yashh.com

Links for 2009-07-06 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Cassandra
A non -relational database like google's big table. More of a key-value storage. Got to check this out. Cassandra even has a python library written by Eric Florenzano. Super ain't it.

Links for 2009-07-02 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

JavaScript Color Picker
jscolor - A javascript library to make it easy to pick colors in HTML form.

Links for 2009-06-25 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

zag font
A free font available for download.

Tribute to the King

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:18:02 PDT

A man who needs no introduction!!

Has given the world a gift, his talent, and, in return, took crucification.

Redefined the term professional entertainer.

A pop phenomenon who never stopped pushing the envelope of creativity

Has his own touch of technology lean boot

The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.

-- Michael Jackson

Finally, King of Pop!!

Links for 2009-06-23 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

install lxml python mac os 10.5 (leopard)
A tutorial on on installing libxml2 & libxslt on mac osx leopard.

Links for 2009-06-22 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Using Flickr API from javascript
A tutorial on how to call flickr API (search API) right from the user's browser. This way we can avoid a bottleneck at the server and use client to do the API call.

Links for 2009-06-21 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Beaker python
Beaker is a library for caching and sessions for use with web applications and stand-alone Python scripts and applications. It comes with WSGI middleware for easy drop-in use with WSGI based web applications, and caching decorators for ease of use with any Python based application.
cocos2d
cocos2d for iPhone is a framework for building 2D games, demos, and other graphical/interactive applications. It is based on the cocos2d design: it uses the same API, but instead of using python it uses objective-c.

Links for 2009-06-20 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Python Paste
Yet another python web framework based on WSGI. A-Do-It-Yourself-Framework.
Werkzeug
Werkzeug is a simple collection of various utilities for WSGI applications and has become one of the most advanced WSGI utility modules. It includes a powerful debugger, full featured request and response objects, HTTP utilities to handle entity tags, cache control headers, HTTP dates, cookie handling, file uploads, a powerful URL routing system and a bunch of community contributed addon modules.

Switched to VPS

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:42:53 PDT

Well I finally motivated my self to switch the hosting to a VPS.

Well its about over an year since I started this blog. I was hosting it on webfaction shared hosting. I really loved their hosting services which were very promising and reliable. I only remember one incident which took webfaction down (fire accident in datacenter) which was a few days of outage. Other than that they were never down.

Anyway webfaction rocks!!!

After a small chat with Will Larson I decided to switch to VPS hosting. I chose linode over slicehost just ...

Finally my first job

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:14:59 PST

Well my 6 months old job hunt finally ended. There is a lot I learned throughout this journey. Quite a lot of experiences varying from pleasant to frustrating. In the end it's all fair.

A few lessons I learned in this period of time.

Never confine yourself to a technology Yup this is a blunder mistake I did. I was so madly in search of a django gig that I completely lost all my confidence after a while. Never get yourself tied to a piece of technology. You can prefer one but never confine yourself to it.

...

Strange development setup

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:18:15 PST

It's a fact that linux rocks at any kind of development. And I firmly believe it.

Well recently I am getting my feet wet with a bit of PHP. Now I am kind of sick to change my development environment to suit PHP. I simply downloaded the MAMP which gives the environment to run PHP. But deep down somewhere I wanted to configure Apache with php and give it a try. I used to have a slice a while back but I just cancelled by slicehost. Paying 20$ for a sandbox is not worth. So I decided ...

Memories 2008

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:11:27 PST

Well after reading the tweet from Chris Amico I felt that I should write a post on my 2008 memories. Well 2008 is quite a big year to me.

First I found django. Well putting a framework name as first point is kind of funny but its the fact. But it was around Dec 2007 and early 2008 I found django. I was fascinated what this framework was and how better its going to be when compared to rails. Well I was learning rails at that time. And I decided to make a blog. ...

