February 2009
Git for the real world →
Now that we’ve been using git at Twitter for a couple of months, we’ve overcome several crippling problems and misunderstandings about how to use it properly. There are dozens of “intros” and “tutorials” to git online, but at some point you need to know more than just the basics of DVCS and the map to svn commands — you need to know practical...
Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores →
Richard Jones is one of the developers at Last.FM, there are a lot of non-RDBMS out there these days. It’s nice to see so many of them compared.
This article represents [Richard Jones’] notes and research to date on distributed key-value stores (and some other stuff) that might be suitable as RDBMS replacements under the right conditions. [Richard is] expecting to try some of...
django-annoying →
Features:
render_to decorator - reduce typing in django views.
signals decorator - allow use signals as decorators.
ajax_request decorator - returns JsonResponse with this dict as content.
get_object_or_None function - similar to get_object_or_404, but returns None if object not found.
AutoOneToOne field - creates related object on first call if it doesnt exists yet.
...
WatchSnails Go west ! Funny TimeLapse on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
see() is a replacement for Python's dir() →
Nice!
Don’t get me wrong; dir() is a wonderful little function. Always there to help you out when you chance upon something new and mysterious. I would dare say it’s one of my favourites.
But wait! There is a problem. Let’s face it: dir() isn’t exactly easy on the eyes. Say you have a list of everyday items:
pencil_case = ['pencils', 'protractor', 'ruler', 'a...
django-media-bundler →
Django Media Bundler is a Django plugin bundles up your Javascript, CSS, and icons for production, while still being easy to debug during development. To use the media bundler, you just have to describe the media you would like to be bundled together in your settings.py file, and run python manage.py bundle_media. The Media Bundler is inspired by the Rails’ Asset Packager plugin, which...
The No-Stats All-Star →
To him the only pleasure in these sounds — the name of his beloved alma mater, the roar of the crowd — was that they marked the end of the worst part of his game day: the 11 minutes between the end of warm-ups and the introductions. Eleven minutes of horsing around and making small talk with players on the other team. All those players making exaggerated gestures of affection toward one...
Sushi conveyor →
Place your video camera on the sushi conveyor and say hello to your fellow diners… [via ReubenMiller]
django-filter →
Django-filter is a reusable Django application for allowing users to filter queryset dynamically.
New django-syncr app for Google Code →
"Telephone is a VoIP program which allows you to... →
“Telephone is a VoIP program which allows you to make phone calls over the internet. Telephone is really easy to use.”
JavaScript makes relative times compatible with... →
As you might’ve heard we recently relaunched Ars Technica, and our new site is 100% static HTML (not entirely true, there’s PHP used a little but only for dynamic includes and passing variables around), generated by Movable Type and rsync’d to multiple lighttpd frontends on generation.
This presents a lot of problems, as David notes in his post. How to do relative times? We...
Page load times affect traffic and revenue →
The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100...
