I was debugging an issue with our Django app at work today; an admin.py file wasn't being picked up, and nothing was appearing in the admin pages. It turned that an ImportError was being thrown in the admin.py and Django was interpreting this as the file not existing.

I'm assuming that the reason for this is that Django uses __import__ to import the module, and catches ImportError's if the admin.py doesn't exist. The trouble with this is that if admin.py does exist, and throws an ImportError of its own, Django will also interpret that as a missing admin.py – which can be misleading. continue reading…

I've been thinking a lot about ego lately, and how it applies to software development. Writing software – like any other human endeavor – is influenced by the need to be recognized and hopefully praised for our work. I am no different; it is most likely ego that drives me to release open source software and to refine it even when there is no direct benefit to be had for that work. In this respect, ego is beneficial as it compels me to writer better code, but in the context of a day-job work, ego is a liability. continue reading…

I figured I would write-up some of the features of Django Techblog, the blogging application I wrote to power this site. It does most of what you would expect from a blogging app, but there are a few features that it does differently. The main difference is extended markup, but there are a couple of other features that worthy of note:

The code for Django-techblog is licensed under my politeware license, which means you can use it for any purpose you see fit, but I would appreciate a thank you! It shouldn't be too difficult to set-up if you have worked with Django, but I'd be happy to help if you experience any problems with it. See the Google Code page for the SVN url:

http://code.google.com/p/djangotechblog/

I figured I'd start a series of Python challenges in my blog. Whenever I've posted questions such as these in the past, the discussion that follows is always very entertaining!

A discussion arose today at work about the best way to flatten a tuple consisting of values and other tuples (which may be nested arbitrarily). So the tuple (1, (1, 2, (1, 2, 3), 3)) would become (1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 3). Now there was actually code implemented which was functional, efficient and easy to read – but where is the fun in that?

I figured I could re-write it in a more terse manner, and here is what I came up with:

This flatten function would actually work in the context of our app, but I would never use it in production code. My challenge today, is to tell me why this code should never be used!

As a Godless heathen, I have no scripture from which to guide me in my day-to-day life, and I must look for meaning elsewhere. I believe I have found that meaning in the most unlikely of places; the Python shell. If you enter import this in to the Python interpreter, it will reveal to you an ancient wisdom in the guise of a collection guidelines for the Python language.

I have studied these words for many years and have come to believe that they are in fact guidelines for living a fulfilling and successful life. continue reading…

I've been toying with optimizing the caching on my blog recently – for my own interest (this humble blog doesn't get all that much traffic). All the same, any speed improvements will only mean snappier page-loads and greater capacity to handle a slashdotting, or similar.

I discovered that Nginx has a memcached module that can serve pages directly from memcached without touching the file-system, or a downstream web-app. Which makes for very fast response times. To get it working, you need to set a cache key named with the url of the page, and the value to the HTML. Alas, this means that it would not work with Django's caching mechanism due to the way Django caches unique pages based on the contents of the request header. continue reading…