay.
   

   emerge -av bzr-gtk bzr-svn subversion
   

Just a quick announcement for all the Houston and surrounding area Python lovers out there. There is a Texas Python Regional Unconference being held in a couple weeks (Sept. 15 - 16) at the University of Houston main campus. Registration is free and as simple as adding your name to the registration wiki page. I’ll be there to talk or hack Django with anyone interested. See you there!

A short while ago, I went on a mission to find a better way to hack Django. I needed a way to keep my patches organized and updated. So, in this article I discuss my experiences with a tool I found to help me achieve these goals…

Enter Bazaar, one of the several distributed version control systems that have been getting some hype recently. With so many to choose from, why did I choose Bazaar? Well, maybe it was because of the cool name, or maybe it was the pretty website, or maybe just because it’s written in the language I love — Python. If you are familiar with Subversion, then you will feel right at home with Bazaar. This is because Bazaar uses most of the same commands as Subversion (e.g. svn ci = bzr ci, svn st = bzr st, etc.).

Following this guide for hacking an open source project using bzr, I created a django directory to stash my django hacks. After using svn to check out the latest Django code to a directory named upstream, and turning upstream into a bzr repository too, it was time to start the real work. To re-iterate in command line speak, here is what I did:

Update: The steps below have been updated to reflect changes with bzr commands (versions >=0.15rc2).

mkdir django
cd django
bzr init-repo .            # use "bzr init-repo --trees ." here instead if using a version <0.15rc2
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ upstream
cd upstream
bzr init
echo ".svn" > .bzrignore   # do not store svn metadata in our bzr repo
bzr add
bzr ci -m 'Initial import of Django.'

Usually, when you want to add a new feature to some code, you create a branch. The purpose of these, so called, feature branches is to keep the features separated. Trying to create multiple features in the same branch would just be a big mess. Creating branches in a Subversion repository is easy enough, you just svn cp the code to a new location. It’s the keeping your branch in sync with the trunk that’s not as easy.

With Subversion, you have to keep track of the revisions that have already been merged to your branch and make sure to only merge the changes that haven’t already been merged. Not so with Bazaar; Bazaar keeps track of this for you. A simple bzr merge will pull in upstream changes that have not been merged yet.

So, when I wanted to start working on a patch for ticket #2473, I created a branch:

bzr branch upstream in-and-empty-list-2473

After cd‘ing into my new branch and committing my changes, I created a diff to attach to the ticket with the command:

bzr diff -r branch:../upstream

So far, working with Bazaar has been a breeze. Without it, my Django holiday hacking wouldn’t have been nearly as fun.

A warning for those who might not of noticed the change. About a month ago (in [3360]), an is_authenticated method was added to the User and AnonymousUser classes. These are the classes used for Django’s default authentication system.

Previously, the template code used for displaying content based on whether or not a user had authenticated went something like:

{% if not user.is_anonymous %}
Content for logged in users.
{% else %}
Content for non-logged in users.
{% endif %}

The problem with this code is that if, somehow, the user template variable did not get populated, your template would treat the requesting user as if they were logged in.

Notice that this sort of behavior will be seen for all negative if statements. The template code {% if not variable %} will always evaluate to True if variable doesn’t exist in the context. This is because Django uses the settings.TEMPLATE_STRING_IF_INVALID value for non-existent template variables; by default, TEMPLATE_STRING_IF_INVALID is '', which evaluates to False (and not False is True).

Notice also that even using the template code:

{% if user.is_anonymous %}
Content for non-logged in users.
{% else %}
Content for logged in users.
{% endif %}

(without the "not" ) will not work in this case because if the user variable is non-existent, the requesting user will still be treated as if they were authenticated.

The new recommended way for checking that a requesting user has been authenticated in your templates is:

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
Content for logged in users.
{% else %}
Content for non-logged in users
{% endif %}

Here, if the user template variable were to not exist your template would treat the requesting user as non-authenticated, just as we would want.

Let’s face it, humans are not well adapted to memorizing strings of random characters; and hence, the average computer user is not very good at creating secure passwords. Most users create passwords made up of easy-to-remember words, like the name of a favorite sports team or maybe the name of a significant other. In this article I will show you how you can make Django require better passwords from your users.

