My Drupal Reunion I started using drupal maybe 3-4 years ago. At the time I wasn’t all that impressed. I liked it better than Joomla (Mambo, at that time), and it was a little more featureful than PHP-Nuke. But even back then I hated that this thing was really making some sweeping, grand assumptions about…
Category: Scripting
To PyWorks Speakers and Attendees
I’ve gotten several emails over the past couple of days about meeting up at PyWorks. This is reasonable, since I was the main engine initiating contact with prospective speakers back in the June-August timeframe. However, much to my disappointment, I won’t be attending PyWorks this year. The story is basically that, in September, the startup…
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…
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…
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…
The promise of Drizzle
I got to actually speak to Brian Aker for maybe a total of 5 minutes after his micro-presentation about Drizzle, which took place at the Sun booth at OSCON 2008. I was a bit nervous to ask what questions I had out loud, because the things I had wondered about were things I really didn’t…
OSCON Day 2: Launching a Startup in 3 Hours
Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well…