So, lately I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 inside of Parallels on my Mac. I have really enjoyed using Gnome 3. It is a vast improvement over the Gnome 2. The reason I left Linux and started using a Mac was specifically the desktop experience. I loved Linux up until around the year 2007 and I started using a Mac then because I realized the desktop wasn't going anywhere. Gnome was stuck in the 1990's and KDE is just simply an odd experience, not very intuitive and kind of reminds me of a bubble gum pop star, but without the sex appeal.

So, fast forward to today and now I find Gnome to be completely usable. I love the Activities pane. I love how it manages virtual desktops. I love the "dock" and how it only shows up in Activities mode. I love the quick search Gnome-Do like application finder. I love the notifications and how well some apps like Empathy uses it. I'm pretty happy so far... I'm going to run it in Parallels for a while at home and at work and if I find myself happy enough, I may switch back to Ubuntu full time... although, not on the MacBook Air. It's kind of a miserable experience installing it natively on one...

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Update (2011/12/03): I have since changed my prompt and got a little crazy with it all and took concepts from Phil's zsh prompt and took the git stuff from Brian Carper's site. It's totally going against what I have stated below (wanting something simple), however, I really liked these concepts and here is what I came up with:

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Here's another small and easy Django tip, but one that I had a hard time finding an answer to when I first got started... I came from a Ruby on Rails and Groovy/Grails background before starting with Django. One thing both of those frameworks have is the concept of environments. Depending on what you're doing, you can have one of 3 environments going:

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This may be something that most people know, but I had a hard time tracking this down for some reason.

I have a couple of custom template tags that do things like get twitter feeds or my github commits. Some of them are simple inclusion tags and don't need this, however, I do have one tag that gets some data and spits it out formatted. Now, I know this may not be the best possible solution to the problem and I will eventually go back and fix this code to do something else, but for now, I wanted to make sure that the data that was being formatted inside of the template tag was being escaped so that I could avoid any XSS issues that could potentially arise.

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