The Nested Float

Link: Twitter, an Evolving Architecture

2009-06-30T15:10:57+00:00

A look at Twitter's current architecture and a few notes on the lead architect's plans for the future. The most interesting bit for me: "Everything is kept in RAM and the database is just a backup." Crazy. (via Willison.) (#)

Quote: Tehran is that, plus Twitter.

2009-06-19T14:44:22+00:00

Calling Iranian politics “byzantine” doesn’t quite do the trick, because all Byzantium really had going on was palace intrigue. Tehran is that, plus Twitter.

Gabriel Winant, from a piece detailing the ins-and-outs of Iran's current political scene. I love Twitter and all, but ascribing this kind of importance to the service is just way over the top.

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Quote: The end of fail.

2009-06-18T14:52:44+00:00

When someone says “FAIL”, what they’re really saying is, “I’m failing to understand a creative person’s constraints.”

Anil Dash, on the death of FAIL.

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Link: Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3

2009-06-16T14:25:39+00:00

I dare say I've never linked to a Smashing Magazine article, but here's one I can really get behind. A pretty comprehensive primer on all of the CSS3 rules worth using. The most useful part for me: which browsers currently support each tool. (#)

Quote: The First Version

2009-06-03T02:17:57+00:00

If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.

Reid Hoffman. (via 37signals.)

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Link: resty

2009-05-21T03:14:26+00:00

A lovely little bash script that exposes a simple HTTP request syntax for using curl on the command line. I can see myself using this a lot. (via Simon Willison.) (#)

Link: Yahoo! Placemaker

2009-05-20T21:52:36+00:00

This is gonna be really big news. Yahoo! is opening up a treasure-trove of geo-relational data that can be queried through what looks to be a really easy-to-use API. Know the city your photo comes from, but want to figure out the state, the country, the continent? That's just one use case. Can't wait to dream up some others. (via Jeff Croft.) (#)

Link: Visible Tweets

2009-05-20T03:06:34+00:00

The best use of Flash I've seen in a long time. A visualizer for Twitter messages that's capable of working in full screen. Hook this puppy up to a monitor at your next geek event and watch as your attendees get sucked into the resultant feedback loop. How wonderfully anti-social! (#)

Quote: Recursion

2009-05-01T15:32:56+00:00

In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

Kai Diefenbach, quoting an unnamed source.

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Link: What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees

2009-04-30T16:16:33+00:00

I spend a chunk of pretty much every day thinking about the user interfaces that Category 4 clients see, so I found this look at the Twitter admin site quite interesting. It's way more barebones than I expected. (#)

Article: Upgrading a Django Server from Ubuntu Intrepid to Ubuntu Jaunty

2009-04-28T01:55:07+00:00

I host Dawsoning at Mosso on an Ubuntu cloud server. If you don't mind doing a little server maintenance, it is, in my opinion, the best way to host your Django project. (And if you do mind server maintenance, check out Web Faction.)

I just managed to successfully upgrade an Ubuntu Intrepid server configured for Django to Ubuntu Feisty. Since you're here, you're probably trying to do something similar, so I hope these instructions help. My initial build more or less followed these instructions. You may want to check and see how closely your build matches mine before proceeding.

Your first task is upgrading the server. (All performed as root.)

sed -e 's/\intrepid/ jaunty/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

The next part was tougher to figure out. It turns out that Ubuntu Jaunty ships with Python 2.6 as the default Python version. Python 2.6 has changed the site-packages directory (/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages) to dist-packages (/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages). It's a sensible name change, so I'm not complaining.

I had a lot of stuff in site-packages – including my Django core files – so rather than symlink everything therein, I just deleted the bits already in the dist-packages directory and moved the contents of site-packages over. So:

sudo mv /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/* /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages

You've probably also symlinked the admin media from your Django install into your project, so be sure to delete and recreate that link. For me, that process looked like this:

sudo rm /home/dawsoning/public_html/static.dawsoning.com/admin
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/media /home/dawsoning/public_html/static.dawsoning.com/admin

Happy upgrade!

