Marty Alchin, some rights reserved.23 Jun 2009
After following some discussion about it, I signed up for chi.mp once it launched as a beta service, and it hasn’t really impressed me all that much. Recently, though, I was asked to take a survey about my experience, and I was disappointed to see that the survey didn’t really ask what I feel are the right questions. Since surveys only allow you to answer the questions that are asked, I’d like to take a few minutes to speak candidly instead, in hopes of better addressing the issues I have with the service.
9 Apr 2009
Thanks to my subscription to the Django Snippets RSS feed, I was recently introduced to CSS Naked Day by way of a snippet to help automate participation. The snippet itself really just provides a way to know when CSS Naked Day is (it happens to be today), so you can prevent your templates from including stylesheets. It was a clever enough snippet, but it made me curious what CSS Naked Day is and whether I should participate.
2 Mar 2009
To the experienced programmers out there, the subject of this article will be immediately apparent. To others who are a bit more … excitable, it may seem rather risque. To those who watch a lot of television, it may simply be a reference to a certain warehouse retailer (I won’t bother giving them a Google boost). But, there are those of us who don’t have Computer Science degrees, and have never been told what the Big O notation is, and the Wikipedia article isn’t much help unless you’re a mathematician (I’m not). Thankfully, I finally had a big “Oh!” about the Big O, and I thought I’d share how I see it, for those of you who may not get what everybody’s talking about.
6 Jan 2009
There are a few of you out there who know I’ve been talking for months now about plans to expand the collection of community-oriented sites that are available for us Djangonauts to use and enjoy. It’s not that I think the current crop of sites are deficient in any way; it’s just that each site has a specific role it intends to fill, and I think there are more roles that need filling. In light of this, I’d like to officially announce Django Events.
6 Jan 2009
So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything of real value here, and I’d like to change that. Sure, it’s not like I’ve been slacking, but I have a blog for a reason, and I’d like very much to make good use of it. I’d like to take a few minutes, though, to explain where I’ve been, where I am and where I plan to go in 2009 and beyond.
1 Nov 2008
So, the recent interest in National Blog Posting Month has made me reflect on my own writing over the past since since I took part last year. I wrote 30 posts in a month, then just 10 posts in the next 11 months. While I don’t regret letting my professional writing get in the way of my personal writing, I feel somewhat obligated to start giving back again. Once the book’s out of the way, I should be able to get back to writing here more regularly, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a bit of what’s been occupying so much of my time.
14 Jul 2008
I’m certainly not the first to mention news of bit.ly, a new URL shortening service, but I’d like to look at it from a different angle. While I applaud most of what bit.ly is trying to here, especially in terms of data capture and availability, there’s a fundamental flaw in their design: if shortened URLs are permanent (which they clearly should be, if their data collection is to be of any long-term value), users MUST NOT be able to specify them explicitly.
22 May 2008
It’s been a while since I’ve posted regularly, and those of you who really keep your ear to the community already know why. Last week, news broke that I’m writing a book. I’ve actually been writing it for several months now, since before the sprint last December, toying with the idea of contacting a publisher. After getting positive feedback from several people at the sprint, I bit the bullet and contacted Apress in January, got a contract and have been working pretty much non-stop ever since.
8 Apr 2008
Like much of the Web development world, I caught wind of Google’s new App Engine launch last night, during the NCAA championship game. I wasn’t following the Scobleizer video though, so I was relying on the TechCrunch article and people in #django and #django-dev to fill me in on what all the fuss was about.
17 Mar 2008
So, PyCon proper has come and gone, and today begins the sprint. I had a great time, got my talk on (I’ll try to fix the fonts, but it’s online, anyway), and learned some fascinating stuff.
6 Mar 2008
Along with the rest of the Web, I’ve been following the recent months of discussion regarding IE8, its version targeting behavior and its support for Web standards. There are a number of opinions about a whole variety of things regarding IE, and I won’t get involved in most of them. In fact, I tend not to follow these discussions very closely, but I’m trying to get better about it lately, now that I’m taking a more active role on the Web. Of interest to me is the announced commitment to Web standards, and I’d like to focus on a somewhat smaller detail, and in a way you might not expect.
16 Jan 2008
While I normally prefer to write about code, I’d like to take a few minutes and review the recently-published definitive guide on my favorite subject. That’s right, I’m talking about The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss (and special quest author Simon Willison).
10 Jan 2008
Since getting involved with Python, I’ve read a few discussions about Zope, and though I haven’t used it, I do enjoy reading articles about it, to see how other people approach common problems. In particular, a recent Satchmo discussion pointed me to an article about using Zope3 interfaces to essentially manage plugins. I knew Trac did this, as I had tried to write a Trac plugin a while back, but I hadn’t really seen a good description of how the process actually works until now (thus my Trac plugin was doomed from the start).
7 Dec 2007
A comment on my previous post prompted me to do a little digging on what Google’s Chart API is and isn’t capable of, and what I found gives me reason to worry.
7 Dec 2007
So, I was surprised to see my news this morning, when information aesthetics spread the news of the new Google Chart API. Looks like they’ve been reading my blog, and they decided to save me the trouble of installing matplotlib or anything.