Ian Lewis | English Blog

2026 New Year Reflections

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As many others have done, I’m going to write a blog post reflecting on the last year and looking forward to the new year. While I’ve been really concerned with where the world is headed, 2025 was a better year for me personally in terms of my mental health and overall balance.This year I hope to build on that and be a lot more intentional about how I plan for the future.

Bash is the best tool for the job

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 23:00:00 +0000

Bash is the black sheep of programming languages and yet every backend or DevOps engineer needs to deal with it throughout their career. It is hard to avoid. It’s always available on Linux servers and it’s often the best tool for the job.

Do we need AI IDEs?

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI integrated development environments (IDEs) are all the rage. Cursor was one of the first AI-focused IDEs and emerged as a fork of VSCode. Kiro, another VSCode fork, was just released by AWS. Windsurf, yet another VSCode fork, recently had their top talent poached and sold the rest. Clearly, a lot of folks at AI companies thought striking it out on their own was a good idea.

Why I Left Twitter

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s safe to say that Twitter has changed a lot from when I first started using it. When I first started using Twitter in 2008 it felt like an amazing tool for connecting with new people. Twitter made it easy to discover and connect with other tech folks and I found a new job through connections I made on Twitter fairly quickly after I started using it.

A New Blue Check Mark, Just Like the Old One

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Bluesky continued their trend of replicating X/Twitter’s features in a slightly different way and just released their new account verification feature. This seems like a pretty big milestone in the social network’s growth and a lot of the prolific members are talking about it. Folks are reacting to being some of the first people to receive one.

Zero Copy Readers in Go

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The io.Reader interface is a small interface that defines a single Read method. Callers to a Reader implementation pass a byte slice which is then filled with bytes from the underlying source. This source could be a file, a network socket, etc.

Building APIs with Static Files

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

APIs are really useful for pulling in data from different sources for analysis in tools like Datasette or spreadsheets. However, APIs are often hard to build and often require writing specialized servers which then need to be deployed and maintained. What if this could be as easy as deploying a static website?

Rust First Impressions: Error Handling

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Python Servers in the Year of the Snake: 2025

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025 New Year’s Resolutions

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Berryman Political Cartoon Collection, Public Domain

Leaving Google

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today is my last day as a Google employee. After nearly 10 years working on the Google Cloud Developer Relations team, I’ve decided to step away and pursue other challenges.

Understanding GitHub Artifact Attestations

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub recently introduced Artifact Attestations, a beta feature that enhances the security of Open Source software supply chains. By linking artifacts to their source code repositories and GitHub Actions, it ensures that artifacts are not built with malicious or unknown code or on potentially compromised devices.

Code Signing is not Enough

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Code signing is often used as a method for ensuring that software artifacts like binaries, drivers, and software packages haven’t been modified by a third party before they are used. Many folks may be familiar with packages that were gpg signed and distributed with an Armored ASCII (.asc) file. Code signing is a great step towards securing the software supply chain above simply providing software as-is, but has a number of downsides that can be addressed with other methods like software provenance.

Four Tips for Writing Better Go APIs

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Go is a really powerful programming language that allows you to write concurrent code that is still easy to understand. But designing APIs can be hard, even for seasoned Go programmers. When designing APIs for libraries and applications in Go it’s important to keep in mind the strengths of the language to make your APIs easier to use and avoid pitfalls like goroutine leaks. With that in mind, here are a few common issues I see often with Go APIs and some tips for how to make them better.

Container Runtimes Part 4: Kubernetes Container Runtimes & CRI

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 12:00:00 +0000

This is the fourth and last part in a four part series on container runtimes. It’s been a while since part 1, but in that post I gave an overview of container runtimes and discussed the differences between low-level and high-level runtimes. In part 2 I went into detail on low-level container runtimes and built a simple low-level runtime. In part 3 I went up the stack and wrote about high-level container runtimes.

Container Runtimes Part 3: High-Level Runtimes

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 14:30:00 +0000

This is the third part in a four-part series on container runtimes. It’s been a while since part 1, but in that post I gave an overview of container runtimes and discussed the differences between low-level and high-level runtimes. In part 2 I went into detail on low-level container runtimes and built a simple low-level runtime.

Container Runtimes Part 2: Anatomy of a Low-Level Container Runtime

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 11:00:00 +0000

This is the second in a four-part series on container runtimes. In part 1, I gave an overview of container runtimes and discussed the differences between low-level and high-level runtimes. In this post I will go into detail on low-level container runtimes.

Container Runtimes Part 1: An Introduction to Container Runtimes

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 18:30:00 +0000

One of the terms you hear a lot when dealing with containers is “container runtime”. “Container runtime” can have different meanings to different people so it’s no wonder that it’s such a confusing and vaguely understood term, even within the container community.

The Almighty Pause Container

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 11:40:00 +0000

When checking out the nodes of your Kubernetes cluster, you may have noticed some containers called “pause” running when you do a docker ps on the node.

Blue/Green Deployments on Kubernetes

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 19:00:00 +0000

For those that want to dive right in, I have put up a tutorial and some sample manifests on GitHub. Check it out at https://github.com/IanLewis/kubernetes-bluegreen-deployment-tutorial

What are Kubernetes Pods Anyway?

