69 Items for 2009


Link2009 Jan 13

Sloppy - the slow proxy for dial-up modem speed simulation

A deliberately slow proxy to simulate the dial-up modem experience. A great way to test fancy features like AJAX.

Link2009 Jan 15

Django | Aggregation | Django Documentation

Django Aggregates have landed in Django. The documentation looks pretty good. People have been waiting for this for a long time. It's great to see such a solid implementation.

Link2009 Jan 15

git externals script

This looks like a useful script for dealing with project dependencies and wanting to avoid either doing a file copy to your project, or submodules.

Link2009 Jan 28

Full-text searching in Django with PostgreSQL and tsearch2

A complete run down on setting up search with Django using PostgreSQL and tsearch2.

Photos2009 Feb 02

iPhone Notes

Logging and reviewing beers I drink.

iPhone Notes

Photos2009 Feb 14

Bronze Banana

A bronze banana in the sidewalk.

Bronze Banana

Link2009 Feb 17

Incredibly useful SSH flag

Eric Holscher demonstrates the -t flag to SSH and how it can be used to set Python paths or the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable on remote machines. A pretty handy trick.

Link2009 Feb 17

Tutorial — Django Solr v0.1 documentation

A tutorial on setting up Solr with Django using the django-solr-search project.

Link2009 Feb 26

Git for the real world

"Now that we've been using git at Twitter for a couple of months, we've overcome several crippling problems and misunderstandings about how to use it properly. There are dozens of "intros" and "tutorials" to git online, but at some point you need to know more than just the basics of DVCS and the map to svn commands -- you need to know practical considerations of real-world usage. None of the intros or tutorials had this stuff, so I thought I'd share what we learned."

Link2009 Feb 28

jQuery Sparklines

This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript.

Link2009 Mar 12

VPS Showdown

The author compares 2 top Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting providers, Slicehost and Linode.

Link2009 Mar 18

Add Full-Text Search to your Django project with Whoosh

A nice overview of adding the new Whoosh full-text search engine to a Django project using signals to trigger a re-indexing.

Link2009 Mar 19

json-framework

This framework implements a strict JSON parser and generator in Objective-C. Bookmarking this in case I ever need to interact with a web service.

Link2009 Apr 14

favikon

An online favicon generator.

Link2009 Apr 16

The Elements of Computing Systems / Nisan & Schocken / www.idc.ac.il/tecs

A course with most materials needed online. There's an accompanying video. Takes students from a NAND gate to adders to machine language to virtual machines to high level languages. All in one course.

Link2009 Apr 21

An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country. - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine

I always like these timeline-on-a-map style of viewing how data changes over time. This one is a bit scary.

Link2009 Apr 30

How Long Will the World’s Natural Resources Last? | FlowingData

Neat chart estimating natural resource consumption. More interesting visualization data.

BLOG2009 May 05

Django and Relativity Updated

Currently it's the season of EuroDjangoCon and I'm reading various presentations. One interesting thing I'm seeing is that many people are using relative paths in their settings.py file but in different ways. (For reference, see Django and Relativity). So far I've seen:

  1. os.path.dirname ...

Link2009 May 05

How To Create A Data Entry Screen | iPhone Development Blog

I'm thinking I will need this in the not so distant future.

Link2009 May 07

korpios's bulbs at master - GitHub

A collection of interesting code, mostly Django related, used by The Onion.

Link2009 May 08

Yolk

Yolk is a command-line tool querying PyPI and Python packages installed on your system.

Link2009 May 13

django-tinymce - Google Code

A django forms widget with support for languages, spell checking, and file browsing. Nice!

Link2009 May 19

The Little Manual of API Design

Insights into API design from Trolltech, makers of the QT libraries. Adding this to my to-read list. (PDF)

Link2009 May 20

The Git Parable

A fictional tale of a programmer's quest to make a version control system, except what it describes in step by step detail is how Git works. Nicely done and informative.

Link2009 Jun 20

MPOAuthConnection

MPOAuthConnection is a drop in cocoa component for Mac and iPhone apps to talk to OAuth web services

Link2009 Jul 01

EveryBlock source code released / The EveryBlock Blog

Source code for Everyblock has been released. This is the Knight Foundation grant given to Adrian Holovaty, et al. and built on Django and Python. I'll be spending time reading the source.

