Author Archives:
Getting MySQLdb For Python Working on Snow Leopard
I’m just getting into Python and Django programming so I’ve been tinkering with the tutorials online to get familiar with it. I develop on a Macbook running 10.6.x and the pre-installed Python was working just fine for me until I needed to connect to MySQL for some of the Django work. To do this you [...]
Using Unicode To Increase Information Density in Tweets
Quite a while back I grabbed the twitter handle @pdxweather with plans to broadcast the local weather over it.
I first thought I would send out a daily broadcast for today’s weather and tomorrow. Being Portland, Oregon, I’m centering around the “Chance of Rain” for those days at least as a starting point. This has proven [...]
Installing Git Manpages on Snow Leopard
When Using Git do you get this frustration:
$ git help pull
No manual entry for git-pull
If so, there is an easy fix
First, note the git version you are using
$ git –version
git version 1.6.4.2
Then download the appropriate tarball from kernel.org
curl -O http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-{YOUR VERSION}.tar.bz2
Then determine your manpath for /usr/local (here it is /usr/local/share/man, yours may be different)
$ cat [...]
10 Minutes to a Leaner LAMP stack
For this quick article I am only going to quickly cover the A and the M of the LAMP stack.
The Setup
Assumptions: You have root on the server in question or you at least have enough server access to effect the configuration of Apache and MySQL.
The test server setup:
A Virtual Private server running on Rackspace cloud
Ubuntu 9.04 [...]
Some Experiments with Canvas Drag and Drop
I’ve been toying around with canvas tag and learning the ins and outs of Drag and Drop
I created a little proof of concept app that allows you to add markers to an image. The meta about the markers (relative location, marker symbol, desc, color, etc) are stored in a DB on another server using JSONP [...]
ipad: My impressions
Sexy little (well medium i guess) device. As a software developer though I cannot see it replacing my laptop (currently a msi u123). I don’t see writing code on a ipad.
Also, it would not be replacing my phone. I guess we will be able to use skype (or skype-like services) on the [...]
vnstat : excellent networking tool
I recently found myself considering moving one of our servers to the Rackspace Cloud. I needed to get an estimate of the cost for bandwidth usage.
I remembered I had installed vnstat on that server when it was deployed. This made the bandwidth calculation completely simple:
Just have vnstat give me the bandwidth sliced by Month:
$ [...]
Your First PHP Development Environment
I’m teaching a PHP/MySQL course at the local community college this fall. First order of business is to get everyone set up with a PHP development environment. I decided to go ahead and post the strategy for the course as a post here in case it may be helpful others just starting out in PHP [...]
Portland Restaurant Health Map
Inspired by Toby Segaran’s creation of a heat map of restaurant health inspection scores for San Francisco, I set out to do the same for Portland, Oregon. I was able to scrape establishment records from the existing Multnomah County Food Establishment Inspections Search. Then I got lat/longs for those addresses using Google’s geocode API. Using [...]
SOLR : very impressive lucene based search tool
Very impressed with Solr and the development community behind it. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
1.5 days of research, submitted bug and resulting immediate patch and I have a fully functional search engine for a project at work.
If you’ve ever thought it would be nice to have your very own google type appliance, I highly recommend you check out solr [...]
