Archive: July, 2007 @ Irrational Exuberance

archive / 2007 / July

Title: JET Pre-Departure Orientation
Tags: JET japan
Series: JET: The Beginnings
A thrilling retelling of the day when the JET program finally got a bit more real. Beginning with my drive down to Atlanta, and ending with a fluffy pillow.
Title: Picture from Hotel Room
Tags: japan tokyo
Pretty busy, getting rushed from place to place. Lots of meetings and speeches. But I do have a picture.
Title: Heading toward Atlanta
Tags: JET japan
Series: JET: The Beginnings
JET gets a bit more real as I head down to Atlanta tomorrow. This post scores a 0.85 on the 5 point "cohesiveness" scale. Yep, its that bad.
Title: Applying to the JET Programme
Tags: JET japan
Series: JET: The Beginnings
So maybe you want to apply to the JET Programme. Maybe you already did. This is what your experience will be, or was, like. Except its really my experience with the words "I" and "me" inconsistently replaced with the word "you".
Title: Failure of Implicit Conventions: Determining Function Destructiveness
Tags: functional language design
The distinction between destructive and non-destructive methods is important, but most languages rely on unwritten convention to differentiate one from the other. We need to do better than this.
Title: "Building Scalable Web Sites" by Cal Henderson
Tags: review scaling
Scaling is hard. Scaling is daunting. Scaling is chaos. If you agree with these statements you may want to take a gander at Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson. Or at least read my witty review.
Title: Dreamier Dream Server with Nginx
Tags: apache django memcache nginx postgresql slicehost ubuntu
Series: Django Server Setup
Upon posting my first dream server setup, it became apparent that it was less dreamy than I had thought. This article is a reworking of the earlier post, but using nginx as a frontend to an Apache2 backend. Rather than... Apache2 as a frontend to Lighttpd. It has also been pared down a bit, removing the security topics (it didn't cover them well anyway). And its more concise, as in its very much unlike this description.
Title: Apache/Lighttpd Confusion
Tags: apache lighttpd
Some thoughts about my current Apache & Lighttpd setup where I use mod_proxy to direct requests through Apache to Lighttpd.
Title: Adding Social Bookmarking To a Django App
Tags: django python
Series: Django Blog Series
Adding support for submitting your Django content to social bookmarking and news sites is a nice addition to any website. Here are my instructions for doing so, based on my experience of adding social support to this blog.
Title: Syntax Highlighting with MarkDown, and a pinch of Automagick for Django
Tags: django python
Series: Django Blog Series
It can be a bit awkward to implement MarkDown and Code Syntax highlighting together in your Django applications. But making them play nicely together doesn't have to be a hassle. Beyond that, its about time to teach your Django blog to automagickly create MarkDown references for you. If only it would stop begging at the dinner table...
Title: Music Video? Movie? The 'Once' Dilemma
Tags: movie once
Yesterday I went to go Once. I enjoyed it, but it has a serious problem: it can't decide if it is a music video or a movie.
Title: Extracting Models From Django Datadump
Tags: django python
Last week I made a sweep of breaking changes (hopefully the last one for a long time) in my blogging software, and it would have required heroic efforts to coerce my old data into my new models. Instead I wrote a quick script that goes through dumped data and builds a folder hierarchy with each model in its own file. This makes changes easy enough to transfer your data by hand, but also makes it easier to write more detailed conversion scripts that only have to deal with one model at a time.
Title: Creating my Dream Server for Django
Tags: django lighttpd memcache postgresql slicehost ubuntu
Series: Django Server Setup
Recently I redid my server to have a solid Django serving atmosphere: apache2, Python 2.5, memcached, lighttpd for serving static media. These are the cleaned up and formatted notes I used to guide myself through the installation process on my 256 meg SliceHost slice.
Title: New Look for LifeFlow, Deployment on Dreamhost
Tags: lifeflow
My last goal before writing some documentation for LifeFlow was to give it a new visual layout that was a bit cleaner and more had a bit more widely appealing aesthetic than my current design here at lethain.com. That task was completed this morning. After finishing it I ran over to Dreamhost and deployed it <a href="http://projects.willarson.com/">for the world to see.</a>.
Title: "Puddle City Racing Lights" by Windmill
Tags: music review windmill
Music is supposed to make us feel. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FPuddle-City-Racing-Lights%2Fdp%2FB000QR0B2O%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Ddmusic%26qid%3D1194307602%26sr%3D8-9&tag=irratioexuber-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">Puddle City Racing Lights</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=irratioexuber-20&l=ur2&o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> by Windmill will make you feel, unless you've forgotten how to. Even then it might create a fissure in your granite heart.
Title: YouTube Scalability
Tags: scaling
Yesterday I watched the Google TechTalk on <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6304964351441328559">Scaling YouTube</a>. It was a decent talk, and I jotted down some notes while listening to it. This article is my compiled notes, because the ideas were occasionally good, but probably did not deserve a 52 minute powerpoint demonstration (filled with jokes where the speaker intentionally pauses... but then quickly aborts the pause when the expected laughter fails to materialize from the abyss).</field>
Title: Stability Issues
Tags: fail
This is me learning to run my own server. This is me two inches tall, shrinking. God, I'm still shrinking. This is me apologizing too. This is also me learning, and getting a little better, slowly, and most importantly, this is me thinking that I may have this site stable before Christmas. Cross your fingers with me now.
Title: How to Migrate Data Across Model Changes
Tags: django python
If you've built a large program in Django (or, ya know, anything that uses a database), you know about migrating data. Specifically, you know that you hate migrating data, and that you'd rather use a badly thought out model and waste hours with a bad design decision than simply fixing the tables and the existing data. Well, say goodbye to your data migration angst, 'cause baby, its going away.
Title: Writing Custom Contexts for Django
Tags: django python
Writing custom contexts for Django is a powerful way to extend generic templates, or to simply avoid writing repetitive code when you need the same content to be available to a number of templates. They are also fantastically simple to use