Link: Writing Software Is Like…Writing

2009-04-22T18:59:53+00:00

I like what this guy is trying to explain almost as much as I like how he does it. He's not really answering the question "What is programming like?" He's answering "Why do no two programmers ever produce the same work?" It's a great analogy. (#)

Link: Your Eyes Suck At Blue

2009-04-22T00:06:35+00:00

I've read a lot about monitor and video color display in my day, but this is a new one on me. Turns out if you reduce the quality of an images blue channel, no one will ever notice. Same, to a certain extent, with red. But mess with the greens and you've got a problem. Fantastic stuff. (#)

Link: tweenbots

2009-04-13T00:37:30+00:00

Little cardboard robots are helped by passers-by in their journey from one end of Washington Square Park to the other. "The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone." Grad student much? I thought so. Still, this is one rad little project. (#)

Link: THRU-YOU

2009-03-14T12:20:08+00:00

Israeli DJ Kutiman takes videos blends amateur music footage from YouTube into a PoMo dance party. Really great stuff. (via Kubicek.) (#)

Quote: Rubber Duck Debugging

2009-03-10T12:12:26+00:00

We called it the Rubber Duck method of debugging. It goes like this:

Beg, borrow, steal, buy, fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck (bathtub variety).

Place rubber duck on desk and inform it you are just going to go over some code with it, if that's all right.

Explain to the duck what you code is supposed to do, and then go into detail and explain things line by line.

At some point you will tell the duck what you are doing next and then realise that that is not in fact what you are actually doing. The duck will sit there serenely, happy in the knowledge that it has helped you on your way.

Works every time. Actually, if you don't have a rubber duck you could at a pinch ask a fellow programmer or engineer to sit in.

Andrew Errington, from an awk list-serv discussion on debugging.

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Quote: Font vs. Typeface

2009-03-08T13:45:22+00:00

When you talk about how much you like a tune, you don’t say: “That’s a great MP3”. You say: “That’s a great song”. The MP3 is the delivery mechanism, not the creative work; just as in type a font is the delivery mechanism and a typeface is the creative work.

Stephen Coles, typography enthusiast and contributor to Font Feed, on the distinction between the terms "font" and "typeface." (via Jeff Croft.)

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Quote: Causing Rain Storms

2009-03-05T14:59:00+00:00

We’re just a million little gods causing rain storms, turning every good thing to rust.

I guess we’ll just have to adjust.

Arcade Fire, from the song "Wake Up."

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Link: Readability

2009-03-03T11:38:12+00:00

Now here's a bookmarklet I'll actually use. From arc90, this tool takes that article you're reading at the Times and strips out everything but the title and the article content. No ads, no extraneous razmatazz, and no fuss. The only dissapointing part is that it removes story-related photos unless they're actually in the article body. (via kottke.) (#)

Article: Moving Servers? An ExpressionEngine Tip.

2009-03-02T22:42:25+00:00

At Category 4, we’ve always used separate servers for development work and web hosting. Though the specifics of how that’s implemented are set to change in the near future, our basic model will remain the same. Development sites get a “dev” url while live sites get (naturally) a real, live url. If you’re like me and you’ve been following ExpressionEngine’s Knowledge Base article on porting an EE site from one server to another, let me share a secret.

You’ve been doing it the hard way.

I ran across the “Find and Replace” utility months ago when I was updating a client’s posts with some revised verbage, sitewide. This handy little tool does exactly what it says – that is, lets you search various resources in your EE database and replace specified bits within. You can find the Find and Replace utility by going to the Admin tab, choosing Utilities, and clicking Find and Replace.

What I’d missed initially is that you can actually select “Site Preferences” as a find-and-replace target for one or (if you’re using the multi-site manager) multiple sites. The reason this is important is that many site preferences aren’t easily accessible any other way than, as the Knowledge Base article linked above implies, clicking through tabs and tabs of control panel options. Where before I needed to find every instance of “http://devserver.com” and change it to “http://liveserver.com” through the admin interface, now I just use the included utility.

With Category 4’s WordPress sites, we’ll typically dump the database and do a search and replace on the dump to get at all the possible locations where the address may need to be changed. For some reason (I think because EE tends to serialize data when it really doesn’t need to) that approach never worked perfectly with EE.

But that’s fine. I like this new trick.

