Developing Upwards

Erik Youngren contributed the loading of packages as plugin modules, which should be useful to a number of users who have module needs that don't fit in a single .py file. This release also includes .egg packages for Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2 versions. Enjoy! Get the new release here  http://pypi.python.org/pypi/straight.plugin/1.2 Or, go straight to the source at http://github.com/ironfroggy/straight.plugin

LONG DAY. Frustrated with the results today, but I am happy that I'm still on track. This is why I got extra words in the first two days! Daily Goal: 1666 Today: 967 Total: 5005 Remaining: 44995 Remaining Daily: 1606 from my tumblr post

I love how the story is revealing itself. I am not planning much, but many possibilities are popping into my head as I start to make connections in the story. Partly i wonder if i should avoid them, maybe they are too obvious since i thought of them just from what i’ve written? I don’t know. I’ll probably run with it, I need the material, after all. What is Roshyn after, anyway? Daily Goal: 1666 Today: 2028 Total: 4038 Remaining: 45962 Remaining Daily: 1584 from my Tumblr post

I started my novel. I hate the first thousand words, which were just meandering and going no where. I stumbled on something interesting for the second thousand. Daily Goal: 1666 Today: 2010 Total: 2010 Remaining: 47,990 Remaining Daily: 1600 Today was a Good Writing Day. Even though I could not write in the morning, and only was able to get 300 words on the bus, I still finished out ahead. from my Tumblr post

I have signed up for NaNoWriMo 2011 with a novel draft I’ll be writing named The Compass and The Leash . I’ll make some notes here each day as I go. Mirrored from my Tumblr post

A little experiment / toy I have, which I might use to keep some decoupling attempts straight. Using this, I'll be able to allow the various components to maintain properties on other objects they work with, safely, without interfering with one another. For example, I have a Draggable behavior that can be enabled in a scene and allows objects in the scene to be, obviously, draggable. During this use, the behavior code may often need to set properties on the objects to track dragging state, but needs to do so without interfering with other behaviors setting properties of their own, even other instances of the same behavior. This simple utility enables this. privates(this, entity).dragPath = []; privates(this, entity).dragPath.push(curPos); ... drawPath(privates(this, entity).dragPath); The concept this is trying to express is that the first object owns a set of private properties attached to the second object, and this works much like private attributes in many langua...

New post on my game development progress. I've been tinkering on a small Javascript and Canvas engine for the last few weeks, and I'm mostly happy with the results, if not as happy with the progress. Still, it has been steady, so I'll focus on being happy for that part.  I'm starting to split the codebase into two parts: a javascript utility library, very similar to backbone.js, and the game engine on top of it. Read the full post

My Month-Project for June 2011 was the 2.0 release of the JournalApp tool I built during PyCon. I'm going to give a quick overview here, but I really hope anyone with the least bit of interest in what I do will go and look for themselves. I also think you should give it a try, but I don't think its for everyone. I think there are ways to sort your thoughts that work for us and we have different methods that will work best for us. This works best for me. If it works for you, great. If not, I hope you find something for you. You can try it out now at GoJournalApp.com . The easiest way for me to summarize it is to just copy-paste the help page right here. Write.   Write  #awesome  things and tag use hashtags to find them later.   Find things by hashtag by typing only the tags you want to search.   #likethis   Have something to do?   TODO:  write todo's in your entries.   DONE:  and click them to check them off....

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say. So, it was a good intention when someone (not me) decided to install a link shortener and send password reset links through it, before producing the printed newsletters that would be sent out to individual members. They would need to type the URLs in by hand, so a shorter URL was a good idea. At least, it must have seemed like it, at the time. Today I took a look at this system, which I was asked to clean up before it gets used again after several months of being ignored. I admit it didn't click in my mind immediately, but after producing some newsletter content in our staging system and verifying the shortlinks were being recorded properly, it suddenly jumped out of the screen and bit me on the nose: The shortener was producing sequential links for a bunch of password reset links. What this meant in practical terms is that two newsletters sent out with password reset links for two different users would send ...

I'm the kind of guy that hates the amount of time he spends considering, evaluating, and test driving new productivity software. Recently I had yet another surge of uncertainty over my use of Remember The Milk, and I tried a few other things. I gave a spin on Nozbe and Todo.txt, and I've come to a conclusion. For now... I have been a big fan of Remember The Milk, and I pay for a professional account. Even still, I'm not above admitting I might be wrong, so when a few things started to annoy me I sought out something new. I had heard Todo.txt talked up a lot on This Week in Google, given that the author is a host on the show. I had also tried Nozbe in the past, but new it had several large updates since then and wanted to give it another try. Remember The Milk I really was happy with RTM, so I want to make clear the things I do like about it! I really have been happy with the Android app, and with the use of smart lists to create filters that match different ...

