Starting Closure

Published on June 8, 2007 in Taiwan under Life

For the last 16 months I have been living in Taiwan (if it wasn't obvious). Within the next month, that will be coming to an end. Over the next few weeks I will continue studying for the GMAT and finishing my MCSE (hopefully) -- any words of encouragement will be ... Read more.

Another Baby Step

Published on April 29, 2008 under Tech Blog

I showed a few of my co-workers my graph and one replied -- oh! that's really cool. (I think only two of my co-workers are actually interested in my geekyness). He then emailed me tonight a .kmz file containing a colorized file of his speed. I looked at the kml ... Read more.

Event vs. DOM Driven Parsing of XML

Published on April 29, 2008 under Tech Blog

I recently have been playing with parsing GPX files and spitting out the results into a special KML file. I initially wrote a parser using minidom, yet after running this the first time -- and my Core2Duo laptop reaching 100% utilization for 10 seconds -- I realized I needed ... Read more.

Installing Mapnik on Ubuntu 7.10

Published on April 19, 2008 under Tech Blog

I have managed to install mapnik 0.4, 0.5, 0.5.1 and various SVN releases in-between on Ubuntu. While this isn't in itself exciting, I think I manage to stumble at every installation. I typically forget to add the flags when building, so, to prevent myself from stumbling again, I'm going to ... Read more.

Django Syndication with Colddirt

Published on June 3, 2007 under Tech Blog

Creating feeds in Django is freaking simple. I'll start with an example of just updating a feed with the newest objects (for instace, newest blog posts). Similar to the forms.py way of handling our different forms, I've created a feeds.py to handle the feeds. feeds.py from django.contrib.syndication.feeds <span ... Read more.

Python, AST and SOAP

Published on March 7, 2007 under Tech Blog

For one of my projects I need to generate thumbnails for a page. And lots and lots and lots of them. Even though I can generate them via a python script and a very light "gtk browser", I would prefer to mitigate the server load. To do this I've decided ... Read more.

AWS in Python (REST)

Published on March 3, 2007 under Tech Blog

As some of you may know, I have some projects cooked up. I don't expect to make a million bucks (wish me luck!), but a few extra bills in the pocket wouldn't hurt. Plus, I'm highly considering further education, which will set me back a few-thirty grand. That said, one ... Read more.

Version 3.0 Part Two

Published on Feb. 5, 2007 under Tech Blog

Well, I'm basically all done upgrading to Version 3.0, I deserve a cake or something. Here's the 411: For the past few years I have been using Mambo, then Joomla, to manage the content on my site. It worked quite well, and was in PHP, so I could add or ... Read more.

Python + Web Developement

Published on Jan. 25, 2006 under Tech Blog

A developer just showed me an interesting framework to produce python-backed sites VERY quickly. This is mainly for you Ian, it natively supports AJAX as well. Here's the link: http://www.turbogears.org/ I watched the demo, pretty interesting. Read more.

Alexa Site Thumbnail And Django

Published on June 6, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

So, you've seen how to look up thumbnails via python, but wonder how to integrate this with Django? I created a sample app to demonstrate. One thing to note about this app is it is slightly more complex than just using the previously mentioned ThumbnailUtility. For starters, ... Read more.

Alexa Site Thumbnail with Python

Published on June 6, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

For one of my sites I needed to get thumbnails, yet Alexa Site Thumbnail didn't have any code snippets for Python. Well, no they/you do. ThumbnailUtility.py import base64 import datetime import hmac import sha import sys import <span ... Read more.

Alexa Site Thumbnail with Python II

Published on June 6, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

This is how I actually use Alexa Site Thumbnail, and since I'min a sharing mood, I'll extend the code your way. In short, this takes the url and searches in STORELOC first, then any urls not already in STORELOC are retrieved and named via a slug. You need to pass ... Read more.