May 2009
April 2009
How to Speed up Your Django Sites →
Multistage Django deployments: Part 2 →
Multistage Django deployments: Part 1 →
Google Analytics for Python: 1.0.2 released
I merged in changes from Robert Kosara, Michael Greene, and Patrick Collison which add multiple dimension and multiple metric support, pagination in data results, various style fixes, and bug fixes.
Also updated documentation to be vastly more comprehensive and split out all the information into INSTALL/USAGE/README/AUTHORS so people can find information more easily.
Clone the most recent from...
WatchAwesome mega-man style 8-bit music video for Kanye West’s Robocop
python-googleanalytics on PyPi
You can find the module on PyPi:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-googleanalytics/
Download a tarball:
http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/python-googleanalytics/python-googleanalytics-1.0.1.tar.gz
or install it from the command line:
easy_install python-googleanalytics
Python Google Analytics Client: How to use it and...
My Google Analytics Python client (http://github.com/clintecker/python-googleanalytics/tree/master) is at the point now where someone could reliably use it to get data out of their profiles. Let me just give everyone a quick tutorial on how you would do this (there are a lot of examples in tests.py too).
You initiate the process by importing the googleanalytics.Connection class. This object is...
What I normally eat in a day
Breakfast (9:00am)
1.0 cup Cheerios (Honey nut or Multigrain)
0.5 cup Vanilla soy milk
0.5 cup Orange juice
2.0 eggs, fried (only on running days)
1.0 big cup of tea
Mid morning (10:45-11:00am)
1.0 Banana
29.0 grams (1 serving) of wheat thins
Lunch (12:00pm)
6.0-8.0 ounces of Chicken
3.0-4.0 ounces of vegetables
(both are just put on a baking tray and cooked in the over for...
WatchA nice explanation of the Idaho Stop law which allows cyclists in Idaho to treat stop signs as yield signs.
An audio clip of the Very Thin Ice/Katie Couric...
A Python client for accessing Google Analytics... →
So the Google Analytics API came out last night. Up until now, most people were using a pretty flaky Python API that downloaded CSV reports of Data.
Now that there’s a real API, I wanted to get work started on a real Python Client, so that’s what I did.
I’m developing the module using Buildout so it should be pretty easy for anyone to fork my github project and start hacking...
Brewing renaissance within Chicago city limits →
Nothing but good can come from this ;)
There’s something of a brewing renaissance happening within the city limits these days. Metropolitan is up and running. Half Acre is also brewing while still in construction mode. Revolution Brewing, owned by Handlebar owner Josh Deth, is set to join them this summer. Along with Goose Island, this marks the first time multiple breweries were...
The Django and Ubuntu 8.04 Chronicle →
Really good step by step instructions on getting a competent Django/Nginx/mod_wsgi/memcached server running on Ubuntu 8.04:
This is my gift to you. I’ve spent the better part of a Jōmon Sugi tree’s lifespan configuring servers and glancing with a raised eyebrow at the various nuggets of wisdom that people have decided to part with through the intertubes. Some of these do actually...
django-db-log logs Django exceptions to your... →
Joblighted →
A neat looking job aggregator that pulls in jobs from a ton of niche job boards (include Ars Technica’s!)
“This time, though, I used zc.buildout and djangorecipe to build, test, package,...”
– Jacob Kaplan-Moss, an amazing man, explains Developing Django apps with zc.buildout
django-openid-auth from Canonical →
Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you’ve already used the code.
Rather than trying to cover all possible use...
My Google Profile
You can make them public now (it’ll show up in the Google search index). You can also “verify your name” through Google Knol using your mobile phone or credit card.
Truly Groundbreaking Marketing Research:... →
Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies. It also functions as a vehicle for teasing peers until they commit suicide. In order to become a “follower” on Twitter, teens first must flash their high-beam headlights at an oncoming motorist on the highway. Then, if that motorist...
djangorecipe 0.17 →
A lot more information than I had before. Might answer some of my previous questions.
This buildout recipe can be used to create a setup for Django. It will automatically download Django and install it in the buildout’s sandbox. You can use either a release version of Django or a subversion checkout (by using trunk instead of a version number.
zc.buildout for an established Django project?
