django-simpleaggregation
I have just released Version 0.2 of django-simpleaggregation. Updates in this release:
- The detection of an update on a unique field was not being correctly computed. It used to use the addition of an id field to determine whether an aggregate should be incremented, but now it uses another hook into the dispatcher to annotate pre-save the model instance with some metadata related to aggregation.
- The old helper functions which were used to get aggregate data have now been replaced with an object which is smarter and cleaner. I suspect there will be a few more cleanup changes to the implementation of this, but the API should now stay fairly stable.
- Pagination is now usable. In 0.1, some rudimentary pagination abilities existed, but now it supports most of the same pagination data that a generic view gives a template.
Eflorenzano.com
I've updated this site to use freecomment and the excellent django-comment-utils by James Bennett, which allows me to automatically use Akismet to block spam. Hopefully this will solve the problems that I've been having with comment spam, despite the efforts that I've made in the past to combat it programmaticaly.
Eyespot
My internship at eyespot is coming to an end in a little over a week. It's really bittersweet for me: it has been such a great experience, moving out to California and working on the "Web too pwoint oahh" craziness, but I miss my friends from the midwest. I was a little nervous to take this internship, because of the technologies that I knew eyespot was using (notably, Perl), but my experience this summer only reinforces my original thought: programming language doesn't matter, it's people who matter.
If it's people who matter, eyespot matters a whole lot, because there has been no other time when I have respected the people around me even close to as much as I respect those at eyespot. I've never seen someone who can come up with the solution to a problem as I'm still trying to grasp the idea of the problem itself. I've never seen people so willing to listen to and implement the ideas of an intern. I've never seen a group of coworkers who were more welcoming and tight-knit, hanging out after work as much as during. And most of all, I've never seen a group of people who were more skilled at their craft, as the people at eyespot.
Sure, there are some things that I think could be done better at eyespot. Sometimes, frankly, I'm surprised that it all works. But I'm not going to go into those things, however, because it's actually not relevant to my point.
So, all said, I'm excited for what the future holds for me and eyespot, my working life after college, etc. But to bring it back to my earlier point, I'm also excited for my last year in college. Being away from home and family and friends has made me realize just how much I appreciate all of them on a daily basis, and perhaps just how much I take them for granted. I could care less about going back to learn computer science--I'm going back for the people (is this a recurring theme, or what?)
I'm going to carpe diem this next school year, because it's the last one I've got.
It was only a matter of time before the iPhone private SDK was cracked, and it looks as if that matter of time is Up. This news is exciting to me as an iPhone user, but also as a programmer. Assuming Apple doesn't patch this, which is a fairly large assumption, the UIKit will just continue to get more and more community documentation, and get easier and easier to work with. There are so many little apps that I want to see, (...for example, a voice record app!) that no bad can come out of this development.
About django_simpleaggregation: Well, one person responded on the mailing list, but that's it. I guess I hoped to get more of a response, given all of the work that went into the documentation and tutorial for it. In hindsight, I should have posted it to both the django-users and the django-developers mailing lists, instead of just the one for developers. But that's not really an option either, as you look like a jerk for crossposting. In any case, I'm sure people will stumble upon it and find it useful.
Google analytics rocks, by the way. I installed it for this site just a few days ago and am amazed by how polished and easy to use it is for a free site. It would be nice to get more frequent updates on the metrics, but hey, it's free! Not only is it good for figuring out where your traffic is coming from (mine is coming from Europe, mostly), but its good for finding out what people are looking at. In my case, embarrassingly enough, people are looking at that old unfinished django gallery app tutorial.
Besides all of this geeky stuff that this blog is usually about, I've recently started watching the BBC-produced TV show Jekyll. It sounds like a terrible idea for a series, and maybe it is, but it's got me hooked. There's something intrinsically great about a story where one is constantly learning/discovering.
Think about the first time you saw the first Matrix movie, and they started explaining what the Matrix was, or in Memento when you finally started getting the necessary information to piece everything together, or even in The Usual Suspects, when you find out about Kaiser Sose. It's the same thing with every episode of Jekyll. The first episode, you know just a tiny sliver of information about the overall story, and as they reveal more information, what you automatically assumed ended up being wrong.
I have just released version 0.1 of a spinoff project I did today. I've been working on a side project which I'm not ready to talk about yet, and one of the things that I have consistently needed was simple aggregation on Django models. Nothing complicated like what we'll start to see with the new aggregation framework, but just simple things like counts on objects based on the uniqueness of certain fields of a model.
So check that out: Here I'd really appreciate any feedback or comments you can give me.
So, that actually took quite a bit of time an energy to write, document, create a google project, package and upload, etc. More time than I would have liked, but if it helps even one person, then it's worth it.
In other news, I have tried out mod_wsgi for Python and hosting my Django stuff, and WOW I must say that I'm quite impressed. I haven't done any formal testing on it like Graham Dumpleton, the creator, has done, but from my own informal observations I've noticed a good bump up in the snappiness of the app that I'm working on.
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