Lonely Lion

Phew…good summer folks. So good, that I haven’t worked on a single side project since June. ChiPy ignored, Tastebud ignored…just about everything, unless it was work or named Wil & Camri, totally, epically, ignored.

Now that the temperature is dropping faster than the leaves, I’ve turned my attention to messing around with cool toys again. My Dad and I have been playing a bunch of Eve Online, growing our fancy Mining corporation to around 300 million isk in assets. It’s the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s ok, because I’m doing it with my Dad. We don’t fish, we mine pretend ore and sell it for pretend money.

At the same time, I’ve been paying attention to some stuff that Harper Reed has been doing. If I were to boil his recent work down to a theme, he’s connecting lots of services together in new and interesting ways. It used to be called “mashing up” but now its really just more of “connecting the wires.” You don’t have to do a whole bunch of screen scraping and reverse engineering anymore, it’s all pretty much out there for the connecting. The idea is appealing to me, as I’m largely lazy, and don’t like to pay attention to a project for more than a few hours after the boy goes to sleep.

Now that my Dad and I are sitting on a huge asset (pun intentional), we’ve been managing our business with a handful of shared Google Spreadsheets. There’s a site called Eve Central that publishes an XML API of market data. We pulled that data into our spreadsheet to figure out profit margins on the 10 or so industrial goods we manufacture to supplement our mining.

The mineral data we get from Eve Central is good, but it’s based on universe wide prices, rather then the prices in the region we call home. Also, we’re totally risk adverse, so we never buy minerals in low security space, only in high security. The prices on Eve Central ended up being low, artificially inflating our margins. When we stepped back and did the math by hand, we realized production was actually losing us money.

After retooling our business to focus on ore mining and mineral refining (production will catch up one of these days) I took a stab at cleaning up the spreadsheet. I wanted to filter the data on Eve Central, to only show prices in our region, and only in high security space. However, like I said, I’m lazy. The thought of putting together a Django app, just to do some filtering, seemed like wicked overkill. So I sort of left the project sit.

Then I read this great entry on Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets. He uses Yahoo Pipes! I totally forgot they existed. So I sat down for a bit with the Pipes docs, and ended up pulling together a simple filter for the Eve Central feed, which gives you a nice RSS feed. After dinking around with it for a while, I found out that you can also grab a CSV file by changed the _render option to ‘csv’. I pulled the filtered feeds into spreadsheet and saw that we’re losing isk across the board.

I have a couple of other ideas in the queue, based on this new style of easy-peasy mashup. As long as I can make significant headway between 7:30 and 9:30 pm, I’ll probably get them accomplished.

Django 1.0 rc is coming this August, according to the RFC Jacob posted last night. Let’s keep our fingers crossed on that one, I’d love to see it happen.

Quite a well thought out rant about why Django, not Pylons. Although I agree with most of his points, I get frustrated with these posts as they end up pulling a lot of nutbags from the nutbag store, who usually act like big nutbags in the comments.

Competition and opinions are good. Comment-baiting perfectly valid projects (just because I like Django’s oomph more than Pylon’s doesn’t mean that Pylons is bad (far from it), it’s just not for me) is a fast track to not-dating-ville.

I’d like to put forward the following bit of Franklin-like common sense wisdom, “no one ever got laid by arguing about web frameworks.” Thanks Adam for putting on paper why a lot of us prefer Django to PylonTurboZopeGears, but screw you dummy blog trolls that really believe there’s some sort of conflict worth taking sides on.

Save your energy for things that matter, like football.

Yesterday was pretty fun…I ended up biting off a bit more than I could reasonably chew, but it was fun nonetheless. I took a small stab at 1028, making a few improvements to the high level RSS framework, but didn’t get anything done with it. I have a plan, based on the tickets suggestion of allowing a complete item template option, combined with some ideas from conversations during the sprint. Then, after lunch, Jacob asked for a FAQ system to be added to the main djangoprojects.com site. I thought it would be pretty easy, so I took it. When I downloaded the code for the site, I realized that I’d been developing Django apps in my own private bubble, and wasn’t “current” on what you’d probably call best practices. My first thought on seeing the code was, “where are the views?” Yeah, see, I never took the time to learn generic views. Which is a shame, because they cover a huge swath of typical data driven web app patterns. So, I had to sit down and learn them. The problem I had was, they appear to be pretty easy, so I didn’t really dive into them, I just started cutting and pasting code. It turns out, you really need to read the chapter before trying them out, they’re slightly trickier than they appear. Nothing huge, just read the docs.

I’m most of the way done with the FAQ system, just need to polish it all up and get the code uploaded. Probably by the end of this weekend. As for the syndication feed ticket, unless it’s taken away from me, I’d like to continue working on it, as it will make my life a lot easier. Podcast feeds will be easier (I believe) if you have control of the complete item template.

For more coverage of the sprint in general, check out The B List and Malcolm’s two part coverage: 1 2.

All in all it was a fun day. The Django community is a fun one, and made up of a lot of fun committed folks that don’t mind teaching and learning. It’s a great group.

Django is sprinting this Friday. The headquarters for the international sprint is here in Chicago. Matt Dorn and I are both attending from PSC. PSC is committed to making Python and Django a serious part of its toolbox. I’m happy to be at a company that allows me to participate in the community this way, hopefully it’s a trend that continues in other IT companies that leverage open source products. PSC has used Django on a handful of client projects, so PSC obviously has a stake in promoting and improving Django. Talking to your boss and saying, “we use this product for free, we should give back in some way” doesn’t always work out well. I’m glad that at PSC they take these sorts of commitments seriously and understand that open source is only as good as the community that supports it.

Django is two!. The framework sure has changed an awful lot in the past two years. Thanks to all involved for making a great tool. Two years ago, I would have been shocked to know that I’d be working full time on a Django based project. Very exciting stuff. For even more nostalgia, here’s the post I wrote after Adrian gave ChiPy a preview of Django in June of 2005, and here’s the follow-up in July where he got into some more detail.

Adrian Holovaty presented Django last night, in a sort of sneak preview for it’s release this week. Django clearly has a lot of features that will be welcome to Python web development. There were actual oohs and ahhs from the group during the presentation.

Neat stuff. Thanks again for your hard work Django-neers.

Clint Ecker rounds up the latest Django news. Lots of great stuff in that post. Nice work Clint.