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:20:00 +0000

Recently I saw a tweet from the awesome Amy Codes (I really hope that’s her real name) about Kubernetes Pods:

Building Go Applications with Google Container Builder

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 10:15:00 +0000

Creating Smaller Docker Images Part #4: Static Binaries

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 16:25:00 +0000

This is the fourth post in a series on making smaller Docker images: static binaries. In the first post I talked about how to create smaller images by writing better Dockerfiles. In the second post I talked about how to squash layers using docker-squash to make smaller images. In the third post I wrote about how to use Alpine Linux as a smaller base image.

Creating Smaller Docker Images Part #3: Alpine Linux

Wed, 31 May 2017 16:25:00 +0000

Kubernetes Health Checks in Django

Mon, 15 May 2017 16:07:14 +0000

A Quick Look at the Kubernetes Python Client

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 23:30:00 +0000

For those of you that don’t know there is a new Python API client in the kubernetes-incubator project: client-python. There has been some high quality Python clients like pykube, but client-python can serve as the official Python client.

How kubeadm Initializes Your Kubernetes Master

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 18:00:00 +0000

kubeadm is a new tool that is part of the Kubernetes distribution as of 1.4.0 which helps you to install and set up a Kubernetes cluster. One of the most frequent criticisms of Kubernetes is that it’s hard to install. kubeadm really makes this easier so I suggest you give it a try.

Performing Maintenance on Pods

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 12:20:00 +0000

Kubernetes includes a feature called services which serve as a kind of load balancer for pods. When pods misbehave or otherwise stop working, sometimes you’ll want to remove the pod from the service without killing the pod.

Using Kubernetes Health Checks

Tue, 24 May 2016 17:50:00 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of questions about Kubernetes health checks recently and how they should be used. I’ll do my best to explain them and the difference between the types of health checks and how each will affect your application.

Google Cloud Platform HTTP Load Balancers Explained via the CLI

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 11:30:00 +0000

The Google Cloud Platform Load Balancers are based off of technology that Google developed for our applications. There are two types of load balancers, the Network (L3) Load Balancer and the HTTP (L7) Load Balancer. The HTTP Load Balancer is global so the same IP can be used everywhere in the world, but still supports very high scalability with no warmup.

Creating Smaller Docker Images: Part #2

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 22:00:00 +0000

This is the second post in a series on making smaller Docker images. In my previous blog post I talked about how to create smaller Docker images but there were limits to how small we could make the images. I outlined a way in which you can make the layers you add to your Docker image smaller, but there may be times where it just isn’t possible. Perhaps you need to run some steps in a particular order.

Creating Smaller Docker Images

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 22:00:00 +0000

Looking Back At My First Year at Google

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 17:00:00 +0000

I joined Google one year ago today. It’s been a really busy year and I can’t believe it’s over so fast. I still feel like I just joined and there’s so much that I’m still getting used to. Google has been at the same time the easiest and the hardest, the most fun and the least fun company I’ve worked at so far. I’ll try to explain a bit what I mean. But first I want to take a look back at my first year.

HTTP/2 and Go

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 14:30:00 +0000

UPDATE (2015/10/15): HTTP/2 is now enabled by default for http servers in tip and will be released as part of Go 1.6. That means that you will be able to create HTTP/2 servers without even calling ConfigureServer().

Cross-Region HTTP Services on Container Engine

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 02:00:00 +0000

<!– Conversion notes (using libgdc version 59):

Testing Django Views Without Using the Test Client

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 16:00:00 +0000

The normal way to test Django views is via the test client. The test client fakes being a WSGI server and actually makes an HTTP request through all of Django’s request routing machinery. There are a number of reasons why this isn’t an ideal approach.

Using Kubernetes Namespaces to Manage Environments

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 16:00:00 +0000

One of the advantages that Kubernetes provides is the ability to manage various environments easier and better than you have been doing. For most nontrivial applications, you have test, staging, and production environments. You can spin up a separate cluster of resources, such as VMs, with the same configuration in staging and production, but that can be costly and managing the differences between the environments can be difficult.

Deploying Go Servers with Kubernetes on Container Engine

Thu, 07 May 2015 02:00:00 +0000

Cross posted on medium

Why I Joined Google

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 02:30:00 +0000

As some of you may or may not know, I joined Google as a Developer Advocate on the Google Cloud Platform Team in January. I just completed my first 3 months and, like many others, it’s been a whirlwind experience. The sheer amount you need to learn and get used to is overwhelming. Google has been doing a lot since it started almost 20 years ago and it shows. There is a huge amount of built-up experience and know-how at the company.

Orchestration with Fabric #1

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 15:30:00 +0000

When figuring out how I wanted to deploy my website I had a few things that I knew I wanted. I wanted to be able to create my server(s), provision them, and deploy the app all from one tool. This will be the first in a series of posts about how I used Fabric to achieve that.

Javascript Templating Languages

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I have been looking at JavaScript templating libraries recently for a personal project and I’d like to write about my thoughts here.

Pickling Objects with Cached Properties

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 12:00:00 +0000

Python descriptors allow you to create properties on python objects that are the result of executing some code. One of the simplest ways of doing that is using the @property decorator. Here, accessing the myprop will call the method and return the resulting "data".

Some General Trends in Programming Languages

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 03:00:00 +0000

New Year’s Python Meme 2014

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Since everyone else was doing it, I thought I’d write one up too.

App Engine Pull Queues and kombu

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 02:00:00 +0000

App Engine provides a pull queue API for accessing, leasing, and processing tasks outside of App Engine. You might do this to perform long running tasks that aren’t suited to App Engine’s infrastructure. Or you might want to use a library or system that isn’t available on App Engine. However, the way you would interact with pull queue is via a REST API. There isn’t much in the way of APIs for actually polling the API, processing the task, and acknowledging to the API that the task is finished.

