Lack of Elegance

dual booting windows 7 and ubuntu 11.10 on lenovo x120e

2011-11-13T17:14:00.000-08:00

This was a bit trickier than I hoped it would be. I didn't really want to reinstall windows 7 and the default ubuntu install didn't seem to detect the right partition to overwrite MBR (or Windows 7 was doing something odd). In lieu of digging into what was really going on I ended up adding an entry to the windows 7 bootloader using BCDEdit, following these directions. I diverged from those instructions by running the "dd" command immediately after install while still within the ubuntu live environment (thereby avoiding the reboot). Following that route seemed to be the quickest. I tried the alternate iso route earlier but it turned out that wasn't necessary with 11.10.

Hope this helps out anyone else out there dealing with the same issue. If this is unclear I can add more details. This was done with the amd64 11.10 iso, default partition was /dev/sda5 for me, I could mount the main windows 7 system partition with the ubuntu disk utility (it mounted to /media/Windows7_OS). Those would likely be the defaults for someone else going this route as well but YMMV.

a couple videos from DjangoCon 2008

2010-10-21T11:19:00.001-07:00

Cal Henderson on why he hates Django, covers issues of scaling and how Django may implement better scaling features in the future. Some of these are likely implemented now.

Guido on the Google App Engine:

upgrading PostgreSQL on Debian/Ubuntu

2010-10-03T15:01:00.000-07:00

I've been upgrading pg on a few servers today. One from 8.1 to 8.4 (debian) and the other from 8.2 to 8.4 (ubuntu). In both cases the process worked as noted here (though I used aptitude):

backup your db(s)

add backports repositories ubuntu, debian instructions (don't forget about pinning)

Then

aptitude install postgresql-8.4
pg_dropcluster --stop 8.4 main
pg_upgradecluster 8.1 main

Once you're sure that's working:

pg_dropcluster --stop 8.1 main
apt-get remove postgresql-8.1

mysql string search and replace

2010-10-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

UPDATE [tablename] SET [fieldname] = REPLACE([fieldname],"[oldstring]","[newstring]");

The code above would operate on every row in the table but you may want WHERE conditions. Example:

UPDATE profile SET homepage = REPLACE(homepage,"blargh.example.com","foo.example.com") WHERE first_name="Joe" AND last_name="Schmoe";

Will change Joe's homepage to http://foo.example.com/ instead of http://blargh.example.com/.

added open graph (facebook crap) to YAT

2010-08-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks capotej.

added Markdown to YAT

2010-08-13T13:05:00.001-07:00

Thanks BlueCloth and whoever wrote this tutorial.

first rails app

2010-08-12T22:46:00.000-07:00

Yet Another Testament is now a rails app. I have a rails client now so I needed to get a feel for it. There's not much to it but before it was a form with a single textbox. Some features:

An RSS feed (only currently applies to posts when they're first created)
Full revision history on every YAT (thanks Vestal Versions!), full text of all but the most recent revision is currently hidden from the user.
Anyone can comment on or edit a YAT
The most recently modified YAT will show up on the top of the front page

You may be asking "But what is Yet Another Testament?" It's the scripture of Church of Mike. Mike is a distant cousin of Bokonon.

I'm mostly a Python (Django) dev but Rails is pretty fun. Capistrano too, great stuff.

more altruistic engineers

2010-08-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

Awesome story about the devs who created "Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers". They basically built it on their own time, unofficially, at Apple without being Apple employees and without official approval.

great video on the Python GIL

2010-08-07T09:48:00.001-07:00

Taught me more than I wanted to know about how the GIL works and reveals a critical problem.

reveals a lot about these communities

2010-08-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

More than 1 in 10 Mozilla bug finders turn down cash. Both that mozilla pays for finding bugs and that a number of devs turn down the cash.

more on reddit's architecture

2010-03-02T07:55:00.000-08:00

Stuff I didn't know about: RabbitMQ, issues with memcached and memcachedb

db design at reddit

2010-02-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting post in this programming reddit thread. The user "spez" was one of the reddit sysadmins for a number of years. I'm not sure if he still works there or not.

is xhtml really the way to go?

2010-02-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

For a while now I've been using XHTML for a number of pages but this post from 2006 from the webkit blog made me rethink. The gist of the post is that because IE sucks you have to do crazy things with content type headers to truly support XHTML so you may as well serve HTML4. I'm not sure I'm ready to change yet but the argument is compelling.

More info here in this reddit programming thread as well.

migrating a facebook FBML app to IFRAME

2010-02-16T13:58:00.000-08:00

I've been migrating a facebook app to iframe from FBML so I'll be posting about that process a bit here. I was figuratively beating my head against a wall trying to determine why some of my xfbml wasn't working. After much ado I came across this thread which posed the question "I can connect to XFBML successfully if I create a login button, that when clicked on will connect to facebook connect and log on. However why do I actually need to click on this login button?" This was exactly my problem though apparently I couldn't phrase my question appropriately for google.

So the answer is, if it doesn't seem like your xfbml or your serverfbml code is working properly (but it is sorta working) you probably don't have your facebook connect app settings setup correctly. Particularly the "base domain" and/or connect url.

I know you're not creating a facebook connect site at all so you'd think these settings were irrelevant. You, like me, would be wrong.

first post

2010-02-16T13:54:00.001-08:00

woot!