So, I’ve been a full-time freelance consultant now for almost 3 months, and I’m happy to say that business is going well so far. I’ll be coming off of a 3-month contract at the end of this month, and I’ve already had some success in building the business in that time. I’ve also had a…
Category: Python
Stop Doing Things That Don’t Work (a.k.a: Excel and Virtual Private Servers are Evil)
Note that I’m talking about using these tools in some kind of professional way, and more specifically, I’m talking about using Excel as a database, and using VPS hosting to host “professional” web sites. By “professional”, I mean something other than your personal blog, picture gallery, or other relatively inconsequential site. Excel is not a…
By popular demand: ReportLab Sample Document
I posted here last week about using ReportLab to generate very simple reports with a chart and code sample. I got several requests for screenshots, but what fun is that? Here’s the PDF… gfe.pdf
Generating Reports with Charts Using Python: ReportLab
UPDATE (Mar. 26, 2010) Just realized I never posted the link to the PDF the code here generates: here it is. My bad. I’ve been doing a little reporting project, and I’ve been searching around for quite some time for a good graphing and charting solution for general-purpose use. I had come across ReportLab before,…
Clone a table in MySQL without killing your server
So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost…
Practical Django Projects Trouble?
I picked up Practical Django Projects by James Bennett just the other day. The book walks through the building of a few different projects, and tries to lead you down the path of “best practices” along the way. However, the book’s publisher decided to release the first edition of this book on the heels of…
There’s now a #django-newbie chan on freenode
So, I’ve really just had it with the #django chan on freenode. I’ve gone there several times for help only to be treated like whale turd, essentially because I’m a newbie to django I suppose. They seem to have an issue with that there. It’s not that you can’t get answers there, mind you, it’s…
A merger, migration, mysql, python, and more news
First, AddThis.com (where I was the director of IT) and Clearspring have merged! A side effect of that is that I’m now (happily, on purpose, by choice) a full-time consultant! I’ll have a web site up soonish. Until then, check back here for updates. If you’re a tech firm who needs help, and don’t mind…
More Adventures in Amazon EC2 (and EBS)
Short Version: You can find a fantastic video here about bundling customized AMIs and registering them with Amazon so that you can launch as many instances of your new AMI as you want. The video is so good that I don’t bother writing out the steps to do the bundling (it would be pretty darn…
PyWorks Conference Schedule Posted
Hi all, The schedule for PyWorks has been posted! I’m really excited about three things: 1) there are some really cool talks that I’m looking forward to attending. There are a couple of sysadmin-related talks, AppEngine, TurboGears, Django, and an area I’ve been especially slow to move into: testing (I know, shame on me). There’s…