PyCon APAC 2013

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 09:30:00 +0000

PyCon APAC 2013 is over! I want to thank everyone who helped make the conference a great success. Staff, speakers, attendees alike all contributed to making PyCon APAC 2013 the best PyCon in Japan ever.

Using jQuery deferreds with Backbone.js

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Backbone.js is a neat little JavaScript model framework. It gives you nice way of making Models and allows you to fetch and save them to the server easily using a REST API. One of the nice things about Backbone is that for a while it has returned the result of calling the AJAX function back to the application, which if you are using jQuery is a jQuery deferred. This allows you to do cool things like doing work in parallel and then running a callback when all the work is done.

Learning a Language as Muscle Memory

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Google App Engine 1.7.7 pre-release

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Update: App Engine 1.7.7 final has been released and is available here: https://developers.google.com/appengine/downloads.

Twitter Archive

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Administer WordPress using Django's Admin

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Mixins and Python

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Python supports a simple type of multiple inheritance which allows the creation of Mixins. Mixins are a sort of class that is used to “mix in” extra properties and methods into a class. This allows you to create classes in a compositional style.

A Japanese Python Community Who's Who

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:00:00 +0000

There is a small but growing Python community in Japan. Many people, even some of those Python enthusiasts who living in Japan, are unaware of this and don’t know who any of these people are. There are a lot of reasons for this but the number one reason is probably the large language barrier between Japanese speakers and non-Japanese speakers. Currently it can be kind of hard to know who’s interested in what, or who the go-to person is for a particular topic. I think that’s a shame and that there should be more communication going on with the community in Japan and the wider Python community, and a lot of the Japanese community leaders don’t get the kind of credit or publicity they deserve outside of Asia. I hope to help solve that problem with this blog post by providing a kind of who’s who of Japanese Python community members.

Phantom QUnit Test Runner

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Blog Access Data

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

I’m the kind of guy that likes to be open about data and such I thought it might be interesting to share what kind of access pattern my humble little bi-lingual blog gets. I really don’t get that many visits, so it’s not really useful to do any kind of deep analysis so, in terms of demographics, there are only a few metrics that are really useful to look at. Because this is a blog and because it’s bilingual the things I look at are what content people are looking at (particularly the language of the content), what the user’s language is, and where they are accessing from and that’s basically it:

Homepage Redesign

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:51:42 +0000

I recently redesigned my homepage to streamline it and give it a different look and feel. Here’s what the old site looked like since I converted it to Django back 3 or so years ago:

My Love-Hate Relationship with JavaScript

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:01:09 +0000

Google IO: Input/Output

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:33:30 +0000

This year’s Google IO page has a nifty little game that allows you to build a machine that guides a ball from an input chute to an output chute. I noticed right away that the tools you can use seem to have odd shapes as if designed for a purpose. You could also choose the primary colors that Google uses often. I figured that they were originally designed so that you could easily make a machine that was in the shape of the familiar Google logo so I went about trying to figure out how. I think I got something that’s represents the Google logo pretty well. What do you think? ;-)

Django's contrib.auth and django-newauth

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:06:56 +0000

Recently there have been a lot of conversations on the Django mailing list about fixing the auth module. Here are some of the recent mailing list threads:

Decentralized groups and Stand Alone Complex

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:10:09 +0000

The other day I watched the talk “The coming war on general computation” by Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow.

Working overtime makes you stupid?

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:39:54 +0000

There was a recent article I read online about how working working over 40 hours a week makes you less productive.

Python Sets

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 20:00:00 +0000

I had an application with two lists of unique items that I wanted to take the intersection of. I had figured that using a python set would be faster but I didn’t realize that it would be faster than the simple list comprehension by this much.

PyCon JP 2011 was Awesome!

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:22:39 +0000

PyCon JP 2011

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 09:24:12 +0000

Kay 1.1 Released!

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:41:01 +0000

An introduction to the Tipfy Framework for App Engine

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:31:34 +0000

(This post is the English translation of the Dec. 24th edition of the Python Web Framework Advent Calendar 2010. Other posts can be found on that page, though they will be in Japanese)

Syncing music on Ubuntu

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:33:57 +0000

I recently played around with and figured out how to get syncing working with my iPhone 3GS and Ubuntu Lucid. Syncing is supported out of the box so not hard, but you do have to know what packages to install to get the support you need. This should work for iPods as well.

Google App Engine 1.4.0 Released!!

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:19:38 +0000

Google App Engine 1.4.0 was just released and has lots of interesting new features. Channel API, “Always On” (reserved instances), Improvements to background processing, Warm up requests, and Metadata queries just to name the big ones.

New Google App Engine API Expert

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:31:13 +0000

bpssl - The Django SSL Support Application

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:31:13 +0000

The other day I released bpssl which is a Django application that helps you support HTTPS on your website. The main functionality is performing redirection for HTTPS only URLs and views. For instance, if a request for your login view /login is received over HTTP, the provided middleware can redirect the user to the equivalent HTTPS page.

Cron only decorator for App Engine

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:54:14 +0000

For a recent project I recently I have been using App Engine’s cron feature to aggregate data and perform maintenance tasks. However, since cron is a simple web request, if a user accesses that url then the cron job will run. In order to prevent normal users from being able to run cron jobs I created a decorator that specifies a view as cron only.

