Visions and voices fade into nothing as your mind moves on a gurney from sleep to non-sleep.

Already half-forgotten ideas melt away as you drift into lucidity.

Your body clock rings a silent alarm as you cycle through the calendar in your mind's eye. "Is it Sunday? Monday?"

It's Tuesday.

Fear grips your wrist, cold, steely. You know you should be up by 7, but it's already light outside.

You pick up your mobile, whose alarm hasn't sounded since the preceding Friday, and notice with a fresh, heart-stopping stab of fear that it's gone 8:04.

You're late.

Bugger.

A little over 2 weeks ago, I took part in Django Dash, a 48-hour contest for Django developers. I built Transphorm, a site to help people make and track changes in their life. The results are in, and... drumroll please...

I didn't win ;)

I did however, come joint 6th with the Three Blind Mice, and was the highest placing solo developer (and the only one-man-team on the winners' roster). Comments from the judging panel included:

“Impressive work for a weekend and especially for one person. Great job!”

I got high scores for polish, code quality and design, giving me a combined score of 7.67 from the three judges.

Big thanks to Adam, Jeff and Travis who looked over the code and got it running, and everyone who kept me company on the #djangodash IRC channel, and on Twitter.

It was my first forray into using the Git versioning system, and distributing Python code with requirements files for ease-of-deployment. There were a few bugs and kinks, in UI and backend which I fixed after the deadline but which weren't counted in the judging. I've now moved the site onto SVN so I can manage it more easily, but you can still take a look at the GitHub repository to sneak a peek at my code.

It was an exausting couple of days, and only the start for what I hope will be a worthwhile project. A few new signups have trickled through, and if you fancy checking it out yourself, please do so; I'd love your feedback.

Take a look at the other runners and riders, many of whom have come up with some really innovative and useful products. Well done!

Real men punctuate correctly, or so claims a black-on-white t-shirt carrying a magazine's logo. Real men also, it seems, dress as women, vicars and Mayors, all in the name of conjuring up in our minds the Village of Dirty Bristow.

In a "space" somewhere in Cheapside - I have no idea what this place actually does as its day job - Jon Bounds and Danny Smith, and many more from within and without the Twitter community rigged up a summer fête to celebrate the launch of issue one of a frankly beautiful magazine. But onto that later.

I'd not drunk for four weeks as part of my efforts to shed some pounds, but happily fell off the wagon in spectacular, over-exuberant style. It was great to see so many friendly faces again, to be nagged to finish some of the things I'd started (namely the Deadlink podcast) and to speak drunkenly on the Internet:

Now, onto the thing itself...

Not since my parents bought into the cartoon TV franchises of the early 90s had I held a magazine with such interest. I'm really looking forward to sifting through its pages, having already admired the typeface, design, composition and incredible artwork.

It's probably the fact that I know so many of the contributors, and trust the editorial style of Jon and Danny that I know I'll be happy to buy future issues, but I'd like to think that, if I had found out about it another way and didn't know those involved, I'd still feel compelled to pick up a copy.

Good luck to Jon and Danny. Dirty Bristow's something really special, and I'm already looking forward to issue two: "Beast".

Buy the first issue now.

It's a shameful paradox that the framework that openly mocks PHP is documented most thoroughly outside of djangoproject.com, in WordPress blogs. Is this because there's no famous 5 minute blog thingy for Django as there is for Ruby on Rails?

I love telling people about Django, and how easy it is to work with once it's up and running. (Python's a really easy language to learn I think, because it's so easy to read.) But all my evangelism is cancelled out by the fact that people seem to find it easier to setup a WordPress blog to talk about their Django work. This is a great shame, and it's one of the reasons I built Dolphy.

Besides allowing developers to host multiple sites on one codebase and database - but let them occupy separate spaces in memory - I've also tried to create a really good blogging app, complete with the obvious categorisation, commenting and tagging, but also the behinds-the-scenes stuff like pinging and trackbacks. It has a blogroll, plugins, widgetised areas (although the UI for this is hopeless at the moment), and of course static, hierarchical pages.

The more Django enthusiasts host on Django, the more viable a platform it becomes, which all helps in the ongoing struggle to kill PHP.

Worth thinking about, eh? I'm just sayin' :)

At midnight on Saturday 14th of August, I'll embark on a 48 hour solo hackathon to produce an app for this year's Django Dash competition. I'm really excited.