Here are the packages you will need:

• CrackLib
• python-crack

Installing the required packages

Step 1: Install CrackLib.
CrackLib is a library for checking that passwords are not easily crackable, or in other words, it makes sure that a password is not based on a simple character pattern or on a dictionary word. CrackLib is a common package that you should be able to find in your distribution’s package manager (or, quite possibly, it could already be installed). Alternatively, you could download the source and follow the installation instructions in the README file. By default, CrackLib installs a python package named cracklib, but it does not have as many features as python-crack. (Redhat does not include the cracklib python package in its cracklib package.)

Step 2 (optional, but recommended): Install extra word dictionaries.
Packaged with CrackLib is a file name cracklib-small. (Some distributions, like RedHat, don’t include this file in their cracklib package, in which case keep reading…) This file is a dictionary of words, simply a long list of words with one word per line. These 50,000 words are a good start, but we can do better. On the CrackLib download page, there is also a package named cracklib-words. After downloading and extracting the package, you will have a single file containing 1,648,379 “words”. Many distributions also have a cracklib-dicts or cracklib-words package that maybe the same or similar to the cracklib-words file on the CrackLib website.

For even more dictionaries, take a look at these word lists. It might also be a good idea to create your own list of words. For example, if you work for a company in the financial industry, it would be a good idea to make a list of words and slang specific to that industry. If you will be dealing with non-english speaking users, it would be a good idea to find some dictionaries in other languages.

Step 3: Create the word indexes that get used by CrackLib.
Now that we have our dictionaries, we need to compile them into an index that CrackLib uses. So, put all your dictionaries in one directory (/usr/share/dict/ is a common place). Depending on your distribution, there will be different commands to run. On gentoo (or if you installed from source), the following (as root) should do the trick:

create-cracklib-dict /usr/share/dict/*

And on RedHat:

mkdict /usr/share/dict/* | packer /usr/lib/cracklib_dict

These commands should create the following files:

/usr/lib/cracklib_dict.hwm
/usr/lib/cracklib_dict.pwd
/usr/lib/cracklib_dict.pwi

Step 4: Install python-crack
If your distribution’s package manager doesn’t include python-crack, then you will have to download and install it yourself. Neither Gentoo nor RedHat include this package, so I will walk you through the install. Download and unpack python-crack. Now, cd into the directory and run

./configure

By default, configure will setup python-crack’s files to be installed to /usr/local. This means that you will have to add /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages to your PYTHONPATH. Alternatively, you could add a --prefix=/usr to the end of the configure command to install python-crack’s files to the usual /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages directory.

If you get this error:

checking for prefix of the default cracklib dictionary database… unknown
configure: error: crack.h does not define CRACKLIB_DICTPATH. Please use DEFAULT_DICTPATH, see ./configure –help

then set the DEFAULT_DICTPATH variable when running configure, like so

./configure DEFAULT_DICTPATH=/usr/lib/cracklib_dict

Now run

make
make install

Now that we are finished installing, lets test out python-crack

$ python
Python 2.4.3 (#1, Jun 28 2006, 23:41:37)
[GCC 3.4.6 (Gentoo 3.4.6-r1, ssp-3.4.5-1.0, pie-8.7.9)] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import crack
>>> crack.VeryFascistCheck(’foo’)
[snip]
ValueError: it is WAY too short
>>> crack.VeryFascistCheck(’foobar’)
[snip]
ValueError: it is based on a dictionary word
>>> crack.VeryFascistCheck(’3#hsad2U>u2u’)
‘3#hsad2U>u2u’

VeryFascistCheck() raises a value error and prints an explaination if the password is not strong enough, otherwise it echos back the password.

