Entries published in April 2008

4 entries published in this month. See also: all entries published in 2008, latest entries.

Micro.

Published April 29, 2008

As a general rule, the things I write fall into two categories: long-form (for the medium of blogging, that is; the book is “long” in a very different sense), in-depth pieces which tend to be either tutorials on various aspects of working with Django or op-ed bits on web development and the Web in general, and short-form tidbits which mostly consist of a thought or two. Typically I never post the latter, because it always feels like a waste: if I could give it a more thorough treatment, I’ll ...

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Minty fresh

Published April 19, 2008

For a while now I’ve been really disappointed with the state of web stats.

When I moved over to my shiny new server back in September of last year, I ditched Mint because it requires PHP and MySQL, neither of which will ever, under any circumstances, be allowed on my box. So I started fishing around for something else; most other host-it-yourself stats packages were, frankly, crap either in terms of what they tracked or the interface they presented it in, which led me to look for a hosted ...

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I don’t normally do memes

Published April 10, 2008

But this one was geeky and interesting enough to be worth it:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   75   cd
   64   ls
   34   ssh
   29   python
   21   rm
   21   hg
   20   svn
   18   man
   18   less
   17   screen

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Batteries sold separately

Published April 8, 2008

At first glance, Google’s App Engine looks like a great way to build the next big web application; you get access to a massively scalable infrastructure, you get access to a huge existing authentication system, you get baked-in stats, you get all sorts of cool goodies.

Oh, and you get Python, which is a great language for writing web applications, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t take some pleasure in Django being available out of the box.

Personally I don’t really care one way or ...

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