Friday, 16th January 2009
US economic data spreadsheets from the Guardian. At the Guardian we’ve just released a bunch of economic data about the US painstakingly collected by Simon Rogers, our top data journalist, as Google Docs spreadsheets. Get your data here. # 6:17 pm
Prawn (via) Really nice PDF generation library for Ruby, used to generate Dopplr’s beautiful end of year reports. # 4:04 pm
Washington Post Update. Peter Harkins summarises the large number of Django-powered database journalism projects released by the Post since September 2007. # 12:18 pm
Dopplr presents the Personal Annual Report 2008: freshly generated for you, and Barack Obama... So classy it hurts. I’d love to know what library they used to generate the PDF. # 12:17 pm
Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down. “It’s easier for blogs, which don’t need a lot of demographic information about a user, to let people jump in and start participating socially without filling out a registration form.” Aargh. Repeat after me: supporting OpenID does not mean you can’t require additional registration details through a signup form. # 12:16 pm
Django now has fast tests. Changeset 9756 switched Django’s TestCase class to running tests inside a transaction and rolling back at the end (instead of doing a full dump and reload). “Ellington’s test suite, which was taking around 1.5-2 hours to run on Postgres, has been reduced to 10 minutes.” # 11:40 am