Dynamically Adding a Method to Classes or Class Instances in Python

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 21:42:26 +0000

In Python you sometimes want to dynamically add methods to classes or class instances (objects). In Python code, the most obvious way to accomplish this might be something like the following but it has one caveat,

Data and instinct driven decision making

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:52:39 +0000

I just read a piece called We Are All Talk Radio Hosts which mentions some studies saying that the more we humans think about things, the more we make bad decisions. The rationale is that we try to come up with reasons why we like or dislike something rather than simply choosing it based on our experience. It extends to almost all of our choices from jams, to cars, to apartments.

Key Value Storage Systems ... and Beyond ... with Python

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:33:38 +0000

Google docs wouldn’t let me share the presentation publicly with people outside our company’s domain and it gave me an error when I tried to download it as a PowerPoint file or PDF so I was forced to recreate my presentation locally. Anyway, I placed the slides to my talk at PyCon Asia online please check it out on Slideshare.

Google Chrome Background Connections

Sat, 01 May 2010 11:21:30 +0000

Today I found that Google Chrome was making lots of background connections to 1e100.net. I was a little worried at first but this seems to be a google owned domain and these connections are used for their anti-phishing/malware feature.

Shady Harvard Puzzle Facebook App Disassembled

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:32:33 +0000

Today I got an email from a friend on Facebook that suggested that I try out this application called “Only 4% of harvard grads can solve this riddle..”. Being curious I took a look at it.

Caching Permanent Redirects

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:47:03 +0000

Since I’ve started using Chrome as my main browser for surfing I have noticed that some web applications seem to redirect to 404 pages. After some investigation it seems that the browser caches 301 responses (they are permanent after all) and when going to that URL again automatically redirects you.

python-openvcdiff and Cython

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:26:15 +0000

I started a project today to implement an interface for the open-vcdiff using Cython. I’m not a C++ master and the Python C libraries are pretty new to me but I managed to expose and implement a few methods of the VCDiffEncoder class. The hardest part so far has been trying to figure out how to use the C++ standard library types like std::string. I’m also not sure how I can interface with python in such a way as to allow fast processing of potentially large binary data. Normally I would use a file-like object in Python to create a kind of string but open-vcdiff being C++ has a slightly different interface for dealing with binary blobs.

Modipyd with Growl Notifications and Test Driven Development

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:54:09 +0000

Recently at work my coworker Shinya Okano came across Modipyd written by Takanori Ishikawa. Modipyd is a module dependency monitoring framework which can build module dependency trees and monitor when modules have been changed. But most interesting feature it provides is the pyautotest tool.

'self' ForeignKeys always result in a JOIN

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:21:13 +0000

I came across a little annoyance in Django today. I found that a ForeignKey that reference self, i.e. points to the same table, always results in a join in a filter.

Django template2pdf

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:21:14 +0000

This is cool Django application from Yasushi Masuda which allows you to render data to a pdf using trml2pdf.

How to be a 10x programmer

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:35:50 +0000

I recently read a blog post that is a satirical look at how to gain a reputation as a guru programmer by converting code to your own code and making it hard for other programmers to get their work done. It’s called 3 Simple Rules That Will Make You a ‘Superstar’ Developer and it’s very tongue in cheek.

Walled Gardens Suck

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:52:45 +0000

I recently read a couple of posts on the openness of the iPad and the effect it will have on tinkering and computer hacking. One was a post by al3x of twitter fame and one was a response, perhaps not directly to al3x, by Rory Marinich called I Love Walled Gardens.

Writing Schema migrations for App Engine using the Mapper Class and the deferred Library

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:59:03 +0000

One thing that many people using App Engine know is that writing schema migrations is hard. Improving performance on App Engine often revolves around getting objects by key or key name rather than using filters, however altering the makeup of an object’s key requires pulling all the objects and saving them in the Datastore anew. This also requires modifying the ReferenceProperties of any objects pointing to your changed object. On top of that, schema migrations generally require modifying lots of data and you have limits on the number of objects returned by a filter, and request timeouts to worry about.

Running django with daemontools

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:38:59 +0000

Running Django FastCGI with daemontools is rather easy but getting it to run in the foreground with the proper user takes a bit of knowledge about how Bash works and the tools in daemontools.

How to Hide Inactive Branches by Default with Mercurial

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:53:44 +0000

mercurial usually shows inactive branches when running “hg branches” but that’s kind of annoying if you have lots of old inactive branches. So I recently set up my personal .hgrc to hide inactive branches by creating an alias.

Testing HTTPS with Django's Development Server

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:36:14 +0000

Django’s development server doesn’t normally support HTTPS so it’s hard to test applications with HTTPS without deploying the application to a real web server that supports HTTPS. The secret is to use two development server instances, one for http and one for https, and to use a tool called stunnel to can create an ssl tunnel to the development server to support HTTPS.

Importing an svn repository into mercurial

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:09:58 +0000

Recently I’ve been forking Subversion (SVN) repositories by converting them to mercurial repositories and uploading them to Bitbucket. It’s fairly easy with the Mercurial convert extension. Convert is distributed with Mercurial so if you have a recent version all you should have to do is put the following in your hgrc.

Minimum cost for warming-up various frameworks(and more)

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:16:31 +0000

My good friend Takashi Matsuo wrote an interesting blog post about start-up times of various frameworks on App Engine. Because App Engine kills your server process it often needs to load your application into memory from scratch. This can take a lot of time if a lot of modules are loaded.

