August 2005
15 posts
5 tags
Where's Single Sign-On? Part 2
In a recent Wired article regarding One Login, reference is made to a new social style network called GoingOn. The article spends most of its time focusing on one site that hopes to aggregate functionality that currently is split between Blogger, Flickr, Friendster, and Bloglines (for the most part). However, the thing it misses is what I previously discussed regarding the lack of a working...
2 tags
Handling Form data with Formencode + SQLObject
Two of my favorite and most often-used Python packges are formencode and sqlobject. Using these packages together is done fairly often, but I’ve rarely seen any documentation describing a full form display, validation, and insert into a database of new data from said form.
In this example, I’ve tried to wean down the code as much as possible to get a very concise snippet (only 12 lines of web...
3 tags
Fragmenting A Framework Userbase
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about web programmers and the web frameworks they choose, or don’t choose, and why. I’m mainly going to talk about Python Web Frameworks as the majority of them have small communites, and possible reasons this could be.
I only started using Python for web development about a year ago, and it took me about a month to settle down on a web framework. In that time, I...
2 tags
Web Design for Programmers?
Designing web pages is a pretty annoying task for most web programmers I’ve met, including myself. I’ll be first to admit it, I’m not too hot when it comes to web design. I haven’t even bothered changing the default theme for the blog engine I’m using.
What would be really slick is a sort of Web Design for Programmers book, ala Joel’s User Interface Design for Programmers writings and book....
3 tags
Language Specific Comparisons
I’ve read quite a bit of Paul Graham’s articles regarding Lisp, how awesome Lisp is, how much of a dufus one might be for using a language programmed for dufuses.
Now, before I start, I should mention that these posts are quite old, and I don’t really want to start a flame fest over this again. However, I couldn’t help but notice today with a problem I had in my code, how easy Python made the...
3 tags
Where's Single Sign-On??
Really. I mean it. Where’s Single Sign-On?
Liberty Allienace was started 4 years ago to provide a competing alternative to Microsoft’s Passport. It’s taken Liberty Alliance years to get to any sort of usable starting point, while Microsoft has actually had developer code out there and usable since 2001. I’ve even toyed with some Passport login code in Perl 4 years ago.
Since that time,...
3 tags
Switched to Typo and some MT3 to Typo Migration...
So tonight I took the plunge, and converted the blog to Typo. It’s totally slick, and I’m digging it. Plus when I want to tweak stuff, I don’t have to mess around with Perl.
It’s currently lacking a feature I had grown accustomed to, Technorati auto-pinging. I’m thinking this would be a good thing to contribute, so I’ll start digging into the code and see what needs to be updated.
Migration...
1 tag
Explaining Recursion to a Non-Programmer
I was going on a walk the other night with my wife, and I think she noticed my far off expression and silence. She asked me what I was so thoughtful about, and I admitted my brain was a bit stuck on solving a complex algorithm involving recursion. At that point she asked me what recursion was, she’s very smart, just not a programmer. So I figured there must be some way I could explain recursion...
Rails Routes port project page is up
I’ve gotten a project site setup for the Routes port I created. Currently the port passes all the applicable unit tests I copied from the Rails route testing package. It’s very rough right now, but a few people expressed an interest in seeing the current code so now its up.
I will be putting it under a BSD license shortly to make it easier to use with whatever other Python Web Frameworks are...
3 tags
Porting Routes from Rails
I’ve begun porting the Routes system from Rails over the last weekend. It’s definitely been a good brain workout, as the one Nicholas Seckar wrote that drives Rails is quite a brain-fuck. His version actually does quite a bit of code generation based on the routes one sets up. At first I tried to do a fairly direct port of the Ruby code behind this to Python, but my brain just couldn’t wrap itself...
2 tags
Technorati Doesn't Know Your Username Either
Update: Technorati informs me that they’re working on fixing this problem.
So I figured I’d log into Technorati, update my profile tonight. Problem is, I apparently forgot my username. So I go to the login screen and don’t see anything about what to do if you forget your username. That’s ok, there’s a Lost Password link, that might help. Clicking the Lost Password brings you to a screen that...
5 tags
Making Decisions for Others
Please Note: Reading the last post would help greatly for this one, and this post does end up comparing aspects of Django with Rails in terms of making decisions rather than actual usage.
As I mentioned in my last post, Rails has been greatly helped by the decisions it makes for you. It decides the layout of your application directory, the directories you put stuff in, where you put what parts,...
3 tags
Who's Attracted By Simplicity?
I’ve been reading a lot of various blogs lately, quite a bit of loud thinking and some 37 signals vs noise as well. A mantra I see over and over regards simplicity, and focusing on doing a few things extremely well. This is reflected in the 37 Signals products, Basecamp, and Backpack. It also bubbles over into the web framework these are all built on, Ruby on Rails.
The Rails framework has a...
2 tags
Podcasts replacing Radio?
Was listening to another Daily Source Code by Adam Curry today, it was an older show from a few days ago. I seem to have a love/hate relation to his show, on some days its really cool, and other days I’m tempted to hit un-subscribe.
This is partly because of the premise of Podcasts in general that I hear, and partly from the problems I see in Podcasting. If you haven’t listened to the Daily...
3 tags
Dissing Programming Langauges...
A friend recently brought to my attention that I seem to have a knack for insulting a language based on a quick overview without actually getting into it. After thinking about this awhile I’ve noticed it definitely seems to be more of a trend than I’d like.
The latest example of this was Ruby, but before that Python (Lisp before that). With each language, I’d find new things to nitpick on...