Creating the Django Manipulator

from django import forms

class NewUserForm(forms.Manipulator):
    def __init__(self):
        self.fields = [
            forms.TextField(field_name="username", length=20, maxlength=20, is_required=True),
            forms.PasswordField(field_name="password", length=20, maxlength=50, is_required=True,
                validator_list=[isStrongPassword]),
            forms.PasswordField(field_name="confirm_password", length=20, maxlength=50, is_required=True,
                validator_list=[forms.validators.RequiredIfOtherFieldGiven("password", "You must confirm password"),
                                forms.validators.AlwaysMatchesOtherField("password", "Passwords did not match"),]),
        ]

def isStrongPassword(field_data, all_data):
    """Test the password with cracklib to make sure it is strong."""

    import crack
    # Increase the number of credits required from the default of 8 if you want.
    #crack.min_length = 11
    try:
        crack.VeryFascistCheck(field_data)
    except ValueError, message:
        raise forms.validators.ValidationError, "Password %s." % str(message)[3:]

Notice that I added isStrongPassword to the password field’s validator_list. Now you are ready to put the NewUserForm manipulator to use in your you views.py. After running the manipulator’s get_validation_errors(), bad passwords will generate errors like “Password is based on a dictionary word” or “Password does not contain enough DIFFERENT characters.” For help on using manipulators in your view, see the Forms, fields, and manipulators documentation.

If you want to make Django’s built-in authentication require stronger passwords, then you could add validator_list=[isStrongPassword] to the password field of django.contrib.auth.models.User.

Now, go forth and require strong passwords.

Adrian’s recent post on the dev mailing list about the code within django.db.models got me remembering some other “monstrous” functions I’ve seen while browsing the Django source. Guess no more as to the most monstrous functions of Django because below are the results of my previously posted complexity.py script when run on the Django source.

Adjust your window until you can see all of the following line:

#===============================================================================================================#

Here are all 80 of the functions and methods of Django that are of moderate risk or higher:

Showing functions/methods with complexity greater than or equal to 11:

Filename                                    Function/Method                              Lines of Code Complexity
./core/management.py                        get_validation_errors                                  146         78
./db/models/manipulators.py                 AutomaticManipulator.save                               97         43
./contrib/comments/templatetags/comments.py DoCommentForm.__call__                                  51         31
./views/i18n.py                             javascript_catalog                                      68         28
./contrib/admin/views/main.py               change_stage                                            75         28
./utils/translation/trans_real.py           translation                                             62         26
./bin/make-messages.py                      make_messages                                          114         26
./contrib/admin/views/main.py               _get_deleted_objects                                    65         25
./core/handlers/base.py                     BaseHandler.get_response                                50         24
./views/defaults.py                         shortcut                                                40         23
./contrib/auth/create_superuser.py          createsuperuser                                         64         23
./core/management.py                        inspectdb                                               84         23
./contrib/admin/views/doc.py                model_detail                                            64         22
./templatetags/i18n.py                      do_block_translate                                      41         21
./core/management.py                        syncdb                                                  61         21
./core/management.py                        execute_from_command_line                               74         21
./views/generic/create_update.py            update_object                                           54         20
./contrib/admin/views/decorators.py         staff_member_required                                   44         20
./utils/simplejson/decoder.py               scanstring                                              41         19
./contrib/admin/views/main.py               add_stage                                               51         19
./core/validators.py                        RelaxNGCompact.__call__                                 51         19
./db/models/query.py                        lookup_inner                                           107         19
./db/models/query.py                        delete_objects                                          48         19
./template/__init__.py                      TokenParser.value                                       61         18
./utils/simplejson/decoder.py               JSONObject                                              37         18
./utils/decorators.py                       decorator_from_middleware                               25         18
./contrib/comments/templatetags/comments.py DoGetCommentList.__call__                               31         18
./contrib/comments/views/comments.py        post_comment                                            66         18
./utils/translation/trans_real.py           get_language_from_request                               40         17
./core/mail.py                              send_mass_mail                                          31         17
./views/generic/create_update.py            create_object                                           38         16
./views/static.py                           serve                                                   28         16
./core/servers/fastcgi.py                   runfastcgi                                              56         16
./core/management.py                        get_sql_delete                                          49         16
./db/models/query.py                        QuerySet.__getitem__                                    38         16
./utils/simplejson/encoder.py               floatstr                                                17         15
./utils/simplejson/encoder.py               JSONEncoder._iterencode_dict                            49         15
./views/generic/create_update.py            delete_object                                           36         15
./contrib/comments/templatetags/comments.py DoCommentCount.__call__                                 25         15
./db/models/fields/related.py               create_many_related_manager                             73         15
./db/models/query.py                        QuerySet._get_sql_clause                                54         15
./middleware/common.py                      CommonMiddleware.process_request                        22         14
./template/__init__.py                      Parser.parse                                            35         14
./template/defaulttags.py                   do_if                                                   33         14
./template/defaulttags.py                   cycle                                                   25         14
./views/generic/date_based.py               object_detail                                           43         14
./contrib/comments/views/comments.py        post_free_comment                                       41         14
./contrib/admin/templatetags/admin_list.py  items_for_result                                        59         14
./contrib/admin/views/main.py               get_javascript_imports                                  23         14
./contrib/admin/views/main.py               ChangeList.get_query_set                                39         14
./core/handlers/base.py                     BaseHandler.load_middleware                             32         14
./db/models/base.py                         Model.__init__                                          33         14
./template/defaulttags.py                   SsiNode.render                                          21         13
./views/generic/list_detail.py              object_list                                             46         13
./contrib/auth/handlers/modpython.py        authenhandler                                           28         13
./db/models/fields/__init__.py              Field.get_manipulator_fields                            24         13
./db/models/base.py                         ModelBase.__new__                                       26         13
./dispatch/saferef.py                       safeRef                                                 65         12
./dispatch/dispatcher.py                    _removeOldBackRefs                                      20         12
./template/loader.py                        find_template_source                                    26         12
./template/defaulttags.py                   IfNode.render                                           21         12
./utils/timesince.py                        timesince                                               34         12
./views/generic/date_based.py               archive_month                                           36         12
./core/management.py                        _get_sql_model_create                                   44         12
./conf/__init__.py                          Settings.__init__                                       26         12
./db/models/fields/__init__.py              DateTimeField.to_python                                 14         12
./db/models/related.py                      RelatedObject.get_list                                  21         12
./db/models/options.py                      Options.has_field_type                                  16         12
./dispatch/dispatcher.py                    connect                                                 34         11
./template/defaultfilters.py                pluralize                                               18         11
./utils/simplejson/decoder.py               JSONArray                                               21         11
./views/generic/list_detail.py              object_detail                                           33         11
./views/generic/date_based.py               archive_week                                            31         11
./views/generic/date_based.py               archive_day                                             34         11
./contrib/redirects/middleware.py           RedirectFallbackMiddleware.process_response             17         11
./contrib/admin/templatetags/log.py         DoGetAdminLog.__call__                                  11         11
./db/backends/postgresql/base.py            DatabaseWrapper.cursor                                  21         11
./db/backends/postgresql_psycopg2/base.py   DatabaseWrapper.cursor                                  21         11
./db/models/fields/related.py               ReverseSingleRelatedObjectDescriptor.__get__            19         11
./db/models/query.py                        get_where_clause                                        18         11