I'd heard about it in one or two places, and thought it was something I'd needed to physically attend, so had never bothered, but a quick look at the website told me I was wrong. I immediately signed up - after getting my head around the Git versioning system - and my solo team will be producing an app to help people make a single pledge to change something in their lives, whether that be to stop smoking, lose weight, establish a better work/life balance, or anything.

I don't want to say much more as I have no idea how much I'll accomplish in 48 hours, but if Hackitude '09 is anything to go by, I'll hopefully have something useful to show. And the idea was dreamed up in about 5 minutes.

The rules state that I can't start any development work until 6pm on Friday (midnight CDT), so bar the first commit to my new Git repository (an empty README file), there's nothing to see or speak of just yet.

The site will be called transphorm.me (DNS updates still pending), and you can keep track of the project - assuming I have time to update it - on the project page on this site, or browse the code in the Git repository.

Wish me luck!

Dolphy, my burgeoning CMS has the facility, with a collection of fairly simple template tags to combine and minify all of the CSS and JavaScript necessary to power the UI for a page, and then let Apache do the job of serving it.

But it seems like All Buttons Pressed have a more pluggable solution. django-mediagenerator is a system for "bundling" together static files, and (I think) saving them to the MEDIA_ROOT directory so that Apache can serve them.

Bundles are defined in the project's settings file, and triggered via the {% include_media %} tag.

If you're running your own Django installation and looking for a quick way to bundle and minify your static media, this could be just the ticket. Dolphy's system of "enqueuing" media (which is a little similar to that in WordPress) has a couple of potential benefits over this, but its code is tied up with many of the other modules that make up the CMS.

If you want to take a peek though, you can check out the source.

Walk about 100 yards from the bottom of Newhall Place in the Jewellery Quarter, down a set of steps and through a stone-clad passageway, and if you're lucky you'll hear the enticing sounds of piano and sax drifting from the tiny bar room.

On Thursday, the Substrakt team decamped to the Jewellery Quarter for a strategy away day. We had a massively productive day, ending the evening with a curry before heading off for one last drink in the Vaults, an intimidatingly subterranean nightspot where the drinks aren't fast in coming, but are delivered with a dash of charm.

Almost as soon as I walked through the archway into the bar that was no bigger than an average living room, I was hit by a wall of improvised jazz. Not my cup of tea, but thoroughly enthralling to someone who loves to see people jam. It wasn't prepared - I don't think the musicians knew each other - and little of it was note perfect, but it embodied a spirit which took my breath away, and led to a good deal of shirt tugging from my colleagues who were trying to get my attention.

Although I only managed two drinks in the place, before thinking it was best to shoot off to bed and thus to work the next morning, I felt an unparalleled feeling of relaxation. Sat drinking whiskey with Chris Ivens, in one of the small vaults which give the bar its name, I felt at peace, and not a little envious that the people of the Jewellery Quarter could be treated to such a romantic and eye-wateringly cool venue.

Thanks to the barman for the banter, and to the pianist and saxophonist who let me have a couple of minutes to indulge myself and bang out a few shaky chords.

Photo by Chris Ivens

And thanks to everyone at Substrakt for a top, top day.

A week or so ago I started learning Objective-C and getting more familiar with Xcode. It's a good platform, well documented with loads of resources, but my brain just doesn't work that way anymore.

As a former programmer, I used to revel in the sheer act of writing code. But since the Web became my sole platform, I began to think more creatively, and with more of an eye on the finished product, the "solution", rather than the problem.

As I moved onto open source platforms - dabbling first in Rails - I became more invested in rapid development platforms, which allowed me to think about the end result, not get bogged down in the nuts and bolts (which, up until a few years ago, I would have enjoyed.)

Now, if I can't get a working app written in an evening, I get frustrated. This is what made me steer clear of the iPhone as a platform, for so long. That is until I started playing with Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile, the free toolkit that lets you write native iPhone, Android and, soon BlackBerry apps, using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which then compiles into the relevant language for each device.

UPDATE: A bit more digging around proves this not to be true. It actually creates JavaScript which is interpreted on the phone. This causes a ("small", apparently) hit over the native alternative, so it's up to you to choose whether it's a valid trade-off. For me, who won't be building technically demanding apps, the time I save is much greater than the time that will be lost interpreting the code on-demand.