Link: django-chronograph

2009-03-02T17:02:57+00:00

Weston Nielson – who as far as I can tell doesn't have a personal site – recently released this handy little app that lets you set up cron jobs that act on your Django views, admin commands, or other scripts, all from within the built-in admin interface. I've never minded setting up cron schedules, but for a site with lots of periodic configuration, this little puppy could turn out to be a huge help. (via TWiD.) (#)

Quote: War in the World of Programming

2009-02-28T23:09:37+00:00

There is an unacknowledged war that goes on every day in the world of programming. It is a war between the humans and the computer scientists. It is a war between those who want simple, sloppy, flexible, human ways to write code and those who want clean, crisp, clear, correct ways to write code. It is the war between PHP and C++/Java. It used to be the war between C and dBase. Programmers at the level of those who attend Columbia University, programmers at the level of those who have made it through the gauntlet that is Google recruiting, programmers at the level of this audience are all people who love precise tools, abstraction, serried ranks of orderly propositions, and deduction. But most people writing code are more like my son. Code is just a hammer they use to do the job.

Adam Bosworth, from a 2004 speech on the primacy of simple, sloppy systems over rigid, perfect ones.

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Article: Elsewhere!

2009-02-28T22:43:54+00:00

It’s hard to believe that it’s been two months since my son, Asher James, was born. In a matter of hours, he’ll be returning from his first road trip with his Mom, leaving his Dad at home for four days to get junk done, fritter time away, and miss him. And his Mom, naturally.

TNF has gotten the short end of the stick since Meg and I became parents. (I’m planning for that to change, for what that’s worth.) The lack of action here is partly due to the fact that I launched another site, Dawsoning, a week or so after Asher was born.

Dawsoning is my version of a (very public) baby book. It’s written in Django and, in addition to providing a tidy little blog, aggregates Meg and my tweets, photos, and videos from sundry other places around the web. It’s fun to maintain because I barely have to touch it. Because the only people watching really care about the subject matter (my friends and family), I’ve gotten the strongest positive reaction of anything I’ve yet built on the web. It’s neat, really. Dawsoning gets a fraction of the traffic of this site, and yet it’s more loved by its followers. That’s a nice reminder for me of the relative value of resources on the web. Sure, a lot of people might be watching. But how many of those people really care?

Anyway, for those that are interested, Dawsoning is where I’ve been spending a lot my time. I’m looking to shake things up around here a bit. But in the meantime, if you’re in the mood to browse through a a quickly growing archive of the life of some other guy’s kid, you’ve now got one extra option.

Link: Science of Watchmen

2009-02-28T14:08:20+00:00

University Physics Professor James Kakalios attempts to explain how the powers of Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan could maybe kinda be explained by quantum mechanics. "Not strictly correct from a Physics point of view, but very cool nonetheless." Yeah, that's what I thought. (via Dan Benjamin.) (#)

Link: The mother of all budgets

2009-02-26T19:41:21+00:00

Salon's Andrew Leonard breaks down Obama's proposed budget and manages to get me totally pumped up in the process. One commenter in particular hits the nail on the head. Watching Obama is like watching a Chess Master. (I should point out, though, that Checkers played correctly is nearly as complex as Chess.) (#)

Quote: What happened to our economy?

2009-02-05T04:08:17+00:00

The bursting of the housing bubble caused the current crisis, but the underlying problem began much earlier—in the late 1970s, when median U.S. incomes began to stall. Because wages got hit then by the double-whammy of global competition and new technologies, the typical American family was able to maintain its living standard only if women went into the workforce in larger numbers, and later, only if everyone worked longer hours.

When even these coping mechanisms were exhausted, families went into debt—a strategy that was viable as long as home values continued to rise. But when the housing bubble burst, families were no longer able to easily refinance and take out home-equity loans. The result: Americans no longer have the money to keep consuming. When you consider that consumers make up 70 percent of the economy, the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent.

What happened to the money? According to researchers Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, since the late 1970s, a greater and greater share of national income has gone to people at the top of the earnings ladder. As late as 1976, the richest 1 percent of the country took home about 9 percent of the total national income. By 2006, they were pocketing more than 20 percent. But the rich don’t spend as much of their income as the middle class and the poor do—after all, being rich means that you already have most of what you need. That’s why the concentration of income at the top can lead to a big shortfall in overall demand and send the economy into a tailspin. (It’s not coincidental that 1928 was the last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the nation’s income.)

Robert Reich, on the root cause of current economic woes in the US.

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Link: Without You

2009-01-20T18:09:46+00:00

This can't be real, right? It's just way too…what's the word I'm looking for? Intense? Yes. Indeed. (via Jason.) (#)

Quote: Bishop Gene Robinson’s Prayer for Obama

2009-01-19T22:31:21+00:00

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears—tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger—anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be fixed anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility, open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity, remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child, Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for all people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our ship of state needs a steady, calm captain.