We all know that maintanence is the biggest cost of software. You can keep the maintanence cost of your program down by writing readable code. More readable code means faster bug fixing, which leads to more time for adding new bugs.

One measure of readability is cyclomatic complexity, a software metric that measures a program’s complexity based on the number of distinct paths or branches in the code. Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute defines the following complexity risk levels:

I have written a python script that take these complexity scripts a bit further by printing the most complex functions/methods in an entire python package specified on the command line. Save the following as complexity.py

#!/usr/bin/python

"""
Find the most complex functions/methods in your python code.

This program is offered freely into the public domain by
Gary Wilson (gary.wilson@gmail.com).

This code requires the complexity shell scripts found at
http://journyx.com/curt/complexity.html
Download the four files and then specify the path to the
"complexity" script below, as PATH_TO_COMPLEXITY.

Note: To get the scripts to work for me I had to change the line
open (T,"|$dn/tab|sort -n +5") || die "no tab?";
to
open (T,"|$dn/tab|sort -n -k 6") || die "no tab?";
This line appears once in "complexdef" and twice in "complexdefclass".

Example uses:

Search the current directory.
python complexity.py

Search the mypythonpackage package.
python complexity.py ~/mypythonpackage

You can also specify multiple files and/or directories.
python complexity.py ~/mypythonpackage /src/myscript.py

This script will search for all files ending in ".py" within the
paths specified on the command line.  All functions and methods will
be sorted by decreasing complexity and printed along with the
filename and number of lines of code.

