Introduction
Here are some notes about what I've been doing recently. They cover my IT research into creative collaboration, my Web work, notes on the artworks that I collaborate on, generally useful things I've discovered, family holidays and pretty much anything else that comes to mind. Other parts of the site detail my various activities more fully.
Django docs
Posted by: aweakley on: Tuesday 11th November 2008
I think when you’re learning about something like Django, as well as having an actual project(s) to do, you need to have a book to read. I think one of the important aspects is the ability to flip through the pages and get an idea of the kinds of things that are possible and I've found this hard to do without a book. Luckily django comes with the docs built in. I built the html version of the docs (cd to docs folder and type make html) which is what I use mostly. It's also possible to build a pdf version from the same source. You have to change the configuration a bit, but luckily I found some instructions here
Moving my subversion repository
Posted by: aweakley on: Tuesday 28th October 2008
I’ve recently moved my domain to a new host and I wanted to move my subversion repository at the same time. Apart from a problem with exceeding the memory allowance given to me by my hosts, it seems to have been a fairly straightforward move.
I dumped the data from the old host, then loaded it into the new repository. I’ve mounted the svn app at the same url as before, and so far my working copies seem to still be working.
Limiting memory usage
Posted by: aweakley on: Tuesday 28th October 2008
This site is hosted by webfaction. They are a particularly good host for django applications, and I'm very happy with the way things have gone as I set up the site.
The account that I have with them gives me only a limited amount of memory which my applications can use. I hadn't realised that I was close to this limit, and last night when I tried to import my subversion repository I exceeded it, and my processes (including this website) were stopped. I've since discovered the ulimit command (good instructions here) which specifies the maximum amount of memory that processes can use.
Publications app
Posted by: aweakley on: Monday 27th October 2008
For this site I made a simple django app to manage my publications. It's working OK but the model definition particularly is starting to look a bit simplistic. For the most part publications seem to appear within other publications: conference papers within conference proceedings for example. I've captured that right enough, but what I haven't got yet is enough flexibility about what information is collected about the different sorts of publications. One thing that is starting to work, though, is the admin section for publicaitons. I've used inlines within the admin page which allows me to associate authors with a publication directly on the publication-creation page.
Adding flickr images
Posted by: aweakley on: Monday 13th October 2008
Screen share was a project I did a couple of years ago, in the area of non-deliberate sharing. The idea is that it takes a screenshot of your machine every time it's activated. The screenshot is resized to 250x250px (too small to read anything, but big enough to give an impression of what you're doing) and then uploaded to flickr.
After two years, I now have quite a large collection of these screenshots, and I guess one day I'll get round to doing some investigations to see what (if anything) they tell other people about me or what I do.
I wanted to add a selection of them to a page on my site...
SVN propset
Posted by: aweakley on: Wednesday 8th October 2008
I've been looking into how to get subversion to ignore certain files (specifically .pyc) in my django projects. This is the command that I used:
svn propset svn:ignore -R -F .svnignore .
Pacific Hotel, Yamba
Posted by: aweakley on: Monday 6th October 2008
We've just spent the week at the Pacific Hotel, Yamba According to CSIRO scientists, Yamba has the world's most-perfect climate.
Also, the Pacific Hotel has the only hotel restaurant north of Sydney to be featured in the SMH Good Food Guide.
Also, the Pacific Hotel is Australia's 'Best Situated Hotel'- right on the cliff above the beach.
- we had a great time...