Designing for iphone

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:53:39 PST

Well after choking an iphone interface for my blog last week, I felt that I should share a few points which should be considered while designing for iphone. Most of the points may not be new to you but still I would like to remind you one more time.

iPhone Web Development
Uses Web Standards
HTML 4.01
XHTML 1.0
CSS 2.1 and partial CSS 3.xx
JavaScript 1.4, including DOM support
AJAX technologies, including
XMLHTTPRequest
PDF
Quicktime

Things to Avoid

Creating a Mobile site for django powered

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:54:24 PST

Last week I decided to create a mobile interface for my blog. I just wanted to create one just to prove my self that I can do it. And it was quite an easy task. A site optimized for mobile should be light-weight and fast to load.

Some of the important principles to be remembered are: 1. Avoid images (espcially big pictures) as much as possible. 2. Load css and javascript to the minimum (as necessary). 3. Keep the data in the page to minimum.

To put it in simple put everything to minimum level. Now to create ...

Handling profile for a user (pinax based)

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:28:43 PST

I have been using pinax for a while and I love the way it is being developed. I always wanted to write regarding pinax but nevertheless I did n't really initiate myself to do it. But today I would like to do it.

Pinax being a bunch of reusable applications, makes it easy for a developer to pick and plug the apps into his own project. But on the practical side, I think its not a task which can be done easily. I have observed many dependencies among the apps.

I would like to share ...

Setup a slice with apache+wsgi+nginx

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:14:57 PST

Well there are bunch of posts on setting up a slice with django. I just wanted to write one for myself so that I can setup a slice in future without wasting much time searching. When you get a brand new slice you need to setup SSH access into your slice.

I recommend to go with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.

Follow this tutorial to get the SSH up. Dont follow the entire tutorial, just get the SSH up and set up a user account other than root. If possible change the port for SSH ...

Right tools for right tasks

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:18:36 PST

Just felt that I should write something else other than django and refresh myself.

There are always a bunch of tools for every task we do. It is important to choose the right one which suites your workflow. A few days back Eric Florenzano's post on "To IDE or not to IDE?" brought me the inspiration to write this post. I always spend a lot of time on searching for tools of professional grade. But later I realized that you need such tools only after some experience.

I started with python ...

Django-syncr Internals

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:55:06 PST

After being an active member in django-syncr I have gained some experience with API calls and parsing data from XML/JSON. It is a lot of fun working in such a project. Recently I have written Readernaut and Brightkite syncr apps which pulls user's data and writes into a django model.

Setting up a django model depends on the data retrieved from the API call. First read the documentation of the API call and know what data is being returned and what is the name of the tag. You can experiment with a ...

Django templatetags

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:31:26 PST

Django template tags are a great boon to developers to perform last minute processing in templates. We often encounter situations where data returned from a view needs further processing, in such cases we can write a django template tag and bring the power of python processing right into template(HTML) level. I personally think django template tags is the best and most striking feature of django.

Yes, as a developer who spent nearly an year on django I think ability to perform something right at template level is amazing. At first I felt that template tag is something complicated and ...

Django comments for authenticated users

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:26:04 PST

Yesterday I read a blog post by Theju regarding 'Using Django comments for authenticated user's. I recommend reading his post before reading this one as I suggest another approach to it.

Let's put some facts together. Django comment's had been refactored in Django 1.0 and now includes some great features like email, url and honeypot to prevent spam etc. Now using the django comments for authenticated user's is not a straight forward approach. You need to write some amount of code to make this happen.

If ...

Expire cache specific to a django view

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:27:14 PST

It is a well known fact that django has some excellent support for caching. Django's support for caching is amazing.

Per-Site
Per-View
Template Fragment &
Low level API

Blog like this use per-site caching which cache everything. But there are situations like where user's posts comments on posts. It's frustrating experience for a user when the comment doesn't appear immediately.

On my chat with Will Larson he suggested me a method to reverse engineer the django cache and observe how the ...

Making Django Dry templates even drier

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:38:17 PST

Recently when I started to redesign my blog I re-wrote a lot of the code to be more optimized. During this process of re-writing I just found a more better way to write templates. Its not very new and innovative but I found it to be a huge time saver.

During my redesign I had to re-write all my templates to change the layout and the look and feel. In this course of work I had to write chunks of code again and again, like displaying a bunch of posts. There is a lot of boiler plate code in ...