Link2009 Jul 17

Alice, the app - VERY MUCH IN CONSTRUCTION

Alice provides a RESTful interface to the RabbitMQ queue server including administration functions. It's written using Mochiweb, an Erlang library for building lightweight HTTP servers.

Link2009 Jul 21

 NASA NEBULA | Services | Services - Overview

Nebula, NASA's cloud computing platform, uses Django. Following the list of open source projects being used here leads to some great and interesting results.

Link2009 Aug 26

Celestia: Home

The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions.

Photos2009 Aug 28

Funny puns

Justin and I abusing puns on Twitter. Read bottom up.

Funny puns

Link2009 Aug 31

A Guide to Branching in Mercurial / Steve Losh

So far the most clear and detailed explanation of Mercurial branching options.

BLOG2009 Sep 09

DjangoCon 2009 Day 1

The first day of DjangoCon has come and gone. Just like DjangoCon 2008, this conference is a big highlight for me. Not only is everything in this conference directly related since I use Django full-time, but the chance to meet people that I only know as a Twitter or IRC ...

BLOG2009 Sep 10

DjangoCon 2009 Day 2

Here's my DjangoCon Day 2 notes...

Keynote by Ian Bicking

I would never do this justice with a short summary, but thankfully Ian posted his talk as a blog post: Toward a new self-definition for open source

Using Django in Non-Standard Ways by Eric Florenzano

This talk was a ...

BLOG2009 Sep 12

DjangoCon 2009 Day 3

Notes from Day 3 at DjangoCon 2009...

Keynote by Ted Leung

Ted gave a great, thought provoking keynote. Here's a few interesting bits I jotted down:

  • Django jobs increased 692%. What time period that covers I don't know but the point is there's a lot more Django ...

Link2009 Sep 17

django-safeform

CSRF protection for Django implemented at the form level - no middleware required.

BLOG2009 Sep 20

Using Vim and Snipmate with Django

Not long ago I found the SnipMate plugin for Vim, which implements some of TextMate's snippets features in Vim. A snippet is a piece of often-typed text that you can insert into your document using a trigger word followed by a tab.

I didn't find any Django snippets ...

BLOG2009 Sep 21

Using Django for iPhone Content Development

The iPhone can use a SQLite database as a content source and managing that content can easily be done using Django and Django's built-in admin. Here's how...

Note: I'll assume a stock Mac OS 10.6 install which already has Python and SQLite support baked in.

Install ...

Link2009 Oct 13

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

A book published under the O'Reilly Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS), with what looks like great tips on customizing your web site to look as much like a native app as possible, using CSS and Javascript.

Link2009 Oct 15

Elements of Statistical Learning

The 2nd version of this classic book on data mining, inference, and prediction. And for free.

Link2009 Oct 16

pympler - Project Hosting on Google Code

Pympler is a development tool to measure, monitor and analyze the memory behavior of Python objects in a running Python application. Pympler integrates three previously separate modules into a single, comprehensive profiling tool. The asizeof module provides basic size information for one or several Python objects, module muppy is used for on-line monitoring of a Python application and module tracker provides off-line analysis of the lifetime of selected Python objects. Python versions 2.4+.

Link2009 Oct 21

Ajaxian » Apple goes live with HTML5 video

Apple is using the HTML5 video tag for their videos on Safari, falling back to Quicktime where the video tag isn't yet supported.

Link2009 Nov 04

NodeBox | Library

Lots of interesting bits of Python in this library, including things like linguistic analysis and semantic networks.

Link2009 Nov 25

Woof - simply exchange files

Very simple local file sharing: `woof filename` serves the file over HTTP once (or configurable number of times), then terminates. It's a single Python script that can live in ~/bin.

Link2009 Dec 30

CSS String Truncation with Ellipsis

Matt Snider shows how to accomplish a nice UI that keeps its vertical height on long strings by truncating strings with an ellipsis using only CSS on the client side. Complete with Firefox example using XBL and XUL to account for its lack of support for ellipsis using text-overflow.

BLOG2009 Dec 30

2009 Python Meme

This Python meme was started by Tarek and it sounded thought provoking so I thought I'd join in...

What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2009?

I have to say that the Python libraries that changed my day-to-day workflow for me has to ...