Tag: development

When you write an application that uses any kind of web-API out there, you eventually get to a point where you hit some kind of rate-limit. It's especially a problem when the API has a frequently changing rate-limit as Twitter's has. Well, at least on this front, there is now an easy way around

For the last week or so I've been messing a little bit around with Pylons during my limited free time in order to be of at least of some help for Martin with his new project. I'm not really sure how I should feel about this framework, though.

Yesterday Malcolm Tredinnick merged the so called unicode-branch of Django into the main branch and with this made all Unicode goodness available to those people sticking to the primary development tree of Django.

For the last couple of months, or to be honest since I got my Powerbook, I wanted to get into development on Macs for Macs. So I've been playing around with Objective-C for example to integrate one of my scripts with Safari and things like that.

This summer I finally want to take the time to do something with Cocoa and GUIs and am therefor looking for some good books about this topic as addition to the articles available on Apple's developer site.

Mike Davidson has a nice article on his blog about the evil of pagination for articles. As he said, it's a cheap way of getting more ad-clicks per article that doesn't really benefit the actual user, although quite a few content providers will probably state, that they only did it to make reading easier for the user.

Today I finally started porting the modules I had written for zerokspot.com from Drupal 4.7 to 5.0. So far everything has worked out just fine apart from one little thing:

I added the modulename.info file to my book review module and there it was in the admin panel. Everything's great. Then I wanted to create a new node with this type and noticed (1) that it doesn't appear in the main listing but only in the navigation sidebar and (2) that when I try to submit the new node, I get an error similar to this one:

array_merge_recursive() [<a href='function.array-merge-recursive'>function.array-merge-recursive</a>]: Argument #2 is not an array in /opt/wwwdev/htdocs/drupal-5.0/modules/node/node.module on line 1916.

John Resig just released a new version of his JavaScript library/framework jQuery. This release (version 1.0.2) seems to be focused on cross-browser related problems.

jQuery is a light-weight JavaScript library which is in many parts similiar to the heavyweighters such as Prototype and aims to help developers with tasks such as dynamic style-changes, AJAX etc. In the recent months jQuery seems to have gained a lot of popularity in the Drupal world and is planned to be included in the next release of the CMS (5.0.0)

[via pixelgraphix.de]

Today I wanted to write a small little tool that I could stick into my MacOSX dock and simply drag'n drop stuff onto it. Since the whole processing in the background is already done using some Python libs I wanted to see how I could get a simply Python script into that dock. The problem here is, that MacOSX has two different areas in the dock:

• One for handling applications
• and one for files and folder (like the trash bin)

... and MacOSX recognizes scripts as the later one. Everything following in the first category seems to be a really .app.

Some random Python hints I learned over the last week while writing on my first Django website (Note: All things mentioned here are in the official docs, but I haven't noticed them before looking at code others have written):

If you want to have a tuple, better play it safe and write ("hello",) instead of ("hello"). Since the braces can also be used to control the precedence of a statement, adding the extra "," will make sure, that you really get a tuple, no matter what number of elements is in there.

Named groups is in my opinion one of the coolest things I've seen with RE done so far. I don't know, if this also works in other languages, but it just makes regex much more readable if you have something like this:

For the last couple of days I've been playing around a little bit with Django, a RubyOnRails like webframework written in Python. Sure, you can compare it to RoR if you want, but in my opinion it has enough unique features to set it apart from the Ruby framework. One thing I'm so far missing though from Django is some of the caching functionality from RoR.

Django offers 3 types of caching (from what I've learned so far):

1. Caching of a whole site
2. Caching of single views
3. Caching of single variables

All nice and good, and I really like how this seems to be done, but I'm somehow missing a way, to explicitly expire a cached view. Think about following scenario: You have a weblog with posts on it, your frontpage holds a list of the latest posts in a teaser-like view which also includes the number of comments made to each post. This count at the end of the day isn't really all that important, so you simply cache the whole page for let's say 10 minutes.