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…
I’m a Top 25 Geek Blogger… for some value of “Top”
I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or…
Freelancing: What’s working, what isn’t
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…
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,…
When will the iPhone get features other phones have had for years?
The iPhone’s success is somewhat in spite of itself. Sure, you can access all kinds of applications that do all kinds of things, and they’ve really gotten a few things right, like (IMHO) the phone interface, but some of the things it lacks are starting to become embarrassments. For example, for what, exactly, is the…
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…