Testing using a mocked HTTP server

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:50:18 +0000

Recently I got some tests working for my django-lifestream project. The lifestream imports data from RSS/Atom feeds so there isn’t a good way to run tests without creating a test HTTP server to serve up your RSS/Atom.

Using Daemontools

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:15:29 +0000

Introduction

Parsing email with attachments in python

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:33:31 +0000

Recently I needed to be able to parse out attachments and body from multipart emails and use the resulting data to post to a service. So I wrote the code below to parse out text and html portions of the email and also parse out attachments.

Annoying things about Django

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:08:00 +0000

Since I’ve been using it for a while now I’ve gotten a good idea about what is good and what is annoying about development with django. This might seem a little trite at parts since some of these gripes are with features that don’t exist in other frameworks but in the spirit of perhaps making django more flexable without ruining it’s ease of use I’ve come up with some annoying spots and possible ideas for fixing them.

Custom Admin Views and Reversing Django Admin URLs

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:08:29 +0000

I recently used the new feature in Django 1.1 for reversing django admin URLs and specifying custom admin views in my project django-lifestream.

Recent EC2 Problems

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:33:36 +0000

Over the weekend we had some problems with EC2 in which some instances could not be connected to via a network. This happened to us for a Nginx load balancing server on Friday and a database master on Saturday for two different web services. Several posts in the forums also indicated similar problems though rebooting the instance did not work for us. Bitbucket also went down on Saturday which I assume is related. I figured I would document what happened as Amazon didn’t release any information about it over the weekend and it wasn’t immediately clear what we should do but it turned out to be fastest for us to replace the offending instance.

Using Mercurial MQ

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:04:44 +0000

I recently started using mercurial’s mq extension at work as I found myself switching between changes a lot. I often had to set changes I was currently working on aside to do a merge or fix something that was more urgent. The mq extension makes that possible by managing patches and allowing you to put away changes into the patch queue.

Django and nginx settings

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:00:13 +0000

One problem I keep encountering with setting up fastcgi with Django is that the default nginx fastcgi parameters cause django to load the top url no matter what url you try to go to. This is because the default nginx fastcgi parameters pass the SCRIPT_NAME parameter to the django instance which Django interprets incorrectly. In order to fix this you need to rename the SCRIPT_NAME parameter to PATH_INFO.

Smipple

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:20:06 +0000

Yesterday I released a pet project I had been working on called Smipple. Smipple is a service for saving, organizing, and sharing snippets of code. I originally decided to create it because I was a user of Snipplr but I was frustrated because it was slow and hard to use and the XML-RPC API was buggy. There didn’t seem to be much response from the author or changes to the website either.

Relaxing weekend

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:29:04 +0000

Reiko and her dog Lala came over and we had a pretty relaxing weekend. On Saturday we went to Kita no maru park which is very close to the Emporer’s palace in Tokyo. I like Kita no Maru because it’s fairly open and generally doesn’t have a lot of people around.

Google App Engine SDK 1.2.3

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:04:46 +0000

The Google App Engine SDK 1.2.3 was just released and contains some often asked for goodies such as Django 1.0 support and support for a task queue API.

Tokyo Hackerspace Meeting

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:54:16 +0000

Yesterday I attended the second Tokyo Hackerspace meeting. It was the first time I attended such the meetings which are being held weekly now. I have a feeling that more was talked about and decided last week but it was good to get an update on how things were going and what people were interested in with the hackerspace. I was told that more artists and creative folks attended the first meeting but this meeting seemed to have mostly web and hardware folks who were interested in joining the two worlds.

Tokyo Hackerspace

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:03:15 +0000

Preview blog posts within the django admin.

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:12:48 +0000

I implemented blog post previews for my blog using the technique described here: http://latherrinserepeat.org/2008/7/28/stupid-simple-django-admin-previews/

Google I/O Day 1

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:59:04 +0000

I’m about 2 weeks late getting around to writing about Google I/O and most people already know what went on but I’ll share a bit more. The keynote was given by Vic Gundotra. Vic announced that Google would be pushing HTML 5.0 in order to speed up acceptance of the web as a platform. He included 5 things that Google is excited about. These include,

New Django-based Homepage

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:06:01 +0000

I finally got around to finishing up my Django based website. It’s pretty inexcusable for a Django developer to have a PHP based blog website. I’m happy that it seems to be snappier and I haven’t don’t anything particular to try to make it fast so that means I can probably make it even speedier by optimizing delivery of static content, and some caching since the blog and some other content doesn’t change that often.

Google Wave BOF

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:08:24 +0000

I attended the Google Wave BOF (Birds of a Feather). It was a good time for folks with Google Wave accounts to show it off to folks who can’t sign into it yet. It originally was going to be about 25 people but due to popular demand the location had to be moved, and it went up to about 40 people. Lots of folks were interested in hearing about Google Wave as a new collaborative platform.

Google IO 2009

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:57:11 +0000

This year I attended Google IO and had so much fun that I think I’ll have to break it up into several blog posts. Google IO is held in San Francisco and is the #1 Google event of the year. About 4000 or so developers attended the event which was held in the Moscone West Convention Center. In this post I’ll kind of give the history of the events leading up to the event and some context.