I want to use Twisted.web for some projects, and I haven't used it in years. I'm relearning and I feel like a novice all over again, as I should, given the years that have passed since I have seriously looked at any twisted code. I miss it, very much. Want to relearn or learn for the first time? I can't stress enough the excellence of a quick pass through the examples of Twisted.web in 60 Seconds . Go through those immediately. Afterwards, I read up on the new twisted.web.template, which is based on the Nevow templates I worked with so long-feeling ago, and I'm pretty happy with what I see there. I'm wondering how well it will produce HTML5 compliant markup, not that it is very strict, but it looks pretty clear. My brain still thinks in asynchronous operations and I constantly have to unravel those thoughts and figure out how to express them, non-ideally, in a synchronous workflow. This is becoming tiring, and while I don't plan on leaving Django, I do plan...

I have a great idea, Windows developers: stop being a big bag of whiny bullshit. Oh my god, you have yet another optional API in your toolbox, if you want to use it. Oh no! It's based on scary web thingies you haven't used before! Guess what? COM was new and scary, and so was Win32, and so was .Net and WFC and DirectX and everything else Redmond is spat at your feet to walk on our praise, at your discretion, for the last several decades. You're making a big whiny fuss because you have one more optional API to use, for a novelty new feature that has obvious merits, but is so obviously not  the entire picture of Windows 8 that your overt and public cry-fest would be laughable if it was even remotely believable. I refuse to accept that the host of Windows developers is really buying into the bullshit story that everything in the history of Windows is getting swept under the rug and replaced by this, that everything is immediately an old, festering legacy API with legacy applic...

[via reddit/r/programming ] I would attend such a conference.

Hashtrack.js 0.2 includes a number of bug fixes and enhancements, and I'd like to start doing official releases that really show off what the tool is capable of. I've been using this for a few years in projects both personal and professional, and I always merge improvements back into it. Hopefully, I can start making an effort to polish it up better, because in this day and age we all are finding ourselves in need of stateful web applications, and we need to handle this gracefully. Take a look at the github repo for hashtrack if you like the sample code below, or take a look at the very sparse but informative docs . hashtrack.onhashvarchange("background", function (value) { $('body').css('background', value); }, true); ----- <a href="#?background=green">Make the background green</a>

Tonight I uploaded straight.plugin 1.1 to the Python Package Index. This release includes a new loader, straight.plugin.loaders.ClassLoader and adds an subclasses parameter to the simple load() API to invoke class loading, opposed to the default module loading. The classes are filtered by type and are looked up in the same modules that would be loaded by the ModuleLoader available in straight.plugin 1.0. This release has been testing on Python 2.7 and 3.2. You can check out the source at github or the packages at PyPI .

Short announcement: I will  be at Pycon this year. Also, that Saturday, March 12, is  my birthday. See you there!

This situation comes up, from time to time, when we need to get something to happen after a many-to-many field is changed. The novice will connect a post_save signal and scratch his head when it doesn't fire on the addition or removal of items in the ManyToManyField. We all learn that it takes a slightly more complicated signal, the m2m_changed signal, and its many actions , which tell us exactly what has changed in the particular field sending it (the signal comes from the field's through table, to be exact). Well, a slightly more complicated case arose in a design today and I was scratching my head and feeling like a novice all over again. You see, I needed to know when new things had been adding to such a field, but I had more than one. In fact, I had four of them. I needed a specific function called on the instance when all of these fields were finished being cleared or added to or subtracted from. This was in a form in the Django admin. Thankfully I had an assumpti...

I had a problem with a Django project that took forever to run its unit tests. The test database took an enormous amount of time to run, upwards of ten to fifteen minutes each. I didn't have a lot of ways around this, because I had to use a base Model that pulled in lots of cascading requirements and I couldn't avoid the dozens of applications it needed to build tables for. This was really hindering my ability to develop, as I rely heavily on constantly running tests in my own pathetic attempt at Continuous Integration. After some poking around the PG forums, I eventually worked out this script, which I now run on startup. #!/usr/bin/env bash service postgresql stop mount -t tmpfs -o size=500m tmpfs /mnt/pg_data_mem/ cp -R /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main/ /mnt/pg_data_mem/ mount --bind /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_xlog /mnt/pg_data_mem/main/pg_xlog chown -R postgres:postgres /mnt/pg_data_mem/ sudo -u postgres /usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/bin/pg_resetxlog -f /mnt/pg_data_mem/main/ser...

Previously I made a little preview of something I'm announcing today, but it is a soft announcement as I've had it on github for some time, but I haven't done anything with the project. This is just a prototype, an experiment, and it is called Trapdoor. I don't remember why I named it Trapdoor. Trapdoor has a simple concept, along the lines of Mozilla Prism. I wanted to take things I use to build web applications and test how they could be applied to building desktop applications. This meant two things: 1) I need to wrap up a web application in something that can be run locally. 2) I need some way to extend a web application in ways that normally only desktop applications can provide. This has been done in the simplest way I could find, at the time, and is available on github . extensions :   - calculator.Calculator js :   - calculator.js plugins :   - trapdoor.contrib.windowmanager Applications are configured through this si...