Entries in September 2007

iPod touch

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 ...

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Standalone Django scripts

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 ...

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django-registration update

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:

  1. User signs up for account.
  2. User receives activation email.
  3. User clicks link in email to activate account.

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 ...

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Django sprint wrap (for me)

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 ...

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Sprinting all the day long

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 ...

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Tips and tricks

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 ...

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ORM Wars

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 ...

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Django, Accelerated

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.

First things first

Make sure you’ve taken preliminary steps to secure your Accelerator before you do anything with it; this means things like setting up ...

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Honey, I'm home

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 ...

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