Tokyo Barcamp 2009

Sat, 16 May 2009 23:18:05 +0000

Today I participated in Tokyo BarCamp 2009. From the Tokyo BarCamp website:

Connecting Sortables in jQuery UI

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:26:41 +0000

jQuery has a UI framework called jQueryUI which provides a number of UI controls and widgets that you can use to create cool user interfaces. I’ve been using jQueryUI a fair bit for work recently and wanted to share a pretty cool feature that jQueryUI has.

Unreadable

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:07:48 +0000

What is it about some C programmers that makes them write code that looks like this:

Transactions on App Engine

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:44:52 +0000

The way to store data on App Engine is with Google’s Datastore which has support for transactions. However, the transactions are quite limited in that,

Jaiku on App Engine

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:52:31 +0000

Werkzeug and reverse urls

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:57:52 +0000

I wanted to impove a Google App Engine application that a friend of mine created (ほぼ汎用イベント管理ツール(jp)) and noticed that he was redirecting directly to urls. He is using Werkzeug to handle url routing so I wondered if there was a method for generating urls from a name like you can in Django.

QueryDict and update()

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:29:46 +0000

Yesterday I ran into an interesting quirk with Django’s QueryDict object and the normal dictionary update() method. Normally the update method will allow you to merge two dictionary or dictionary like objects but because the QueryDict internally holds it’s values as lists you get some unexpected behavior.

IE, JSON, and the script tag

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:34:57 +0000

My coworker recently introduced me to one of the most blatantly bad behaviors in web browser history. He introduced it thus:

Field/column Queries in Django

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:24:38 +0000

One of the neat things making it’s way into Django 1.1 is F object queries. The F object is kind of like the Q object as it can be used it queries but it represents a database field on the right hand side of an equality/inequality.

jQuery Multi-Pageslide

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:15:08 +0000

Earlier this week I came across the jQuery Pageslide plugin via Ajaxian and was impressed with the design. I set about using it to display help messages to the user for a site I am working on.

Python date range iterator

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:27:30 +0000

I couldn’t find something that gave me quite what I wanted so I created a simple Python generator to give me the dates between two datetime objects.

Introduction to Algorithms

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:10:37 +0000

Make Firefox look like Chrome

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:02:52 +0000

UTF-8 with guile

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:03:47 +0000

Getting UTF-8 to work with guile is a bit of a stretch as guile doesn’t have any real encoding or UTF-8 support to speak of, but I was able to get at least some basic stuff working by using the Unicode Manipulation routines which are part of the Guile-Glib module.

Django Sitemap Framework

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:22:06 +0000

Using the Django sitemap framework is so easy it’s almost no work at all. Just make a sitemap object and add it to the sitemap in urls.py. The sitemap framework calls items() in your Sitemap to get the list of objects to put in the sitemap and then calls get_absolute_url() on each object.

Django admin inline forms

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:09:55 +0000

For my new project dlife (Update: Now django-lifestream), I went about implementing a simple comments interface that would allow users to make comments on imported feed items. I wanted to support this in the admin in the typical manner such that when you click on an item in the admin, you can see all the comments and edit them from the item’s page.

Feedparser and Django

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:13:52 +0000

Over the weekend at Python Onsen I worked on a lifestream web application using Django and feedparser. I was really impressed with how simple feedparser is to use and how easy it is to get unified results from atom or RSS feeds. You simply import feedparser and call feedparser.parse to parse a feed from a URL.

Python Onsen Oct. 2008

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:12:18 +0000

Last weekend I went to my second Python Onsen organized by Nakai-san(id:voluntas). I talked about Python Onsen in my first blog post. Python Onsen is a 3 day event (Fri, Sat, Sun) but as before I only participated on Saturday and Sunday. This time I opted to work on creating a lifestream web app using feedparser and Django. feedparser is a snappy little parser for reading RSS and Atom feeds. The result was dlife which so far can parse a set of feeds and show them on a user’s lifestream though it’s not in any way user friendly yet (you have to update the feeds in the Django shell).

Disqus Plugin

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:03:20 +0000

The first version of the Disqus plugin has been released!

Ok/Cancel buttons with jqModal

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:12:22 +0000

I recently quit using Google Web Toolkit and started using jQuery for a personal project of mine and I wanted to be able to show some modal dialog boxes using jQuery. As it turns out there is an easy to use plugin that does exactly this called jqModal. jqModal makes it simple to create a modal dialog by simply setting a CSS class on the tag you want to open the dialog and on the tag in the dialog that you want to close it.

jsonschema 0.2 alpha

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:04:08 +0000

I just released a new version of jsonschema 0.2 alpha over at http://code.google.com/p/jsonschema

New Sweetcron Homepage

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:02:39 +0000

Twitter reply updates via e-mail

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:10:52 +0000

I just set up Plagger to send me e-mails to my cellphone and Gmail when there are updates to my replies rss feed on twitter. This took way longer than anticipated because of how long it took to install and configure Plagger properly.

Graphviz

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:00:16 +0000

Just played a bit with Graphviz and made some simple graphs. Graphviz is an open source suite of programs for generating graph diagrams from a number of text formats, the simplest of which is the dot format.

Bob's Talk on Erlang

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:20:37 +0000

Update (2023-10-02): The video is no longer available.

Wanted: Dictionary program for Windows/Linux

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:21:00 +0000

I have wanted a good dictionary application that supports a number of dictionaries/dictionary formats for studying Japanese but I’ve been sort of frustrated that there is no single application that does what I would like. I have looked mostly at StarDict and epwing because they are closest to the type of dictionary I want. Specifically I have the following requirements:

jsonschema mentioned on json.com

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:47:10 +0000

Kris Zyp (the author of the JSONSchema proposal) mentioned jsonschema on his blog at json.com. Thanks Kris!!

