I started this website 20 years ago as a means to learn Django, which made sense, as at the time I wished to do everything myself: website and hosting, running my own mail server, dns server, and probably something else, too. Over time my desire to spend time on these activities dwindled, and I move my content to blogger. Year by year I wrote fewer articles, and then it became years since I wrote anything. Perhaps it was the UI for blogger or the niggling feeling that Google could kill it off at any time, or perhaps it was having a kid. Eventually the libraries were no longer maintained. This weekend I opted to:

I have recently had the opportunity to begin exploring Docker, the currently hip way to build application containers, and I generally like it. It feels a bit like using Xen back in 2005, when you still had to download it from cl.cam.ac.uk, but there is huge momentum right now. I like the idea of breaking down each component of your application into unique services and bundling them up - it seems clean. The next year is going to be very interesting with Docker, as I am especially looking forward to seeing how Google’s App Engine allows Docker usage, or what’s in store for the likes of Flynn, Deis, CoreOS, or Stackdock.

I was trying to install HALite, the WebUI for SaltStack, using the provided instructions. However, I kept getting the following errors when trying to create the certificates using Salt: 'tls.create_ca_signed_cert' is not available. 'tls.create_ca' is not available. Basically, the ’tls’ module in Salt simply didn’t appear to work. The reason for this is detailed on intothesaltmind.org: Note: Use of the tls module within Salt requires the pyopenssl python extension. That makes sense. We can fix this with something like:

I have been meaning to play around with the Natural Language Toolkit for quite some time, but I had been waiting for a time when I could experiment with it and actually create some value (as opposed to just play with it). A suitable use case appeared this week: matching strings. In particular, matching two different lists of many, many thousands of names. To give you an example, let’s say you had two lists of names, but with the name spelled incorrectly in one list:

In February I gave a presentation to about 80 people at the Sydney Python group hosted by Atlassian. Firstly, Atlassian’s office was beautiful, feeling a little like Google’s Sydney office, but with beer on tap instead of cereal dispensers. Secondly, the talk before me on Cython by Aaron Defazio was exceptionally interesting, garnering lots of questions from the audience. My presentation, more of a show and tell on piping location data to Google’s Latitude through App Engine, was also meant to subtly share my views on the need for innovation in the public sector (all sectors, really).

For the last ten years I have run this website from various systems. First it was on Wordpress, then Mambo, then Joomla, and since early 2006 it has been running on custom code written using Django. I used this site as a learning tool for Django, re-wrote it after gaining more knowledge of Django, and then re-wrote it again when Google released App Engine. However, I recently realised that for the last few years I have spent more time writing little features than actually writing. I have entire trips that I never wrote because I was too busy writing code.

I recently had the desire to send small updates to my so called lifestream page via XMPP/GTalk. I played around with Twisted Words and several other Python XMPP clients, but I didn’t really want to keep a daemon running if unnecessary. It turns out imified took a lot of the pain out of it. The steps for me were as follows: Create an account with imified, and create a URL, e.g. /app/api/ We then configure the urls.conf

A few weeks ago I saw an opening to give a 5-10 minute lightening talk at SyPy (Sydney Python), and with two nights to prepare, decided it would be interesting to explore Splunk’s usage of Python. You can see the presentation video

I recently had the need to add some HTML to the label for a form field using Django. The solution is pretty easy, except I didn’t see it written explicitly anywhere, and I missed the memo of the function I should be using. My form first just had the HTML in the form label as so: from django import forms class AccountForm(forms.Form): name = forms.CharField(widget=forms.TextInput(), max_length=15, label='Your Name (why?') However, when I displayed it, the form was autoescaped.

I’ve started to get into Google’s App Engine again, and have started developing a simple product that I had a use for. The initial first draft was a quick 200 lines in webapp, and it worked great. However, I’m starting to find certain things quite cumbersome. I’m a huge fan of Django, and but also about keeping things as simple as possible, which is why I picked webapp to begin with. I’m now considering making a swap to Django, but there are some development issues; namely, I’m using Ubuntu 10.04, Python 2.6, and Django 1.2. This setup presents several setbacks, as GAE has the requirement of Django 1.1 and Python 2.5. There are two solutions that I found: a) use virtualenv, …