By default, this script will print out all functions/methods found.
If you would rather only see functions/methods with a certain
complexity or above, then change the COMPLEXITY_LEVEL setting below.
"""

## User Settings ###########################################
PATH_TO_COMPLEXITY = '~/complex/complexity'
# Only show functions/methods with a complexity greater than or
# equal to COMPLEXITY_LEVEL.  Setting to 0 will print all functions/methods.
COMPLEXITY_LEVEL = 0
############################################################

import sys
import re
import os
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

def complexity_for_file(filename):
    cmd = '%s %s' % (PATH_TO_COMPLEXITY, filename)
    p = Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE, close_fds=True)
    errors = p.stderr.read()
    if errors:
        sys.exit(errors)
    tuples = []
    reached_functions = False
    function_header = re.compile('Funcname|Classless_Function')
    for line in p.stdout.readlines():
        if function_header.match(line):
            reached_functions = True
        if reached_functions:
            fields = line.split()
            # We don't want the header lines.
            try:
                int(fields[5])
            except:
                continue
            # filename, function name, lines of code, and complexity.
            tuples.append((filename, fields[0], fields[4], fields[5]))
    return tuples

def add_to_functions(functions, dir, filenames):
    for filename in filenames:
        if filename.endswith('.py'):
            functions += complexity_for_file(os.path.join(dir, filename))

def get_column_widths(function_tuples):
    widths = []
    if not function_tuples:
        return widths
    for col in range(len(function_tuples[0])):
        widths.append(max([len(ft[col]) for ft in function_tuples]))
    return widths

def get_print_parms(widths, function_tuple):
    parms = []
    for x in range(len(widths)):
        parms.append(widths[x])
        parms.append(function_tuple[x])
    return tuple(parms)

def main():
    function_tuples = []
    paths = sys.argv[1:] or os.path.curdir
    for path in paths:
        path = os.path.expanduser(path)
        if os.path.isdir(path):
            os.path.walk(path, add_to_functions, function_tuples)
        elif os.path.isfile(path):
            function_tuples += complexity_for_file(path)
    # Filter out functions less than desired complexity level.
    function_tuples = [t for t in function_tuples if int(t[-1]) >= COMPLEXITY_LEVEL]
    # Sort by complexity.
    function_tuples.sort(key=lambda t: int(t[-1]))
    function_tuples.reverse()
    print "\nShowing functions/methods with complexity greater than or equal to %s:\n" % COMPLEXITY_LEVEL
    if function_tuples:
        headers = ('Filename', 'Function/Method', 'Lines of Code', 'Complexity')
        widths = get_column_widths(function_tuples + [headers])
        print '%-*s %-*s %*s %*s' % get_print_parms(widths, headers)
        for ft in function_tuples:
            print '%-*s %-*s %*s %*s' % get_print_parms(widths, ft)
    else:
        print "None."

if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.exit(main())

I sure wish there were news sites in my city that didn’t suck. How happy I would be if I could have sites such as the Django-powered 49abcnews or LJWorld to give my attention to each evening. Instead, I’m stuck with crappy news site after crappy news site after crappy news site. Popups, popovers, registrations, and URLs that make you cringe…

http://sports.statesman.com/merge/tsnform.aspx?c=statesman&page=mlb/news/index.aspx?sport=AA
http://www.kvue.com/news/top/stories/051906cckrKvurescape.2b620a4.html

Oh my!

To be fair, Statesman.com (and its Austin360.com entertainment site) is now much more pleasing on the eye due to a major redesign last December. The redesign seems to have paid off, with the Statesman’s web site duo recently receiving the top ranking by the NAA for the greatest local reach among large newspaper sites. With a monthly readership of 31 percent of Austinites, it edged out The Washington Post (27 percent) and the San Diego Union-Tribune (23 percent).

In my mind though, Statesman.com fails to deliver the news. All those headlines on the home page are just a tease to get me to register. I just want to be able to read the news and find Rolexes in supermarkets without getting hassled. Is that so much to ask?

LJWorld gets it. There’s plenty of content here just begging to be Django-ed. With Austin being the state’s capital, land of the silicon hills, a smart place to live, home to one of the largest universities in the U.S. (with plenty of college girls making out (04:43)), and then there’s always the Live Music Capital of the World bit. Austin news sites don’t get it.