JSON Schema Validator 0.1a for Python

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:01:32 +0000

Update (2025-01-27): Many of the links no longer work.

Django Views

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:15:30 +0000

I was thinking about using Django for one of my projects on App Engine because it seems like a popular project and somewhat easy to use, but I’m not quite understanding yet why it’s better to have helper functions rather than controller/handler classes like Pylons or GAE’s normal WSGI handling has. With handler classes my controller might look like:

Protocol Buffers

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:22:09 +0000

A few days ago Protocol Buffers was released by Google as an open source project. Protocol Buffers is a way to generate code for objects that can be serialized to and deserialized from the Protocol Buffers binary format. An implementation of the Protocol Buffers compiler which reads a .proto file and can output Java, Python, and C++ code. Because the format is a binary format and the compiler can output in several languages, this would allow for fast message passing between applications that may or may not be implemented in the same language.

Javascript Interpreter

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:45:46 +0000

I wanted a convenient way to test out some javascript by running it in a browser and being able to play with it via an interpreter like python has. As it turns out the almighty Bob created a nice interpreter for playing around with Mochikit but I wanted something a bit more generic that would allow me to import any kind of javascript and play with it. It turns out this is really easy so I added one simple function to the interpreter.js file called importjs.

Python Onsen

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:36:21 +0000

Twitter Page Code

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:14:11 +0000

Ohloh

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:34:43 +0000

Just found out about Ohloh, which is an open-source community website that allows users to give each other “kudos”, and the number of kudos that you give and receive affects your standing within the open source community.

Google Developer Day 2008

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:04:08 +0000

I went to Google Developer Day 2008 in Yokohama Japan yesterday. The keynote speech was pretty much the exact same info as was given at the keynote at Google I/O where Google announced their direction, moving forward the web as a platform.

Gallery 2 plugin with TinyMCE

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:18:21 +0000

I made some changes to the TinyMCE plugin for b2evolution to support some callbacks which will allow other b2evolution plugins to register TinyMCE plugins automatically. This is especially useful for the Gallery 2 plugin because it will allow me to add a button that allows users to add photos from Gallery 2 to their blog posts to TinyMCE automatically when the Gallery 2 plugin is installed. Currently it’s a pain to get it to work because the standard Gallery 2 image chooser button doesn’t work with TinyMCE and installing it requires you to copy the g2image directory to another location.

Health related Japanese Vocab

Sat, 31 May 2008 19:37:25 +0000

Since I went to the doctor today I thought I would post some Japanese words that are relatively new to me. Some I learned today and some I had learned before but they all relate to illness or infirmity. Forgive the somewhat advanced and somewhat gross nature of some of the words but I hope they could be useful to someone looking to go to the Japanese Doctor.

Google Developer Day 2008

Thu, 29 May 2008 20:39:03 +0000

Google Developer Day Japan 2008 is being held on June 10th at Google’s offices in Shibuya and I’ve registered to attend this year. There were a number of sessions that people could take part in but I decided to register for a Google App Engine hackathon. I’m pretty curious about App Engine since I’ve been working at becoming more familiar with really newly evolving technologies and not necessarily ones that have been around a while. Newly evolving technologies is something I’ve always felt I’ve had to catch up on since starting programming in high school. Going to high school with folks like Bob Ippolito (Mochikit, simplejson) and Konrad Rokicki who started coding stuff when they were in early middle school didn’t help my self esteem.

Google Analytics for Mobile Sites

Fri, 23 May 2008 20:13:41 +0000

I implemented tracking using Google Analytics for my company’s mobile sites using a technique described by Peter van der Graff on his site. The technique involves performing a GET to to an image on Google’s server and passing it a bunch of options. Incidentally this is because JavaScript can perform gets of images but not gets for any other kinds of content (as an aside, this kind of protection seems usless since the server could return any kind of content in wants to the JavaScript even though the GET has an image in the url. Maybe someone could enlighten me).

Choosing Kanji

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:32:20 +0000

One of the things that makes Japanese hard is the writing system. Written Japanese consists of essentially four alphabets, Kanji (borrowed chinese characters (1,000 needed for literacy, 2000 base characters, about 5,000, give or take a thousand, in active use)), Hiragana (Used for Japanese words (46 characters)), Katakana (Used for foreign words (46 characters)), and Roman characters (foreign words, English (26 lowercase, 26 uppercase)).

Gallery 2 for WordPress

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:51:03 +0000

I took a look at the Gallery 2 plugin for WordPress by ozgreg to get some ideas on how they had integrated Gallery 2 with the WordPress blog engine and how I might be able to bring those features to b2evolution. I felt somewhat bad looking at it as I’ve worked on by own Gallery 2 integration plugin for b2evolution for about a year and haven’t really taken more than a cursory look at the WordPress counterpart. I felt even worse when I realized how slick it is compared to my, comparatively, rather simple integration.

