Entries in November 2006

My site is smarter than I am

Published November 22, 2006

Looking through my stats today, I found an incoming link from a blog written entirely in Chinese. Now, I don’t read Chinese (I know about half a dozen words of Mandarin, but couldn’t begin to pronounce them with the right tones), so I ran it through Babelfish and found that this person was — apparently — commenting on how “comforting” my site was to him.

This left me somewhat befuddled, until I went back and ...

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Django tips: get the most out of generic views

Published November 16, 2006

Recently at work I had the chance to revisit an application I’d written fairly early on in my tenure at World Online; I was still getting used to doing real Django development and to some of the quirks of our development environment, and ended up writing a lot more code than I needed to, so I was happy to be able to take a couple days and rewrite large chunks of the application to ...

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Comment problems

Published November 12, 2006

So it seems that something’s broken somewhere in all the hacks I do to the comment system, because every attempt to submit a comment is now met with AkismetError: missing required argument.

I’m working on it.

Update: commenting still won’t work, but apparently I’m not the only person running into this bug. I can’t find any notes regarding changes to the Akismet API, but that feels like the most obvious ...

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Programming tips: learn optimization strategies

Published November 5, 2006

Recently I spent a little time talking about the tradeoffs between “concise” code and readable code in Python. Throughout that entry, I was using as an example a simple function which calculates numbers in the Fibonacci sequence; here’s one variation: 

def fib(n):
    if n < 2:
        return n
    return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

The Fibonacci sequence is a classic example from introductory programming materials, because it teaches recursion, and recursion is an ...

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Django tips: auto-populated fields

Published November 2, 2006

One of these days I’m going to run out of frequently-asked Django questions to answer. But today isn’t that day, so let’s look at one of the most common questions people ask: how do you set up a model with one or more fields that never show up in add/edit forms, and get automatically populated with some specific value?

A simple example

Let’s say you’re writing a to-do list ...

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