PyCon 2011 bus trip


It's been interesting. The busses got nicer the closer i got to Atlanta. From Minneapolis on, they were the new Greyhound busses with 110 V power and wi-fi. My fellow passengers were ruder the closer I got to Atlanta. And more slovenly. A shallower slope, but the drivers' quickness to irritability increased the more I traveled … Continue reading PyCon 2011 bus trip →

PyCon 2011!


Tonight, I leave for the bus station, to travel for 2+ days by bus for a week of PyCon 2011 in Atlanta. I’ll liveblog and tweet (using the #pycon hashtag) my bus ride through America's heartland, and then from the conference. "Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh "Michigan seems like a dream to … Continue reading PyCon 2011! →

My company’s hiring: QA lead, individual contributor


IP Street is looking for more QA talent. We're building a very cool data mining product for intellectual property. The technology stack is almost all open-source, built on top of Python and Django. The dev and QA environments are Mac-based. We're looking for folks at the lead and individual-contributor levels. Read on! QA Individual contributor … Continue reading My company’s hiring: QA lead, individual contributor →

AT&T tethering while I’m on the road


I'm going to use AT&T tethering while I'm traveling to & from PyCon 2011. CLEAR/Clearwire could have gotten my business, but their service has been so terrible at home. They lose!

2010 in review


The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here's a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats. About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was … Continue reading 2010 in review →

WordPress’ iPhone app was written by 5-year olds


How badly can you build and QA an application? If you're WordPress, you can do a bang-up horrible job with your crap iPhone app. It changes titles, inserts and removes newlines, and applies other wonderful transforms to your blog's posts at will. It's a pity Apple doesn't allow negative stars in a review. The WordPress … Continue reading WordPress’ iPhone app was written by 5-year olds →

Python interpreter tricks


John Anderson has documented some nice Python interpreter tricks on his blog. Including a .pythonrc.py file hack for Djangonauts: For Django developers when you load up the ./manage.py shell it is nice to have access to all your models and settings for testing: See his post for more interesting Python tips. Me, I'm enabling autocomplete … Continue reading Python interpreter tricks →

An easy Django ForeignKey performance +1


Today, Christophe Pettus wrote about an easy way to get better database performance from a ForeignKey reference. Don't do: pub_id = b.publisher.id Do do: pub_id = b.publisher_id After you read his post, you'll think, "But of course!" Joe Bob says check it out.