Django Posts

My client is looking to hire a new Python developer, initially for an 8 month contract. It's a home working position, we communicate mostly via Skype / email / gtalk etc. Although we do meet up in meatspace from time to time, so ideally a candidate would be in the London / Oxford area.

You will be working with your truly. The projects I've been working on are in the server side of web-enabled devices. The web interface is written in Django, so you'll need the usual battery of front-end technologies; HTML, CSS, Javascript etc. We have a Twistd server which communicates with devices in the field, that my client produces. In the middle we have dynamic user interface generation from XML. continue reading…

Here's a Python gotcha that I spent some time tracking down. I'm writing it up in the spirit of saving developers a debugging headache in the future.

I had an integer with a single bit set, and I wanted to find the index of that bit. For example, 4 in binary is 00000100. The 1 is at the third position from the right, which should give an index of 2 – since the first position is 0.

You can do this in two ways; either check each bit in turn until you find a 1, or you can use math as a shortcut. I chose the math solution:

Simple right? Finally staying awake in high school maths paid off. So simple that it was the last bit of code I suspected to be broken (spoiler: it was). continue reading…

I made currency site available for testing today. See my previous post for the back-story, but in essence currency site is a virtual currency platform.

I sometimes object to the word virtual in ‘virtual currency’. Most of the money I possess is not in any physical form; it's merely a number stored in a database somewhere – and transactions occur without any kind of physical objects changing hands. So the word ‘virtual’ seems entirely redundant, since there's is no qualitative difference between virtual and ‘real’ money I can see. The only difference is the level of trust in the system. continue reading…

Net Communities are looking for a Python/Django developer to work on an in-house project. It's a contract that would require some on-site work, but they would also consider a full-time developer for the right individual.

If you are interested, get in touch with Andy Evans.

Locidesktop was my coffee shop coding project of last year. I was quite pleased with the results. Locidesktop.com has been happily serving link desktops to some loyal visitors for months now – with no maintenance required on my part (a good thing because I've been busy with other projects). continue reading…

So what to do with locidesktop.com? It's a desktop-like website bookmarking tool – if you haven't seen it, take a quick look at this example desktop.

I built Loci Desktop a few months ago and promoted it on a few geek sites. It's been running ever since, with no maintenance from myself, happily serving up start pages to a small number of regular users. There was a buzz when I promoted it, people were largely impressed, some were indifferent, but few ended up using it regularly. So now I'm left with a quandary.

I could try and promote it. But to what end? It's not like I need a certain number of visitors to cover the hosting. I'm using the same VPS as I am for my blog, and I designed Locidesktop to be ultra-low bandwidth anyway – so it effectively costs me nothing to run. continue reading…

I am pleased to announce a new version of PyFilesystem (0.3), which is a Python module that provides a common interface to many kinds of filesystem. Basically it provides a way of working with files and directories that is exactly the same, regardless of how and where the file information is stored. Even if you don't plan on working with anything other than the files and directories on your hard-drive, PyFilesystem can simplify your code and reduce the potential of error.

PyFilesystem is a joint effort by myself and Ryan Kelly, who has created a number of new FS implementations such as Amazon S3 support and Secure FTP, and some pretty cool features such as FUSE support and Django storage integration. continue reading…