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Good tools
Published April 5, 2013
Apparently we’re in one of those every-couple-of-years cycles of everybody and their brother rushing to adopt/encourage others to adopt the hot new programmers’ text editor. This time around it’s Sublime Text, which, though I haven’t personally tried it out, does seem to at least be a very nice editor. If you were just starting out and needed a quality text editor, I think you could do a lot worse than Sublime Text. However, I would still, and will still, recommend that you also at least try ...
Persistence
Published January 29, 2013
The last couple weeks have been rough, on a personal level. Nothing I can’t get through with a little help (and thankfully, there is help), but nothing particularly fun to get through, either. I’ve spent a lot of time going over and thinking about some old issues. Part of that has involved digging up a bunch of things I wrote years ago; a minor crisis occurred this past weekend when I tried to power up an old laptop — its hard drive is the only place certain archived emails ...
reddit takes a new direction
Published February 13, 2012
Several months ago, reddit shook with the news that longtime subreddit /r/jailbait — dedicated to, well, you can probably guess — had been shut down by its own moderators. Yesterday, reddit shook again, with the news that a variety of other subreddits, arranged on similar topical lines, were being shut down by reddit’s admins.
Predictably, this has caused a shitstorm. It has also caused calls for bans of other subreddits which have nothing to do with sexual fetishes involving children. There are, of course, plenty of subreddits devoted to other ...
Apropos
Published November 19, 2011
Abraham Lincoln, remarks for the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg battlefield, November 19, 1863:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as ...
Napoleon's battle plan
Published August 21, 2011
So, right up-front, let me just say that May is one damn fine month to quit your job.
As previously noted, I’d been in rather an epic funk, and once my last day was over and all the paperwork was filed, I went on a mission to spend my summer doing anything other than sitting in front of a computer. I traveled a bit, saw friends both old and new, indulged some of my non-tech-related hobbies, read some books and was an all-around lazy bum. But August is growing ...
Quo Vadimus?
Published April 27, 2011
I’ve been in a rather epic funk for quite a while now, and for most of it I didn’t know why. I just knew that I didn’t really feel motivation to do much of anything. No motivation to deal with things at work, no motivation to work on Django or any of the open-source projects I’m involved in, no motivation at all. I’ve basically been treading water. This wouldn’t have been surprising if it had happened, say, last year or the year before (both ...
A stateful problem
Published December 24, 2010
So, this week we dropped some security updates, which you should definitely check out if you haven’t seen them yet.
We also released the first 1.3 beta, which is an important milestone since it means 1.3 is now feature-frozen and will get only bugfix and polishing work until the final release. Quite a few useful things made it in between alpha and beta, and a couple just barely slipped in under the wire. One feature in particular is near and dear to me, since I’ve been ...
The news done broke
Published November 2, 2010
(or, “Dear Louise…”)
Once upon a time, Jacob wrote a wonderful insider’s view of how our election coverage works, and noted that basically the whole thing’s held together with baling twine and duct tape. That was 2006; it’s now 2010 and midterm elections are upon us again. As I write this I’m actually at my desk at the Journal-World office, and for the first time tonight nothing’s actually broken. So I’d like to update Jacob’s post with the story of how we do ...
django-FUNserver
Published November 1, 2010
Step 1: pip install django-funserver
Step 2: Add “funserver” to your INSTALLED_APPS.
Step 3: Run manage.py funserver.
For best results, don’t do this on a real server.
Code is here, for those interested.
On branching
Published February 2, 2010
Back in 2008 I posted some rambling thoughts on distributed version-control systems, largely in response to the huge amount of hype surrounding such tools (particularly git). Then at PyCon last year, amid even more hype as it was announced that Python will switch from Subversion to a distributed tool, I gave a lightning talk reflecting on what I’d picked up and seen during the intervening eight months.
It’s now been a year and a half since that original blog post; in that time I’ve switched all of ...
django-registration
Published October 14, 2009
So, life has been eventful lately. There was DjangoCon, which was awesome even though I came away deeply unhappy with how my talk turned out; due to a lot of hectic things going on, it fell far below the standard I usually like to enforce for myself. I’ve got a couple things cooking for PyCon, though, which will hopefully make up for it. Things are starting to ramp up for the Django 1.2 development cycle, which is looking to be chock full of awesomeness. There’s quite a ...
Let's talk about WSGI
Published August 10, 2009
Recently Armin Ronacher (whose blog you should be reading if you do anything at all involving Python and the web) has published a couple of good articles poking at the current state of WSGI, the standard interface for Python web applications. Some of his comments dovetail nicely into concerns I’ve been trying to put into words for a while now, so I’m glad he’s posting on the subject and providing some context.
In short, I’ve come to have some rather severe misgivings about WSGI — both as ...
On "magic", once again
Published July 23, 2009
So it seems Giles Bowkett is upset about use of the word “magic”. I’m happy to agree with the general consensus from various fora that the specific article he’s complaining about is, well, pretty much content-free. I could read that post over and over and still have no idea what actual things the author liked about Django or didn’t like about Rails. But I’ve pretty much learned to ignore content-free hype, and that’s what I did in that case.
I’m also quite happy to ...
When licenses attack
Published July 14, 2009
Jacob posted twenty questions about the GPL. Zed followed with an explanation of why he placed Lamson under the GPL. This has provoked some discussion around the internets, some of which I have read and some of which I’ve ignored.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of noise drowning out useful discussion, much of it centered around alleging — directly or indirectly — that if you ask questions about how the GPL interacts with other licenses, you must be trying to “get around” the GPL, or take someone’s GPL code and ...
In pace requiescat
Published July 8, 2009
So the charter of the XHTML Working Group will be allowed to expire without renewal. This is a source of consternation for some, who feel that the W3C is perhaps sending conflicting messages — how long until we find out that HTML5 isn’t really the future, either? — and, perhaps, smug “I told you so” satisfaction for others.
I have little to add to either of those camps, so what follows here is nothing more than my rambling, disconnected thoughts on the news.
XHTML had it coming
In a way ...