I’ve not used a linked list since my Pascal days, and have oft-wondered how one would create such a thing in Python. Well, I’ve found my answer in looking over the ctypes docs today.
Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
I’ve decided to become more active in Django than I have been in the past. I’ve been brushing up a lot on my Python (and Ruby, but that’s another tale, for another time), and I think I can contribute in a useful manner, other than just commenting on features to add and the like.
I’ve been going through the beta book a bit, and am going to start going through some tickets in the hopes of being able to contribute as much as possible. The more I contribute, the more I learn, the better I feel about Django as a whole. It has a lot of potential - Rails is by far more “feature-complete” - and I want to see it succeed and surpass its competition.
Adrian, my coding abilities are yours for the exploitation! Er.. using!
Sometimes, when someone screws something up royally and it pisses you off, it happened for a good reason.
For example, Acxiom screwed up my background check already with this new job. They called my CURRENT employer and started asking questions.
The good side? To make up for the fact that they may have just gotten me fired, they’re going to push through the background check.
God DOES work in mysterious (if not aggravating) ways…
Sometimes Google scares me:
What is Google’s Lighthouse? by ZDNet’s Richard MacManus — The Google Analyst Day earlier this week threw up a conspiracy theory of sorts, Is it a security function, or a next-generation search for desktop files? Or… with Google initially providing a powerpoint file of the presentation that had extensive notes about upcoming products named as: GDrive, GDS and Lighthouse. Greg Linden was one [...]
Well, I feel bad because I only did 90% of the work I was supposed to do, but I got sick near the end of it all.
Anyways, Jalopy Journal has a new look and feel - Ryan did the design, I did the HTML and Wordpress templating.
I think it’s a kick-ass design.
I nearly got played today. Slashdot DID get played today.
Basically, Chris McEvoy took this and substituted “Frames” with AJAX. I believe Chris was trying to make a point with the article, but it’s mostly untrue.
There are several ways to get around the navigation and usability issues that CAN crop up in AJAX applications when you don’t reload the page or assign unique URLs. On his blog, Chris complains about the usability issues with Microsoft’s Windows Live AJAX project, and it’s a valid complaint.
The problem is, joke or not, this is leading people to believe there’s no way to fix those problems, when there are several ways out there.
Ahwell. If people are suckered in, I guess it’s their own fault.
Trevis Rothwell at clearps.com has put up a detailed and thorough tutorial on building a basic, yet functional, weblog application in PHP using MySQL as the storage backend. He even gives the basics regarding using a database in PHP, and gives an explanation of the technologies used. Check it out here.
Mike Gardiner from down under posted a simple DB_DataObject_FormBuilder tutorial back in June that I apparently missed in my search for documentation. Hopefully, by linking to it, others will find it when I had not.
web/work/lifetime: DB_DataObject_FormBuilder :: A Simple Tutorial
For those of who have any idea what RSS is, this is neat! For those who don’t, well.. I can attempt to explain.
RSS is a protocol for extracting “news” from a particular source using a language called XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML is very similar to HTML, in the sense that it “describes” the data. It doesn’t, however, have any means of making the text appear different.
Anyways, an RSS aggregator is a program that will hit the RSS “feed” of several websites, and pull it up into a single page to view. Slashdot is, essentially, a news aggregator, and has several RSS feeds you can choose from. You can do all sorts of neat things with RSS feeds, as they’re written in XML, which the newer “HTML” is based upon. You can easily convert it into a block of HTML and have it spit back out as part of a web page. It’s how I got the posts from BEFORE I set up this weblog (from truth.mygamefactory.org) to appear in the blog. It pulled the information using RSS from the Truth website.
What happens when you combine this with AJAX? Well, it may not seem like a lot, but it allows for some really neat things. AJAX, as you may or may not know, allows a webpage to be a “gateway” to server-side instructions, but without reloading the page. That is, it gets around the “stateless” limitation on HTTP, and allows you to click a checkbox, and bam! A whole new page appears. Basically, what this aggregator does, is it keeps all of the actual operations of checking the news sites, database interaction and the like “behind” the page you’re cliking on. This means the view pane just adjusts when you click on a different site or article, retrieving the information directly. What’s REALLY cool about this takes some thinking to wrap my head around: I can read all the web-pages I like that support RSS all from one place. If there’s something new posted to the site, I’ll see it in the RSS feed almost immediately. I can then play around with how it looks and never have to worry about that site’s clunky or difficult to navigate interface again! I still read their content, and they know it, but I can instead enjoy the experience how I want to enjoy it.
After writing a response to a comment left by Adrian from the Django Project, I got to thinking, and decided to try the mod_python method of hosting a Django application.
It appears that the problem isn’t necessarily with Django, but python is missing something. I’m still new to python, so it could have been my gaff.
I’ll have to research this some more.
Update: I updated via SVN today, and that opened up a whole new can of worms. The model structure has changed, breaking it in another way. After further research, Hugo let me know that Django will NOT work on mod_python 2.x on Apache 1, it needs mod_python 3+ and Apache 2. I’m still not seeing this in the documentation, but I could just be missing it.