Using less and grep with logs

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:34:43 +0000

Recently I’ve been doing a decent amount of debugging a database conversion process and looking at log files on the Red Hat servers at work. This has meant looking at some rather big (10 or so megabytes) log files. Normally I just fire up vim when looking at text files but opening a text file in a text editor that is a number of megabytes is a no-no since pretty much any text editor will load the whole file.

apt pinning

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:48 +0000

Many people who are new to Debian might be thinking that Debian stable releases are slow. You are right. Many do look at this and turn to Ubuntu because of their relatively quick releases. It’s true that Ubuntu does release “stable” versions more often but I would encourage people to sit back down and give Debian another try. Especially with the cool feature of Debian’s packaging system, apt, called apt pinning.

Using mercurial on windows with cygwin

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:40:54 +0000

So for the longest time, well, about 5 months, I have used the mercurial package in Cygwin as my mercurial at work where I run windows on my desktop. I use Cygwin as my terminal on windows because it’s Unix-like and the window command line isn’t very good. No sane command/path completion nothing. Scripting is a nightmare etc. Anyway, the reason I used it was because I was under the false impression that all other mercurial installations wouldn’t play nice with Unix paths.

Mobile phones are not Desktops

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:28:33 +0000

While John C. Dvorak generally writes flamebait that you shouldn’t pay attention to, there is usually a nugget of truth in his writing. This time Mr. Dvorak points out that iPhones are not desktops. He says iPhones but he really means all mobile devices of various shapes and sizes from mobile phones to laptops. The idea that mobiles are not desktops might seem obvious.

Website Update

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:32:46 +0000

Today I finally updated my website and gave it a new look. I hope everyone likes it. The theme is a customized version of the “Simple Zen” theme by Foppe Hemminga. I thought it would work well since I wanted a theme that where the header would expand no matter what resolution you view it at and wasn’t a fixed pixel size. The fact that’s it’s a zen theme and I live in Japan just makes it all the better. There are still some rough edges to work out but they should be fixed within the week.

BBC Open Source

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:09:20 +0000

I took a look at the Google summer of code mentoring organizations for 2008 and was surprised to see BBC research listed. They were probably previous participants but it seems that BBC maintains a number of open source projects on their open source page. The most notable ones seem to be the ones that they are going to use the interns for, Kamaelia, which is apparently a test system for large scale media distribution, and Dirac, an open source video codec. All in all, some pretty cool stuff.

Mercurial and named branches and hgweb

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:19:59 +0000

Mercurial is a nice distributed SCM system written in Python which I have been using at work and at on OSS projects for a little while now. Mercurial allows three types of branching, cloning, named branches, and local branches. Each of these has it’s uses but I have only really used cloning and named branches in my own development.

hg email and gmail

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:41:16 +0000

I just set up my e-mail settings with Mercurial so that I can e-mail patches via my Gmail account. I have Debian installed on my machine which has exim installed by default so it was pretty easy to set up. I’m not terribly versed at setting up mailing agents so I basically followed these instructions on the Debian Wiki. After getting that set up it’s easy to set up Mercurial to use exim4 since it’s a drop in replacement for sendmail.

Backup with rsync

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:18:00 +0000

I wanted to have a simple incremental backup system I could use on my machine to back up to an external drive so I came across this post on Benno’s blog. Basically it involves using rsync with the --link-dest option to compare files you are backing up against a previous backup and only create new copies when the files have been modified since the previous backup. The rsync command would look something like the following:

MochiKit does makes java suck less

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 22:58:44 +0000

So the last few days I’ve been playing around with MochiKit and working with Javascript. Until now I have done some JavaScript here and there but not too much. MochiKit seems to make it a lot easier by providing you with lots of useful functions for things you do often. In fact it’s so popular that I have a hard time explaining to myself why I hadn’t tried to use it up until now. I’m certainly not on the bleeding edge here.

Bob Ippolito

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:49:21 +0000

I found out today that the principle author of a popular Javascript/AJAX library Mochikit is my former highschool classmate Bob Ippolito. I remember him being pretty smart. I supposed he would make a name for himself in some CS circles and it looks like he has. He is also apparently a co-founder of Mochi Media, a company that makes products for content creators. Mochibot can be used to track usage of Adobe Flash content. It looks like they are moving into some advertising space by creating an advertising system for casual online games.

cp interactive copy

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:50:40 +0000

Is it just me or has the behavior of cp in Linux distributions changed recently? cp is non-interactive by default so a lot of people, myself included, set an alias to include the -i flag so that cp was interactive by default.

Setting output of a program to a variable in Windows Batch

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:03:39 +0000

I recently had to do this to get TortoiseMerge working with Mercurial within Cygwin. It turned out to be pretty easy and I couldn’t believe that a lot of people were saying that you had to route the output to a temporary file and then read it back into your program or some such garbage. Anyway, behold!!

Learning GTK2.0

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:25:24 +0000

Today I’ve been playing around with writing programs in GTK 2.0. This has been on my TODO list for a really long time, almost since college, but I’ve never got around to it. I’ve revived my old project gorbital and decided to rewrite it using GTK 2.0. I originally wrote it in C++ using gtkmm for GTK 1.0. But GTK 1.0 is long since dead. Even my beloved GnuCash has finally made it to the world of GTK 2.0 making it the last application I use that has made the switch (Gaim being the first).

Internet Explorer is CRAP!!

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:29:20 +0000

Basically the title says it all. Since I started doing web development I’ve lost count of the number of bugs that I’ve found in Internet Explorer but I want to highlight a couple that were especially annoying to me.

Returning Arrays in WSDL

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:41:28 +0000

This week I’ve been working on setting up several web service for a project I’m working on for work. Because we are creating these web services from scratch we had to start by creating a WSDL file to describe the web service and it’s functions.