Published March 16, 2008
I gave a quick talk at the Django open session last night, and I’ll be giving it again here in a few minutes as a proper lightning talk, briefly walking through the process of some of the database-backed journalism projects we do at the Journal-World (specifically this feature on crime reports at the local university campus).
Slides are already online. If you’re at PyCon and want to hear the talk, come to the ballroom.
Published March 15, 2008
I just finished my talk, which apparently included a bonus live transcript on IRC by Justin Lilly, and I think it went pretty well considering how much ground it had to cover and how nervous I was up until the moment when I started talking.
If you aren’t at PyCon, or if you are but didn’t come to the talk, or if you just want to download them and mash them up, my slides are online:
Since it includes several CC-licensed photos, and since I ...
Published March 12, 2008
My flight arrived in Chicago a while ago, and despite an attempt by the hotel to screw it up, I’m currently sitting in my room enjoying a beer before bed. Here’s my plan for the next few days:
Outside of these predictable time slots, I’ll probably be all over the ...
Published March 11, 2008
Recently I received an email from a company that’s in the online advertising business; they run a network that places targeted ads on a collection of sites, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in running them here. I just finished writing a reply and, since I’ve gotten a couple such offers in the recent past, I figured it’s probably time to make a public statement of my policy toward ads on sites that I personally manage. It’s very simple:
I don’t run ...
Published March 3, 2008
“Standards” means “standards”. Thank you for listening.
Now. Anybody out there who’s relying on version-specific quirks, get off your ass and fix your sites. It’s 2008, for crying out loud.
Published March 3, 2008
Once upon a time, I was doing a server setup at work, installing all the various prerequisites and utilities to support the things we use. One part of that involves installing Jing, which we use for XML validation; Jing is written in Java, and so we use gcj (the GNU Java compiler) to compile it for use, ending up with a nice little binary we can call from anywhere.
Now, we’ve standardized on Ubuntu for our servers, so installing gcj should be as simple as apt-get install gcj (or ...