Another guy named Mike

Jep 3.1 Released

2012-06-10T12:41:40Z

I have just released Jep 3.1 on PyPi. Get it now: pip install jep.

Interested in a Teradata Python Driver?

2012-04-15T08:45:40Z

Teradata is big in the data warehousing world, but it has horrible support for all of my favorite platforms. I've been thinking about writing a native Python DBAPI 2.0 driver for Teradata. I have to use this database for work, and I'd like to have first class Python support on all my platforms (OS X and much more modern Linux distributions than they support).

Thanks @rdegges - 100 carb habit

2012-02-29T21:33:40Z

Randall Degges wrote about his ketogenic diet about a month ago. I'm not going to pretend to know much about diet, but the more I read about it the more sense it made to me.

Python string formatting

2011-12-08T09:22:40Z

Because I can never find it when I want to, here's how to quickly format a US dollar amount:

>>> from decimal import Decimal
>>> '{:,.2f}'.format(Decimal('12312123.1231212'))
'12,312,123.12'

This is for Python 2.7 and above.

Thanks, Raymond!

My fab file

2011-12-03T09:47:40Z

There aren't enough examples online of Fabric scripts as used in the real world. The documentation is good but a real example is always better.

Backup GMail

2011-11-06T13:51:40Z

Google might disable an account for a number of reasons. Accounts may be disabled because Google requires real names or because an algorithm decided an account was being used to spam. Accounts can be locked and users are left at the mercy of Google's weak customer service.

Site ported to Hyde

2011-10-30T17:28:40Z

I have ported this site to use Hyde, a static website generator written in Python. I had been actually running a static version of my Django blog for sometime (using wget mirror), but Hyde does a great job of making generating a new site, links and templates very easy.

Added Import hook for Jep

2011-07-30T10:00:00Z

It's been a while since I removed the old monkey patched import function from Jep. I finally got around to adding a nice import hook, so now stuff like this works without breaking things like numpy:

uWSGI init script

2011-05-06T10:00:00Z

This site (and accompanying backend for NameDropper ) went down about 4am PST this morning due to a Linode outage .

No, flash is not relevant

2011-05-01T10:00:00Z

Popping the Higher Education Bubble

2011-04-24T10:00:00Z

As a current CS student and full time programmer, I am keenly aware of both the rising tuition costs and utter uselessness of a degree as a "signaling" tool to potential employers.

LA Open Source Hackathon

2011-04-07T10:00:00Z

I have procured special permission from the wife so I'm going to the hackathon this weekend. There are still available tickets .

I'm looking forward to hacking Packaginator , too.

Think Quarterly 01 Data

2011-04-01T10:00:00Z

Interesting and beautifully designed. Check Think Quarterly out.

What the naysayers don't get about Cloud Computing

2011-04-01T10:00:00Z

Sadly, while Cloud Computing platforms are getting easier to use every day, IT at my company spends a significant amount of its time designing even more cumbersome forms. Due to mandated change controls, IT is slowly wresting greater control over core systems, but it may not notice its share of responsibility is being eclipsed, quickly.

Ceridian automation

2011-03-28T10:00:00Z

I used to waste a significant amount of time entering hours into Ceridian. Then I heard from HR that I can't just put the same hours in every day. :-)

uWSGI for fast Django apps

2011-03-07T10:00:00Z

Nice to see uWSGI still cleaning up on the benchmarks . This site is using uWSGI already and it's worked wonderfully for both the blog and the API backend for my Android app. I'll be adding some production servers at work that'll be using it within the month, too.

Selecting Time Ranges in Leemba

2011-02-11T10:00:00Z

One of the great things about using Leemba is that you can set custom time ranges for graphs. This often comes in handy when researching past problems, or drilling down to details to see the exact results of a performance tune.

Setting the gnome-terminal title in bash

2011-02-09T10:00:00Z

There's a lot of confusion about how to set a title for the terminal tab, particularly using gnome-terminal.

Cache invalidation with Django staticgenerator

2011-02-06T10:00:00Z

After installing staticgenerator, my site has become noticeably faster. Since Nginx can directly serve cached files, the big Django processes on this server are kept idle for real work, not regenerating every single page.

Make Programming Fun Again

2011-02-05T10:00:00Z

Django caching options

2011-01-31T10:00:00Z

This is a great post on Django caching that I've been reading in preparation for writing some work stuff using Django. But I notice few options here for cache invalidation.

Faster Django with staticgenerator

2011-01-30T10:00:00Z

One nice thing that I missed from Wordpress was the ability to static cache posts using things like wp-super-cache. It's a giant waste of CPU to generate pages for every request, especially now that I have setup disqus, page changes are very infrequent.

Django-cms and MPTT

2011-01-17T10:00:00Z

I had quite a bit of trouble with errors like this:

 AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'get_ancestors'

I was moving to a new host and even though I had tested the exact same setup, and created a fresh virtualenv with my requirements according to best practices, I still had dependency problems with Django-mptt.

It's not obvious from discussions like this (at least to a Django newb), but Django-cms includes it's own copy of MPTT. But if you use pip to install Django, it'll bundle mptt-0.4.2. You don't want this.

To fix, simply uninstall the site package to use the provided version:

 pip uninstall django-mptt

You might need to also update Django-cms, since the MPTT version that it provides might have been overwritten.

It's worth mentioning that Django-cms plans to fix this soon, hopefully in 1.2.

But I thought it was web scale!

2010-12-31T10:00:00Z

Wow, Django doesn't include or use a connection pool! That's just not web scale [NSFW]. This screenshot is the difference in response time after adding pgbouncer.

Custom Django tags

2010-12-17T10:00:00Z

I doubt if this method prevents much spam, but I wanted to learn how to implement a custom Django tag. The [ documentation for tags ][2] seems fairly straight-forward, but it often splits up examples into small code pieces which can make it seem more difficult. (Or maybe it's just that there's too many places to look for a quick answer.)