Simon Willison’s Weblog

Job: Django developer in London. I’m consulting with GCap Media at the moment, who are looking to hire full-time Django developers in London for some really interesting projects. Please feel free to contact me directly with questions. # 7th January 2008, 9:37 pm

Naming twins in Python and Perl. Simple anagram problem solved in Perl and Python, with a bunch more solutions in the comments. The C# solution provides an interesting example of LINQ in action. # 7th January 2008, 11:03 am

FUD and TurboGears. Not cool: the TurboGears guys have been targeted by some (hopefully not deliberate) FUD along the lines of “the author of the TurboGears book is using Django now”, based on Mark posting about his research in to other frameworks. # 7th January 2008, 9:02 am

Django Tip: Complex Forms. Malcolm demonstrates some advanced tricks with newforms. # 6th January 2008, 10:14 pm

Filtering foreign key choices in newforms-admin. A nice introduction to the Django newform-admin branch, including an example of how to easily implement row-level permissions. # 6th January 2008, 8:31 pm

Chatting with Adrian Holovaty. Fabio Akita interviews Adrian about Django and related topics. # 1st January 2008, 11:44 am

This Week in Django podcast. Michael Trier’s been doing a really fantastic job putting together a Django podcast. The most recent episode (number 4) includes an update on the newforms-admin branch and a couple of handy tips. # 1st January 2008, 10:44 am

django-mptt (via) Jonathan Buchanan’s simple utility for performing Modified Preorder Tree Traversal (efficient tree operations in SQL) on Django models. # 29th December 2007, 11:33 am

Django and Comet. How to build a chat application using Django and the Orbited comet server. Orbited can be set up to proxy most requests through to a Django backend while handling any comet requests itself. # 26th December 2007, 9:05 pm

IPy. Handy Python module for manipulating IP addresses—use IP(ip_addr).iptype() == ’PUBLIC’ to check that an address isn’t in a private address range. # 24th December 2007, 1:19 pm

Size Is The Enemy. Jeff Atwood: “I’ve started a cottage industry mining Steve [Yegge]’s insanely great but I-hope-you-have-
an-hour-to-kill writing and condensing it into its shorter form points.” Lots of verbose static typing apologists in the comments. # 24th December 2007, 10:50 am

WebOb. WebOb is “an extraction and refinement of pieces from Paste”—provides a very nice request and response object, clearly inspired partly by Django. The documentation includes the differences between the WebOb API and that of other frameworks. # 23rd December 2007, 10:22 am

Speeding up dateutil: Python’s heapq module turns minutes into seconds. Neat case study in data structure optimisation. # 22nd December 2007, 1:07 pm

Pvote (via) Electronic voting machine software in 460 lines of highly readable Python (using Pygame), implemented by Ka-Ping Yee for his doctoral dissertation. Demonstrates prerendering, where as much of the UI as possible is defined in a separate ballot definition file. # 22nd December 2007, 1:04 pm

Using Unipath to Keep Things Portable. Django tip to avoid hard-coding full paths. I usually set a global called OUR_ROOT in settings.py using os.path.dirname(__file__) and use os.path.join with it to construct any other paths that I need. # 21st December 2007, 10:45 am

Misapplying book terms, Pylons, and the ’end-user’. Ben Bangert responds to Adam Gomaa’s claim that Pylons lacks “conceptual integrity”. # 19th December 2007, 11:09 am

Frameworks Exist for Conceptual Integrity. Adam Gomaa just taught me a bunch of interesting things about Django’s underlying philosophy. Looks like I need to re-read the Mythical Man-Month. # 17th December 2007, 1:58 pm

The future of web standards. Nice analysis from James Bennett, who suggests that successful open source projects (Linux, Python, Perl etc) could be used as the model for a more effective standards process, and points out that Ian Hickson is something of a BDFL for the WHAT-WG. # 17th December 2007, 1:16 pm

Chapter 7: Form Processing. The chapter on newforms I contributed to “The Definitive Guide to Django” is now online, along with the rest of the published book. # 16th December 2007, 9:44 pm

stompserver. I think this is the lightweight message queue I’ve been looking for: written in Ruby and EventMachine, easy to set up (thanks to gems), interoperates perfectly with stomp.py. # 14th December 2007, 4:40 pm

Two-Faced Django. Excellent Django tutorial by Will Larson that shows how to build a polling application with an interface both on the Web and in Facebook. Also touches on unit testing and Ajax using jQuery. # 14th December 2007, 2:44 pm

Updates to template_utils. James Bennett’s Django template_utils library now provides tags for consuming external RSS and Atom feeds. Combine with template fragment caching for an instant mashup written just using templates. # 10th December 2007, 3:25 pm

Django snippets: Authenticate against Active Directory. Uses a custom authentication backend with the Python ldap module. If Django hasn’t seen the user before a new Django user account is created with data from ldap. # 10th December 2007, 8:40 am

Django Basic Apps. Nathan Borror has released a suite of simple, reusable Django applications: Basic Blog, Basic Places, Basic People, Basic Library and Basic Profiles. # 5th December 2007, 3:30 pm

xkcd: Python. Just type “import antigravity”. # 5th December 2007, 6:09 am

Datejs—A JavaScript Date Library. Building a date API around chaining—Date.today().next().thursday()—is a neat concept. I’d like to see that adapted for Python’s datetime library. # 3rd December 2007, 9:01 pm

First Notes on Django. Cool, the IETF are developing internal tools with Django. # 3rd December 2007, 11:38 am

Oxford Geek Night 4. Tomorrow night, usual venue. Topics include mySociety, Pylons, MythTV and more. # 27th November 2007, 9:04 pm