• Question (Q): Why Django build-in Web Server (development server) works VERY SLOWLY on Windows 7 ? And how to fix this?
  Answer (A): seems it’s all about DNS… To fix this just open C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file (in notepad for example) and uncomment (i.e. remove “#”) in the following line: 127.0.0.1 localhost

• to be continue…

Some interesting Django related links:

- Django Project Home

• http://www.djangosites.org – list of Django sites
• http://pinaxproject.com – a platform for rapidly developing websites
• http://cloud27.com – site that was build using Pinax
• http://www.django-cms.org/ – Django CMS
• http://code.google.com/p/django-tagging/ – A generic tagging application for Django projects, which allows association of a number of tags with anyModel instance and makes retrieval of tags simple.
• http://djangopluggables.com/ – 3-rd party Django applications
• http://www.djangosnippets.org/ – useful “snippets” of reusable Django code

Installation of Python Image Library (PIL)

It will be a problems with PIL installation on  Windows 7 64 bit, so you will need to install library from source code:

1. Download PIL library source code from http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
2. Unpack it to any  folder, for example C:\PIL
3. Run in command prompt (cmd):

   cd c:\PIL
   python setup.py install

   This will install library, but without support for TKINTER, JPEG, ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) and FREETYPE2 (i.e. actually without anything )

So let’s add support for at least JPEG and PNG. To do this, you will need to download following libraries:

1. libtiff – download sources (zip) from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tiff.htm
2. zlib – download sources (zip) from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/zlib.htm
3. libjpg – download sources (zip) from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/jpeg.htm

Following blog posts will help you to continue with installation:

• http://www.wiredfool.com/2005/10/29/how-to-build-the-python-imaging-library-for-windows (in case if you want to use Visual Studio to build libraries)
• http://boodebr.org/main/python/build-windows-extensions (in case if you going to use open source software like MinGW or Cygwin to build libraries)

Notes:

1. Possible that you will need to remove

    include  

   from some *.h source files as this needed to be included only on Unix (ok, at least not on Windows)
   For example you will need to delete such line from zconf.h in zlib sources before try to run nmake for zlib.

2. Don’t forget to set PIL library pointers (in setup.py of PIL) to point to the locations where you put zlib, libjpg and libtiff. If you forget to setup  - PIL will not found them and you will get what I describe in the beging of post – I.e. nothing .
   This is for example what you need to set for zlib in setup.py of PIL in case if you copy zlib sources to c:\PIL\zlib folder (I assume that you unzip PIL into c:\PIL here):

   ZLIB_ROOT = './zlib'

3. You also can found yourself with finding all the 32-bit times “__time32_t” and changing it to “time_t” for 64-bit conversion