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…
Category: Technology
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…
Sustained IO on EBS == No Bueno
I have a small EC2 instance running with a 25GB EBS volume attached. It has a database on it that I need to manipulate by doing things like dropping indexes and creating new ones. This is on rather large (multi-GB, millions of rows) tables. After running one DROP INDEX operation that ran all day without…
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…
Why I Don’t Write Book Reviews
I have a lot of interaction with publishing types. I write a lot, and I edit some, and I do tech reviews and stuff for some publishers, and I co-authored a book, and I’ve worked on two magazines, and a newspaper, and I’m generally fascinated by the technical book market and stuff like that. I’m…
Design Patterns in System Administration
Most readers of my blog know that I consult, in addition to usually having a day job. I started my career working for a consulting firm, and couldn’t let go of the endless fascinating problems that exist in the “technological landscape”, and in addition, the seemingly endless numbers of ways to solve them. I’ve learned…
Is it time to switch VM apps on OS X?
Thought I’d throw this out to the lazyweb for advice. I’ve been running OS X as my primary desktop OS since I got my macbook pro around May 2006 or so. I installed Parallels as soon as I found it, and it was great. I still have it installed. However, I’ve found two issues with…
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…