Today I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8, a relatively smooth process. I ran into completely unrelated problems (hitting the process limit for my shell account) that derailed things for a while, but the WordPress upgrade itself was smooth.

I use Subversion to upgrade, first using
svn export --force http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/ .
in my development environment, seeing if things look okay there, then checking in the 2.8 changes to my own repository (the only niggly part because I neglected to clean the dev environment of changes before the export, so I had to look through things to see what was part of the upgrade), backing up my live database, and then checking the changes out to the live environment. It all looks fine, and hopefully will continue to function normally.

I’ve been using Pylons (and, more recently, the Pylons-based TurboGears 2.0) for various projects for a while, and a few weeks ago ran into an annoying and specific problem: using Pylons via Apache made Pylons occasionally think it was running on a different port.

There’s a relatively easy answer to this, but until I was reading through TurboGears documentation, I didn’t find it.
[more...]

My brother is organizing what will hopefully become a regular web-centric Python meeting. The first meeting is planned for 18:00 Tue 23 Jun 2009 at the SF Public Library. I think a couple of speakers are lined up already, although I don’t have details on the talks. I’ll be there, and if you’re a Python developer with web interests, or a web developer into or curious about Python, you should attend too!

I’ve been using Twitter for about three months now. I was fairly skeptical about it, but decided to try it out, and while I don’t think it’s now a completely essential tool, I do find it useful.
[more...]

My email server was down earlier this evening, and when it came back up, it didn’t like something about my procmail setup. My brother noticed and shut off my procmail after a while, but for some period, emails to me were getting bounced.

So, if you happened to send me an email this evening, you should send it again.

Last year, the server with my Subversion repository on it died suddenly. I’ve made several attempts to revive it, none of which have worked. I tried to get the data off of it, but had trouble doing this as well. Having been frustrated a number of times, I gradually got used to not having it… which is something I should have fought harder against.
[more...]

This is probably all over the net by now—I saw it via Sarah Milstein—but it’s too cool not to post about: Tweenbots.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
—Kacie Kinzer, tweenbots.com, 2009

I think it’s a fascinating project, and love the fact that the tweenbots were largely helped to their destinations successfully by strangers. I immediately wanted to see experiments where different features on them, as well as different routes and different times, and possibly the presence of money on the tweenbots, would alter the results. I’d also love to see how the results would be altered by their becoming more common as a result of running tons of experiments with them…

The Guardian reports that residents of a village in Buckinghamshire phsyically prevented attempts to add street view images of their town to Google. Perhaps because I’m a sneering, post-ironic, San-Francisco-values, technocrat elitist, I find this extremely amusing. This line just makes it better:

Jacobs said there had been three burglaries in the last six weeks: “If our houses are plastered all over Google, it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.”
—Maev Kennedy, “Coy village tells Google Street View ’spy’ to beat a retreat”, guardian.co.uk 3 April 2009

I finally got around to writing up docs for, and then packaging, the two WordPress plugins I’ve finished recently:

• Recent Commentary Widget, which contains the code used for the current comments sidebar on the main page and which I described here.
• Show Tags in RSS, which adds a list of the tags for a post to the end of the post’s entry in the RSS feed.

I’m currently looking at support for series in WordPress, and am considering either writing my own plugin or using/forking the Organize Series plugin.

I’ve made some changes to my Related Posts by Tags plugin, so that it’s now possible to add the list of related posts to the RSS feed entries. As I was experimenting with this, I realized that I wanted the RSS entries to show the tags for a post as well, so I wrote a (very simple) plugin to do that, too.

As a result, those of you reading this via RSS will now see a list of tags at the end of posts, followed by links to related posts. Please let me know if this doesn’t work as intended, or if you have other comments on the change.

While I’m familiar with a lot of them, I’d never actually read Yahoo!’s performance recommendations. They’re clearly laid out, with lots of good information in there. I should have a look at changing some of my own stuff into CSS sprites, as well as some of the other suggestions—these rules make a difference to users even on sites like mine.

Except for those of you who read all this via RSS, of course.

I recently came across this article about an AI program winning two Traveller competitions in the early 80s. (This was naval space combat simulation with Traveller rules, “Trillion Credit Squadron”, not roleplaying.)
[more...]

I’ve had a Recent Comments section on the front-page sidebar of the site for quite some time, and decided it was time for an upgrade. The old version was straightforward: it displayed a list of the most recent comments and who made them. What I decided I wanted was, rather, a list of the posts with the most recent comments on them, how many comments there were, and a list of the people who made the comments in timestamp order.
[more...]

Mozilla Labs recently introduced Bespin, a browser-based fully-featured text editor. I have mixed feelings about this, because I wonder if the time would be better spent working on other things (or improving other editors), but on the other hand I like the idea of a text editor written using languages that web developers can tweak, and being in the browser offers a tremendously rich framework for layout and presentation. I also wonder if it might lead to the kind of semantic “word processing” tool I’ve previously mentioned looking for.

One of the first things I did with my resuscitated blog was to figure out how I could develop for it in a reasonable fashion.
[more...]

After refusing for quite some time, I’ve decided to give Twitter a try. This might prove short-lived, but we’ll see. I like the concept of easy status updates and of disconnecting them from a larger, clunkier framework, e.g. Facebook.
[more...]

As I said I would, I’ve made a WordPress plugin out of the ‘related posts by tag’ functionality that I use on this site.
[more...]

I know that the Songsmith thing has been extensively covered, but this one is different, and interesting, and depressingly informative:

Having revived my proper blog and transferred my content over, I’ve now started adding improvements, some of which I’ve been wanting to add for quite some time. The first one is a list of related posts on the individual post pages.
[more...]

I really like this jQuery sparklines plugin. I’m not sure what uses I can find for it right now, but my books/week or books/month reading rate, something like lines of code written or changed per day, the page counts of recent books, or recent MTG results would all work with it. Some of those things would be better expressed with full-size graphs using Flot, though. But while I don’t have a use case right now, this seems like a tool worth having in the toolbox (especially since it’s free).

I came across a blog post about the Rules of Database App Aging today. I’m having another look at my database assumptions at the moment, and the three rules that Peter Hawkins lays out seem solid:
1. All Fields Become Optional.
2. All Relationships Become Many-to-Many.
3. Chatter Always Expands.
[more...]

Regardless of the answer, I’m not sure that this product is for you. It’s from a major technology company, which makes it scarier. I’m not convinced that either the product or the ad are real, actually. Maybe that’s part of the genius of it.

Because I didn’t think it would be fair to inflict it on others without watching it myself, I forced myself to get through it (it took three tries) and I think enduring that might be worse than being RickRolled.

I came across this essay on large numbers by Scott Aaronson recently, and found it fascinating. It pulls together concepts of large numbers, notation, Ackermann numbers, and Turing machines, in clear and concise fashion.