Entries in category “Misc”
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 ...
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 ...
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
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 ...
Dependencies.
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 ...
Baseball
Published October 6, 2007
My beloved Cubs went up against one of the best pitching teams in baseball, and forgot how to hit. Three games and they’re out, which is sad for me but good for you, because it means I can make unbiased predictions about the rest of the baseball postseason. So here goes.
NLDS: Rockies/Phillies
The Rockies are already up two games to none in a best-of-five series. As I write this Game 3 is ...
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 ...
A tale of two redesigns
Published April 25, 2007
Newsvine launched a redesign, or possibly a “realign”, today, adding a number of useful features while staying true to what has, overall, been an attractive and successful layout. Criticisms in the discussion thread are met with haiku and promises to work on it. Result: pats on the back all round.
Fark launched a total redesign today, and the number of design sins not committed is perhaps the easiest thing to enumerate:
- It doesn’t have ...
Quote of the day
Published April 10, 2007
Jeff is on a mission to find view functions and template tags in our software which don’t have useful docstrings (and hence don’t have useful auto-generated documentation in the Django admin). The result (copied from IRC):
<jcroft> congratulations to ubernostrum: weblogs wins the award for the most well-documented Ellington app
<jcroft> which is especially impressive, given that it’s also the one with a fuck lot more views than any other
Jeff diplomatically ...
Be liberal in your HTTP Accept…
Published January 12, 2007
Ever since I started using Joe Gregorio’s mimeparse module to help with my OpenID delegation, I’ve been treated to a first-hand tour of the various things people have thought it would be good to stuff into the HTTP Accept headers their applications send. So, naturally, I’m going to start a gallery of some of my favorites.
So far the winner in the “is that really what you meant” category is what appears ...
QOTD
Published December 11, 2006
Matt, talking about the CPAN shell:
It reminds me very much of a very gentlemanly rapist. “Now I’m going to…”
The Prestige
Published October 22, 2006
I read the book The Prestige a while back, because it looked really interesting. And it didn’t disappoint; what started out looking like a feud between late-nineteenth-century stage magicians — which would have been cool in its own right — quickly turned into something much deeper and much more involved.
And the movie didn’t disappoint. The particular events it uses to drive the plot are different, but enough of the overall plot is the same ...
Defenders of design theft
Published October 1, 2006
When a case of alleged design theft on the Web — the appropriation of one or more elements of a site’s design, without permission — is exposed, there is an elite group of mentally-challenged individuals who spring into action to defend said theft. Their arguments never vary; they stay the course and seem to assume that if they simply repeat themselves often enough, their lack of functioning neurons will be ignored.
Broadly speaking, these arguments fall ...
Tool Wars
Published September 3, 2006
A long time ago, in a land far away, there lived people who were called “carpenters”, and their jobs consisted, in part, of the following tasks:
- Cutting pieces of wood to particular sizes
- Occasionally refining those pieces of wood into particular shapes
- Putting the pieces of wood together, and making them stay together.
Now, the last one was particularly problematic, because it usually involved pounding a small metal connector — called a “nail” — through one of ...
Friday fun
Published September 1, 2006
It’s the end of the week and, while I’ve got plenty of things I could write about, I’m sort of tired and burned out. So let’s just look at a couple things that went on this week.
Django performance with foreign keys
There’s been a bit of a to-do the last few days over a supposed performance problem in Django. I have a hard time classifying it as a “bug ...
A modest proposal
Published August 19, 2006
As a lifelong baseball fan somewhat dismayed with the currently-available coverage of the sport, I’d like to propose a change to the structure of the major leagues which might make things a bit more bearable, especially as we head into the waning days of the regular season: all it requires is adding a third league. I know this will be controversial, but bear with me.
The problem
In any given area of the country ...
I’m going to predict this now
Published August 18, 2006
Assuming they’re both still on TV in 2008, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will both run for President. In different parties.
Mandy, I’m dandy
Published July 28, 2006
I don’t honestly expect any of you to remember this, but some time ago, when I posted an entry talking about Python and Ruby (on which comments are closed because the post is over a month old — hopefully this weekend I’ll get around to turning on the auto-moderation stuff I wrote up), I received a comment from one “Mandy Owens”, who seemed to think that, for both technical and marketing reasons, Rails makes ...
Apropos of even less
Published July 25, 2006
One day real soon I’m going to start writing real blog entries again. But for the moment, I’m a bit too bogged down with various things, so I’m just going to continue sharing quick, amusing anecdotes.
Moments ago on IRC, Jeff posted one of the more amusing error messages we’ve ever come across:
tar: phpicalendar-2.22/phpicalendar/tmp/parsedcal-US%2520Holidays-2006: implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 16:00:00
Apropos of nothing
Published July 24, 2006
So this morning we come in to work, and something’s wrong with all the chairs; they’ve been moved around or reset or something, because they’re not in their usual friendly-to-programmers-with-poor-posture configurations. We deal with it.
Until about thirty seconds ago, when Matt stood up and started trying out every empty chair in the office to see if he could find one that felt right. His reasoning:
Man, this Aeron’s throwing an ...
Independence Day
Published July 4, 2006
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires ...
Essentialism
Published June 30, 2006
For the second time, Mark Pilgrim has written up a list of his “essential” software (for reference, here’s the first time). It being Friday, the day when bloggers around the world veer off and post things of very little relevance to important world issues, I feel compelled to do the same.
Wherever I go, there they are
I work with two operating systems on a regular basis: Mac OS X and Ubuntu GNU/Linux ...
Levels of openness knowledge
Published June 25, 2006
Level 0
You were upset when you heard about the DRM “lock-in” of Apple’s iTunes Music Store, so you burned all those locked-up files to CDs, then ripped them back in Windows Media Player. As WMA. You can’t play them on your iPod anymore, but at least you can play them on all the other portable music players you own.
You blog on MySpace. But you keep links on your MySpace page to ...
Marketing shampoo (and conditioner)
Published June 19, 2006
I was at the store last night and remembered that I needed shampoo, so I wandered over and took a moment to look at what they had. I’ve always been fascinated by one brand in particular: Clairol’s “Herbal Essences“, which was the first shampoo I ever saw in a transparent bottle; the color of each type of shampoo (there was one for each type of hair, one for each of several common conditions ...
Upgrading to Ubuntu 6.06
Published June 16, 2006
I’ve been a Linux user for about six years now; I started out with Red Hat while I was in college, and then a little over a year ago I jumped ship to Ubuntu because smart people kept talking about how nice it was.
Overall, my experiences with Ubuntu have lived up to that; Ubuntu does an amazing job of being both a great development platform and a good desktop operating system. That’s ...
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