Published September 30, 2007
When Steve Jobs announced the iPod touch at the beginning of the month, I knew I wanted one: it looked like the perfect little device for my assorted mobile needs. I spent a week or so thinking it over, then placed an order, and Friday morning as I was stepping out of the shower a FedEx delivery guy rang my doorbell to deliver it. I’ve spent the last couple of days playing with it, and so far I’m quite happy. What follows are my observations, which may or ...
Published September 22, 2007
In the grand tradition of providing answers to frequently-asked questions from the django-users mailing list and the #django IRC channel, I’d like to tackle something that’s fast becoming the most frequently-asked question: how do you write standalone scripts which make use of Django components?
At first glance, this isn’t a terribly hard thing to do: Django’s just plain Python, and all of its components can — in theory — be imported and used just like any other Python modules. But the thing that trips most people up is ...
Published September 19, 2007
For those of you who are using/following it, I’ve just pushed out django-registration 0.3. The basic workflow of the application is still the same:
But under the hood quite a few things have been rearranged to make the application cleaner and more extensible, and there have been a couple of backwards-incompatible changes for anyone using an older version. Here’s how it breaks down.
You’ll now need ...
Published September 16, 2007
I don’t know whether anyone else is going to continue on for the rest of the night, but I’m exhausted and I’ve got to be at work in the morning.
Today, for me, consisted of reading every open ticket in Trac and doing as much triage as I could; a lot of duplicates got closed, a lot of similar issues got consolidated, a lot of ancient tickets which have either been fixed or invalidated were marked as such.
Some highlights of the last 36 hours:
Published September 15, 2007
Wow.
So the “official” Django sprint day is over, though (in my time zone, at least) work actually started yesterday and looks like it’ll keep on going into tomorrow. Already the amount of activity (as measured by the Trac timeline) is simply astounding, and that’s likely to continue; there have been about 150 commits so far, and I couldn’t even begin to count the number of patches that have been filed and the number of tickets which have been triaged.
I got a bit of a late ...
Published September 6, 2007
In a few days it’ll be the weekend and I’ll (hopefully) have a bit of news regarding updates to the various applications I spun out during the process of rewriting all the code I’m using here, as well as the first official release of the blogging application I’ve developed (you can probably already find it if you know where to look, but for now it’s neither documented nor supported). In the meantime, there are a few minor and miscellaneous — but still useful — tricks I’ve ...
Published September 4, 2007
Last week while I was still on blog hiatus, Adam Gomaa wrote up a pretty constructive summary of why he prefers SQLAlchemy over the default Django ORM, and documented how he made SQLAlchemy a little less painful to use by writing a set of helper functions before moving on to announcing that he’s writing his own declarative layer — borrowing somewhat from Django’s model syntax — on top of SQLAlchemy.
I went back and read a few of Adam’s other posts, and generally I like what I see; he ...
Published September 4, 2007
As of yesterday, this site is served from a Joyent Accelerator, running Django via Apache/mod_python backed by a PostgreSQL database. This setup probably isn’t for everybody, but if it’s right for you (and only you can make that call), here’s how I got everything running.
Make sure you’ve taken preliminary steps to secure your Accelerator before you do anything with it; this means things like setting up key-based SSH authentication and turning off password-based login, disabling SSH logins by root, etc.; the ...
Published September 3, 2007
If you’re seeing this, congratulations: the DNS changes have propagated and you’re seeing this site, in all its redesigned glory, at its new home: a Joyent Accelerator.
This took quite a bit longer than I’d expected, largely because — while ostensibly working on redesigning the site and re-writing the blog application which powers it — I kept feeling the urge to spin off various bits of functionality into their own generic, standalone applications. Now I’m finally putting all that work to good use, and does it ever feel ...