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Fucking Goldmine.
I am speechless. To any of you so-called “friends” who knew about this and didn’t fill me in, may you never lay your stingy hands on any of these records in the flesh. If there were a contact email available on the website, I’d probably already be on a plane bound for New Zealand to pay an aging collector a well deserved conjugal visit. First Flight of the Conchords and now this?! I’m tempted to expatriate.
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BYOP Portland Photos
Be Your Own Pet in Portland last weekend.
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Getting Git Again
Wow. That attempt at backporting Git really sucked. I did manage to find a thread on the Ubuntu Forums from the developer of prevu, jdong (real name), in which he mentions there’s a fix for my cp: cannot stat ./<maintainer@emailaddress.com> woes in the Hardy version. So I basically decided to start from scratch and update prevu before backporting anything. Of course the potentially mind-numbing paradox of doing sudo prevu prevu is a looming threat to our build chain - so let’s be really clean about this upgrade.
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Getting Git on Ubuntu with submodules - A glimpse into failure.
So lately it seems like there’s this internet-wide trend among developers to move their current source repositories into Git. I have to admit - I didn’t get it (…get it?) Even after reading endlessly about how people are moving to Git, I still failed to see the advantages - the why. Maybe it was the very different way Git operates when compared to more familiar SCM’s that I couldn’t wrap my head around, maybe it was the fact that the documentation is slightly confusing or geared towards just getting up and running (usually from an existing SVN repo), or perhaps it was the fact that most of what I’d read was from dudes who got the Git bug, but don’t actually do anything except mimick SVN’s behavior - ok, maybe it was the doc’s. I also ran into a brick wall when trying to use the submodule feature in Ubuntu, which is just plain unsupported in Gutsy - a fact that would have been nice to know earlier in my Git experimentation.
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Address Book Woes Unwoed
Today I installed Leopard on my MacBook. It was hard.
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Adding Tag-based Feeds to Django Syndication
I just started generating feeds for my site using the Django Syndication Framework and it honestly only took about five minutes thanks to the docs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that clear how to add feeds that filter the models it returns based on some common relationship (ie, tags!). I did figure it out after a little code-digging, and here is the result. If you use Jonathan Buchanan‘s django-tagging app, this should work as-is for you.
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Colons in URLs in Django
My first bug ticket for Django! Please just don’t use colons in your URLs even if this gets put into trunk. More headaches than it’s worth… which is nothing at all.
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Sweet Jesus, It's Finally Here!
Model Inheritance makes its way into the QuerSet-Refactor branch of Django. Been waiting on this one for a year+!
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Shell Shortcuts (bash + mac compatible!)
Christer Edwards documents a few extremely handy bash shortcuts. I’ve found that most work out-of-the-box in Terminal.app for Leopard.
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Gracefully Supporting Sites
So tonight I was working on implementing the MetaWeblog API in Django and I basically had a freaking panic attack when I read the spec and realized that there’s an argument called blogId required by a few of the remote calls I’d be implementing. My app doesn’t really support multiple blogs in any way, much less ones with a model containing a unique ID or anything fancy. And if you haven’t picked up on it, I’m the kind of guy that can’t stand things like unused variables when I’m implementing an API. I mean, I could use ‘0’ or hell, just disregard it altogether, but I figured if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. I managed to whip up a pretty cool way of registering “blogs” with the system that is flexible enough to accommodate my lonely blog with an identity crisis, and whatever other schemes people want to use in their own blog apps. I’ll be finishing it up and releasing it as soon as time permits (see ya next year!)
So when I was writing test cases (crazy idea - I know), I got to thinking: what would most people use to implement the concept of multiple blogs in one Django app. The only thing I came up with that seemed universal enough to even worry about was the Django Sites framework. Naturally I read the docs and began banging out a test model to see what it would all look like. It was so easy to set up, I thought I’d just add sites support to my own blog. Even though it’s just little old me here, who knows how many blogs I’ll want in the future, plus I get a clear, defined solution to my ID problem. Perfect!
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If twitter went down...
how would we know?
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Thumbnails from WebThumb
Josh Eichorn has been a name I’ve known for a while, mostly due to his HTML_Ajax efforts a couple of years ago, so it was no surprise when I found out he was behind the pretty neat web service called WebThumb. Although a tad rough around the edges (and obviously a PHP app), it’s a cool idea and very cheap in comparison to similar services, and free for the first 100 requests per month… or something like that.
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Decent XML-RPC for Django via code.djangoproject.com
Not a bad attempt at a standard, re-distributable XML-RPC implementation for Django. Probably going to use this for the MetaWeblog API
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Concatenation Performance in Python
A look at the performance of different methods of joining strings together. I got curious about this when working on the blog tonight.
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Quickly launch “Top Hit” in Spotlight
Mark Jaquith has a bad-ass shortcut. I use Quicksilver in Tiger but love Leopard’s new Spotlight behaviour. This brings me closer to consistency across both.
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Semantify your crappy classnames
There’s a lot of web chatter lately related to CSS frameworks and the (un)semanticality thereof. Many people have been trying desperately to find a tangible reason to NOT use CSS frameworks - specifically Blueprint - but most either don’t know exactly what they’re trying to accomplish in the first place, citing unnamed references, claiming they want - nay - need semantics, and subsequently hate the aforementioned framework offerings. Enter Semantify.
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JeffCroft needs a new host
Just wanted to make a quick thumbnail to remind us that even the “big guys” have hosting issues.
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A new paintjob... and a full on engine overhaul
I’ve found myself doing a ton of Django stuff lately, probably because Emma is switching over as soon as we can. But I finally got some quiet time at home to devote to resurrecting my own internet identity, which resulted in my new blog app for Django — and the page you’re reading right now. I came up with a bunch of pretty cool stuff (imho) while developing it, which is also cool because now I have blog fodder for weeks.
More tweaks and content coming very soon.
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Rainbow Divider... via www.simplebits.com
Holy Crap. SimpleBits provides us with the perfect test case for breaking WebThumb! Great timing!
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Django URL snakebite
Jake Elliott comes through with a fix for a subtle Django gotcha. I’m using a lambda to create a new unbound comment form per request for this very page.
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WebThumb API for Python
Ross Poulton wrote a light python wrapper for the WebThumb API. I’m using it to grab thumbnails for my link roll.
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Josh Eichorn's WebThumb API via blog.joshuaeichorn.com
It may be old news, but this service allows you to remotely grab screenshots of URL’s for free(ish).
