Lonely Lion

I just spammed Chicago user groups with a message about this. I’m getting pretty good at that. Kind of a cheap tactic, but I like getting the word out.

WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio, is looking for an open source developer, or team of developers, to build the web front end for their very ambitious Secret Radio Project.

It’s a pretty ambitious project, with a very quick turnaround time. They took out an ad on the 37signals job board that explains things a little better.

My friend Steev is leading the tech effort for the station. He’s a really bright guy, and would be great to work with. We built the original Chicago Improv Network together. Steev is also the force behind Don’t Spit the Water. The guy is a machine.

I’m really excited about this project, and plan on helping in any way I can. I wish I could throw in for the actual contract, but am happily employed. I hope someone from Chicago takes this job…it has a ton of potential.

I didn’t know this was in the pipe.

It looks like it has some work yet, but it’s good to know it’s coming. I made a few smallish attempts to use the Unittest framework to test my Django apps, but ended up giving up. It was a little frustrating, especially after working with the slick as hell Rails testing suite.

I’m really very glad to see an integrated Django-centric testing suite coming soon.

I’m soliciting opinions here for inexpensive Django hosting that doesn’t suck. Victim of Time is quickly outgrowing it’s $9 / month Dreamhost account, and needs a new place to live. If I had unlimited funds, I’d go for a dedicated server, like during my heady days of debt ridden ServerBeach hosting of non-profitible projects. As it is though, VoT is well on its way to being solvent, but I don’t want to cut into the budget unnecessarily.

Any suggestions? Right now I’m leaning towards TextDrive, as I met one of their founders at Snakes and Rubies, and really liked the guy. They’re very much in the “as long as it runs under FastCGI, we’re all over it” line. They’re also very Django-aware, and seem attentive. They have a pretty solid looking shared plan that you can upgrade to Business hosting or a sort of Virtual Private Server. Their pricing is a little high for the VPS stuff, but the shared is reasonable, and you can pay a year in advance. I also like that they’re (obviously) pretty Rails friendly, so there’s no problems with me moving other projects over at the same time.

Any opinions out there?

For this season’s last TechCoffee, I spent some more time toying with Perl6. I won’t be able to check the code in until tonight, but thought I’d summarize. There were more side conversations today than in the past, which was fun, but hit me in the productivity department.

I downshifted a bit, kicked in the turbo boosters, and quit namby pambing around with the little crap. I went straight for the junk and read up on subroutine argument passing, something that’s been lacking in Perl since 199*.

So long sub this { my $arg = shift; }, hello sub this ($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) {}.

In addition to purely positional arguments, you can also pass named arguments sub named (:$cats, :$dogs) {}, or lists sub lister(*@listofargs) {} and hashes sub hasher(*%hashofargs) {}

I’ve been playing around with Hpricot for the past hour or so. It’s very fast, which is cool. I’ve tried Rubyful Soup in the past, and really liked the api, but it’s pretty slow as it’s pure Ruby. Hpricot is a Ruby wrapper around a C library, which has significant speed advantages.

I don’t really have a usage opinion of one over the other just yet, however, both are included in a work app I’m working on. A bunch of pages are stored in a table. Each page object now has a .soup method and a .hpricot method. I haven’t done anything with either, but it’s good to know they’re there. I’ll probably start parsing some of this stuff out next week.

I love _why’s libraries, perfect mix of oddness combined with genuine usefulness. Although I ended up not using it for this project, mouseHole was a big learning experience for me. _why’s code is a great learning tool.

I’m 30!

So, expect a lot more mature blogging now, instead of all this hot open source stuff I’ve been tossing out at you. Now that I’m an old man, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing Java or C#, kicking back with my enterprise friends, chatting about the power of waterfall.

So long 20’s, I barely knew you.

After working with Rails for a few months now, I realized that my first Rails site, Tastebud, was really not written in a “Railsish” way. I started rewriting it a few days ago, and then got really frustrated with my code. I ended up switching to Django.

It makes sense to me, as the site is a one publisher deal. The overhead of maintaining two sites (a backend site and a frontend site) was irritating to me. If I was trying to build some sort of social network of food tasters, I’d have stuck with Rails, but the focus of the site is a selfish recounting of wines and cheeses we’ve tasted.

So there.

Also, the focus is changing up a teeny bit. The front page is now the “blog.” This is a lead in for some stuff we’re going to be trying over the next couple of weeks. I don’t want to talk it up too much, so we’ll just leave it at that. It’ll be a fun surprise.

After some tinkering, I’m actually really happy with how this site looks. I’d like to make the following recommendation to anyone feeling bogged down by templates: take a copy of the default template in your application of choice, and wipe out the existing style sheet. Then just build it up bit by bit.

In the past, I’d tried modifying the wordpress themes to my liking, but that was more trouble than it was worth. I’m a CSS neophyte. I do what I need to do to get by. I don’t get a lot of more sophisticated CSS techniques. I work better from scratch in these cases, rather than trying to rebuild someone elses work.

At least, as of right this minute that’s true. Maybe as I get more and more comfortable with some of these fancy css techniques, I’ll be able to hack someone elses design up a bit, but for now, I really enjoyed working with a clean slate.

I went to “redesign” my blog and front page, got frustrated, and decided, “f this, I’m going to cut out all design, just go with Times New Roman on White.”

Kablammo. I think the majority of folks that read my blog do so through RSS anyway, so there you go. Anti-design to the max. If you’re dropping in here from a Google Search for “Python USB” (I’m popular in this space apparently), then sorry if this is terribly shocking and disorienting.

The meeting only went for about an hour and a half last night, but had two really great presentations.

Adrian presented the next step in Django-volution last night. Way back when when he first released Django I remember thinking, “this is going to make things a heck of a lot easier.” You just had to define your domain, and voila, all your silly admin CRUD is done. Nice. But wait, how about if you could just define your domain, and voila, there’s your whole website? Adrian showed us a great Django application that’s meant to do just that. Just dump his new toy into your url definitions, and you have a complete data browser. Pretty slick stuff.

It may not be the sort of thing you want to base your full site on, but it’s certainly useful for data intensive applications where you’re not entirely sure how relationships between data will emerge. There’s a whole class of web applications that can benefit from this sort of quick and easy view. I’m looking forward to the release. Adrian says the app, called data-browser, should come out next week or the week after.

After that, Johhhhhnnnnnn Melesky presented (sans slides and demo thank you very much) app-script, a Python replacement for AppleScript. Although AppScript seems plenty interesting, the best part about John’s presentation was his inability to use his laptop. Shockingly, no one had a dvi-vga dongle for his Mac, so he had improvise and dance around the front of the room to get his point across. This is the second presentation I’ve seen in recent weeks (the first was Atul Varma’s presentation on Lua at the first RHS meeting) that had no slides and no demo, and still got a point across.

Powerpoint is for suckers.