Post-transaction events in Django

So, at work I’m using Django quite a bit, and I ran into a problem where I need the database transaction to be committed, and then I need to trigger additional server-side code that will act on that data. Putting all of this into the view function with a manually managed transaction sucks, far too [...]

Eclipse is still mean to me

So in working on Android programming I’ve been working through O’Reilly’s book on the subject, or one of them at least, and I’m at the stage of including the jtwitter library to talk to twitter. So, I add it as a library in eclipse, and everything builds, and then when the app runs I get [...]

Blogging in the mobile age

What a strange world where I am writing a blog post on my phone. Kinda slow going, even using this cool Swype app to speed things up. Mind you, I suck at it… Perhaps a Bluetooth keyboard will be needed. Anyone else phone-blogging?

Eclipse, you could be nicer to me

So I’m playing in Eclipse going through Android development HOWTOs. Yes, I know. Java. Thankfully there’s a scripting layer for Android, but I want to learn it all before I choose a toolset for a particular problem. Besides, Java ain’t all bad, just mostly. Anywho, I fired up the HelloWorld tutorial, made my project, and [...]

Bash, sometimes you suck

So, I’m trying to pass a ! character to a shell command. Should be simple right? Not so much. twit –post ‘OMG…I’m out of coffee…work stoppage!’ bash: !’: event not found Huh? Oh yeah, in the fine tradition of crappy shells like csh, bash uses ! to re-run commands from the command history. But you’d [...]

DBUS, an interface only Java programmers could love

I decided to move away from Gnome on my netbook desktop, as recent Ubuntu updates caused more problems than they solved, and now I’m back to running my beloved Fluxbox. Of course, doing so means that I lose some conveniences in the Gnome desktop. For example, when I close my laptop lid, the netbook no [...]

I really love *nix

So I’ve recently been playing with Ditz, a ruby-based distributed issue tracker, to go along with my distributed workflow in Git. It’s a good start, but not quite polished yet. I added the issue-claiming plugin, played with it for a while, and then realized that I don’t need it since I’m the only developer on [...]

Twisted Python and Chunked Encoding

When I was first writing a little web service in Twisted Python that would return JSON encoded data, and I was having some issues with loading it up using Javascript, I used Wireshark to trace the whole thing and was surprised at how the response looked. There were delimiters around the data, and the response [...]

Humour in manpages

I just discovered surfraw in the results of an apt-cache search (love that command) and I had to laugh at the manpage: DESCRIPTION Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many [...]

Cross-Origin Requests in Twisted

I’ve just been learning about Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, to permit javascript downloaded from one domain to make Ajax requests out to another domain. I started learning this because I was writing a Google Maps client to test some back-end code and it wasn’t working for some reason. Thanks to the help of someone on the [...]