There's one massive benefit to this, apart from simple rapidity of development. It means you can become a little more platform agnostic, whilst still offering a native user experience (ie: using the buttons and switches that come with the phone's UI) and only having effectively to develop one app. What's not to like? ;)

There was a storm recently over Apple's latest Terms of Service release, which has been interpreted and misinterpreted more often than the Bible, but if apps use the APIs that Apple provide, and don't crash - or have the name Adobe anywhere near - I'm hoping there should be little standing in my, and other rapid development fans' (or "lazy bastards" if you will) way.

It's not to everyone's taste, and there will certainly be people who will say that I'm doing it wrong, by not using the tools that thousands of other developers have grasped. And that's a pair point, but if Appcelerator can democratise the mobile development platform and open the door to more "developers" rather than "programmers" (that's not intended as a slight, by the way, just a distinction between mindsets in my opinion), we'll see even more apps that can be built quickly, and not tied to a single platform. And that's just full of win.

Over the past few months, Nick Booth has been busying himself with a website to bring together elements of work he's been doing for the last 18 months or so. Social Media Surgery Plus is a website that helps people find groups of people who can help them understand how the social web can affect and improve their not-for-profit organisation.

Last year I cast away my usual shyness - yes, I am shy - and became a "surgeon" for a night, at an early event held at the BVSC in Digbeth. Mostly I just chatted to some people from Kings Heath, but I had a good time and completely understood the valur of the event. For months, the surgeries lived online at Paradise Circus, but now they have their own dedicated home, built by Josh Hart.

If you're unsure, a social media surgery is a relatively informal way of sitting down with someone who can help you understand anything from how to filter spam comments on a blog, to developing a Twitter strategy. Anyone, as long as they represent a not-for-profit or public sector organisation, is welcome. SMS+ is a really easy way to find these events.

It's still in beta, but the signup process works (it's really friendly too), and finding surgeries to attend is a doddle.

Well done to Nick, Andrew and Josh, and also a big "yay" to Claire Hartley at Substrakt who created the SMS+ brand!

Just spent the last couple of hours playing with the iPhone 4 camera, getting an idea about its auto-exposure, auto-focus and flash. Here's a slideshow 

I started off first by testing the depth-of-field. I should point out that these aren't tests that push the camera to its limits, or even necessarily show its use in common situations, but hopefully it gives you a broad idea of its capabilities and possible shortcomings.

The main "subject: of the first photo was the fork. I don't know anything about cameras or photography bar a couple of very rudimentary rules, but I'm guessing the lens has a very short depth of field. Is that right, or is it just that the objects are too close together to get a real sense of depth?

The second photo features a stainless steel Blue Snowball mic, and a bunch of bananas in a holder. Here I wanted the mic in focus, but because of the difference in light between the front and rear of the room (I guess), the brightest object ended up being the trees beyond the mic. This may also be because the phone got confused, and thought that the object centred in the little square was the trees, not the mic.

The third and fourth photos are roughly the same composition, however I set the camera to focus in on the framed painting in the former, and my trainers in the latter. Because the picture is in a darker corner of the room, the exposure was increased, meaning in the third photo my shoes are bleached out, whereas in the fourth image, my shoes are nice and crisp, with decent blacks.

Image five is a rose growing up my downstairs neighbour's back wall. Here the trees behind the rose are much further away, but there's still very little difference in terms of sharpness.

Next, I tested the low-light capabilities of the camera.

With the curtain closed, the guitar in photo six was the main focus, but the automatic flash lit up the whole shot, dampening the contrast but making sure everything was visible. The same could be said about number seven.

The phone determined that there was enough light in my eighth image to negate the flash - some light may have come from my monitor however - and so we end up with a reasonably crisp, if slightly over-exposed image of a cat who I swear is alive and well :)

So that's The ninth photo is my favourite. Here the flash added allowed a lot of light in, and so you end up with quite a vibrant image of what is actually not that colourful a scene, when viewed by the naked eye.

The last photo was taken again with the automatic flash, but so much light has appeared to bounce off the wall that the hands of the clock aren't completely visible.

So that's about it for my photography tour of the iPhone 4 :) For some real iPhone depth-of-field work, check out Karmadillo's blog post on fitting a macro lens to the phone.