Give him stirring words; We will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand, that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity, and peace. Amen.

Episcopal Bishop Gene Robison's prayer opening the "We Are One" concert that kicked off the festivities for President Obama's inauguration.

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Link: Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection (Asics Commercial)

2009-01-09T15:50:07+00:00

Origami artist Sipho Mabona details the history of the Asics Corporation in – what else? – folded paper. The writers also deserve much of the credit; pay attention to the unique narrative turns sprinkled throughout the story. An absolutely stunning corporate movie. (#)

Article: Limiting Inline Admin Objects In Django

2008-12-22T02:16:27+00:00

I'm now just over two months into my Django experiment and about halfway into my first client project. I'll admit to anyone who even feigns an interest in listening that I've never had this much fun working on the web. The framework never fails to impress.

On relating data.

If you're building a website or application of any considerable complexity, you're going to have one type of data that you want to relate with another. The example I seem to most often in CMS and programming tutorials is a database for musical acts. You'll have one-or-many artists who belong to none-or-many relate to bands. You can extend this example out to include, music videos, albums, individual songs – all distinct types of data that need to interrelate in your application or website.

ExpressionEngine, the CMS that powers this site, handles content relationships in a logical, user-friendly way that makes rapid development of data-heavy (and even data-heavy-esque) sites possible.

But EE does have its limits.

Take for example the problem I was confronted with in building an online registration system for an after-school program at a local elementary school. At its core, this app has five main data types: Courses, Sessions (that is, Fall 2009, Winter 2009, etc.), Course Instances (or a particular course happening during a particular session), Students, and Registrations – whose soul responsibility is to link a Student to a Course Instance. As parents register their children for courses, administrators will need to login to Django's admin interface and mark when the registration fee has been paid.

The problem.

Because the intermediary model does very little more than provide a bridge between two data types, I didn't want to require administrators to hunt down the appropriate registration instance to mark it as paid. Not that the admin site would have made this a particularly difficult task, but it just seems so much more natural to look up the student and have all current registrations listed on their admin change screen. If you're doing fifty of these in a shot and you've got a class to teach in fifteen minutes, you're gonna want the most logical system possible. Fortunately for me and the future administrators, inline model admin objects allow you to show child data inline with a parent model. Exactly what I needed.

Almost.

See, I got pretty ambitious with how I set up this data. What I really wanted to do was give the site admin's the ability to, at the end of each school year, mark a session as inactive and have all associated course instances effectively disappear from the site. So the Session data type has a field "is_active." Django makes it dead simple to limit course instances on the front end – and most of the backend – by providing a limit_choices_to parameter to foreign key fields (which are one of your options for relating one bit of data to another).

But when I set up my registration inline admins on student records, I noticed that the limit_choices_to option was being ignored. The docs do point this limitation out, but I'd completely missed it on first read.

limit_choices_to has no effect on the inline FormSets that are created to display related objects in the admin.

A hack-free solution.

Here I have to point out my hands-down most favorite thing about Django: hacks are almost never needed. That's not to say that the solution _solr from the Django irc channel helped me come up with isn't a bit inscrutable. But it involves absolutely no hacking of core files. It lives right in the admin module for your application. And, if you spend a bit of time studying Django's core, it actually does kinda start to make sense. Kinda.

"""
Override the typical inline formset with a custom formset that
excludes all registrations not related to active sessions.
"""
class StudentRegistrationInlineFormset(BaseInlineFormSet):
def get_queryset(self):
return super(StudentRegistrationInlineFormset, self).get_queryset().filter(course_instance__session__is_active=True)
class StudentRegistrationInline(admin.TabularInline):
model = Registration
fk_name = 'student'
formset = StudentRegistrationInlineFormset
class StudentAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
inlines = [
StudentRegistrationInline
]

Now, if my boss asked, I'd have to admit that the solution is pretty much completely undocumented, and I did spend a good amount of time sussing it out. But the point is when all things are said and done, the solution is just so gosh durned beautiful. All we're doing is overriding the function – get_queryset() – that's responsible for providing data to a generic inline admin. The beauty is that we didn't have to do this for the whole system, or even for our whole project. This behavior is attached to just one inline admin in one app in our project. And nothing more.

I do so love clean code.