Post archive
The Interaction Consortium
2009 June 18
Greg, Julien and I have formed The Interacton Consortium. We've got some great offices in Redfern
Gah!
2009 June 18
Just spent ages trying to work out why my view didn't work. The error message said that the 'picture' attribute had no file attached to it. I thought because my model's ImageFile field had blank=True then it should be allowed to be empty. That's the case, but what was causing the error was my template code {{object.picture}} or something like that requires that there is a file. This is where I found the solution
Vivacity - webby award nominee!
2009 April 13
Vivacity, the django site I recently worked on, is a webby award nomine! Webby nominees
Django: testing commands
2009 February 17
When you want to run a command like syncdb in your tests using the test database, then you need to use call_command('syncdb'). Output from commands like that goes to stdout so you can't capture it directly to make sure that it's what you're expecting. This is a way to capture stdout temporarily (mostly from Programming Python, 3rd Ed):
Vivacity 09
2009 January 10
I've just finished working on the Vivacity 09 site with Greg and Julien.
The site is built with Django, and I'll write more later about the process and some of the things I learned.
Meanwhile, it's great to see flags all over the city about Vivacity:
Django docs
2008 November 11
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
2008 October 28
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
2008 October 28
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
2008 October 27
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
2008 October 13
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
2008 October 08
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
2008 October 06
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...