Here’s my mini question of the night. I posed it on Twitter and go no biters. How would one use buildout for a (established) Django project?
A lot of what I see focuses around the use of development on a particular module, or in Django’s case, a specific application. You specify a DjangoRecipe and it gets all your dependencies, sets up a nice little testing Django project for you,...
WatchKevin Rose being pretty miffed at Truveo’s framing of the Revision 3 Website (seek to 32:00) — “Wait! Why is Truveo doing this? Holy shit they’re framing Revision 3! Did you know about that Prager? … No they just created an IFrame of /all/ of Revision 3! … ooh Prager, someone’s taking your shit!”
The short version of how Ars rolled out short URLs...
I keep meaning to do this, but I really do plan on writing up a short post on Ars Vigiles about how I implemented and deployed the Ars Technica URL shortening service in about 3 hours using Django.
For quickies it’s just a vanilla Django project utilizing a hacked version of Josh VanderLinden’s django-ittybitty—Jannis Leidel is busy making it less hacky. By default, the...
X-Rev-Canonical on Ars Technica
Just added X-Rev-Canonical headers to articles on Ars Technica.
I just republished the past 40 articles, so those will currently be the only ones sporting the headers. Once we get around to doing full republish of the site—we use Movable Type and push out really light PHP files to a cluster of Lighttpd front ends)—all the articles we’ve ever published will respond with their short urls...
“I JUST WANNA BE A DOPER PERSON WHICH STARTS WITH ME NOT ALWAYS TELLING PEOPLE...”
– Kanye West
“But here’s the problem… Based on everything publicly published for us common...”
–
The Truth About Digg’s DiggBar
robhudson's dumpy →
A pretty neat little Python script that takes in a config file specifying any number of databases. It dumps those databases to files, and allows you to specify any number of operations to be made on them: renaming with a timestamp, moving them to a filesystem location, bzipping, and moving the files to Amazon’s S3.
I’m using it right now on a cron job to dump the DB holding the...
“At the kinds of volumes that Twitter handles (and with what I assume is a...”
– Dave Thomas — Twitter Should Move Away from Ruby
FiveThirtyEight: Will Iowans Uphold Gay Marriage? →
Interesting analysis by Nate Silver. The amount of people supporting gay marriage bans are declining by approximately 2% per year across all states:
I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes...
Getting ahold of me via IM
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I’m probably not going to be using my old AIM accounts anymore. Therefore if you want to get ahold of me the best way is:
Personal Accounts
AIM: clintecker
gTalk/Jabber: clintecker@gmail.com
Yahoo!: clintecker
MSN: clintecker@gmail.com
ICQ: 24408693
For work related stuff
gTalk/Jabber: clint@arstechnica.com
Short URL Auto-Discovery (wiki) →
We should be rolling out http://arst.ch/ shortened URLs for almost all our content today or tomorrow:
Over the past few years SEO efforts lent to longer and more descriptive canonical URLs for content pages. During this time URL shorteners such as tinyurl.com and others came in to help undo that trend and make URLs fit into limited 140 character situations for sites like twitter.com or SMS...
Amazon EC2 + Chef = Mmmmm.html →
One of the perceived downsides of EC2 is that the instances aren’t persistent. That’s where Chef comes in! Chef is like a little system admin robot… you tell it how you want your system configured and it will do all the dirty work on the server. Below I describe how to get started with EC2, use Chef to prepare the server for rails apps, and then use Capistrano to start up a...
Shrtr →
From Adactio, ideas about sites providing their own shortners and specifying them as a rel attribute in a link element. Cool idea :)
Kellan says that they’re also putting together a URL shortener over at Flickr. He’s thinking about how to specify a short URL for a document: some way of specifying here’s the short URL for this page in the same way that we can specify here’s the stylesheet for...
Facebook's photo storage rewrite →
Haystack stores photo data inside 10 GB bucket with 1 MB of metadata for every GB stored. Metadata is
guaranteed to be memory-resident, leading to only one disk seek for each photo. Haystack servers are built from commodity servers and disks assembled by Facebook to reduce costs associated with proprietary systems.
The Haystack index stores metadata about the one needle it...