Category archives: Snaking

Just ran into a South migration issue.  Basically we had a field that looked like this (simplified):

class MyModel( models.Model ):
    hostname = models.CharField(
        default = random_unique_hostname,
    )

where random_unique_hostname() was written like so (again, simplified):

def random_unique_hostname():
    test = generate_random()
    try:
        MyModel.objects.get( hostname = test )
    except MyModel.DoesNotExist, err:
        return test
    else:
        return random_unique_hostname() ...

Ran FakeLion over our current project.  It's actually pretty cool just as a design tool.  The text is backward and in a weird "font", so you aren't distracted by what is says, you just see the site's layout with text-where-text-will-be.  With this being the third time we've used it on the project, there really wasn't ...

We use globalsub and MockProc extensively in our test-suite at work.  Today I wanted to look up the name of the argument in MockProc (we use globalsub in almost every test case, so I don't need to look that up).  So, look up the docs... wow, whoever wrote this library really sucks, there's just some ...

I've just done a bit of hacking to make the (Py)OpenGL.raw hierarchy a little more "normal" looking when you read the auto-generated code.  There are now functions declared, the functions are then annotated with decorators to make them into wrappers (which actually replaces the original functions).  Doesn't really affect how the code works, it just ...

Spent a few hours working on getting PyVRML97 (on which OpenGLContext is built) updated to use Cython instead of hand-coded C modules for the accelerators.  The transformation-matrix stuff worked pretty well, but so far the frustum-culling code isn't happy.  I'd like to get the rework done before releasing a new version of OpenGLContext (which really ...

Got one of the phones flashed up to 2.2 (an unsupported release for it), so in theory I'll be able to develop/test OpenGL ES 2.0 now.  I spent far longer than I should have doing that (the whole day, basically, what with various mis-steps and spending hours trying to figure out what the best ROM ...

Finally got a few minutes to poke a toe into the world of Android development.  Started the installation of the Android SDK for Ubuntu (Oneiric).  Eclipse won't start.  Segfault just after telling it where the workspace should be.  Apparently no one has ever changed the default working directory in the first dialog they ever see ...

My (2 year old) son likes screaming at the OLPC "Measure" application, so I'd like to have something like that for all of our computers (i.e. something that displays audio as a simple view that lets you see your own voice).  SilleScope is the result.  At the moment it only has an ALSA source (i.e. ...

D'Arcy asked if I could port basicproperty, basictypes, wxoo, etceteras to Python3.  Not really high on the priority list, but why not dash it off; add 2to3, see happy Python3-ers.  Will log any issues as they arise here...

Python3.2 testing virtualenv can't install anything (not even pip).  Seems that the distribute and distutils code are ...

Mike Bayer mentioned in comments yesterday that one can configure SQLAlchemy to use one session with multiple database connections, so I decided to play with it tonight.  This is in the context of a TurboGears 2.1 app with SQLAlchemy 0.5.8, btw.

Documentation for how to setup the mapping isn't particularly helpful about best practice for ...