I need to make clear that I did not invent the code below. I’m not sure who did, but the topic of making vi’s “paren bounce” feature work in Emacs came up in a conversation I had the other day, and I’m posting the chunk of code that’s lived in my .emacs file since, [...]

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This is probably a “no-duh” to some people, but I had not known this. When you upload something to the CDN, you get a url that looks like this:
http://cdn.mycompany.com/images/someimage.jpg
Which is all fine and good. Django’s MEDIA_URL is usually suffixed with a closing slash, meaning that if you’re in the habit of typing something [...]

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A few weeks ago, I installed the latest version of the Gnome Accessibility Toolkit (Gnome-AT), and while I never quite got it to work the way I wanted to, it didn’t seem to be doing any harm.  I figured once I got to the point of showing the client the work we’d talk about accessibility [...]

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Functional. Elegant. Foolproof. Pick two.

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Like many designers, I’ve been enjoying Clients from Hell, a collection of various incidents freelance designers and developers have had working with customers over the years.  Oh, boy, do I know some of these.  But there’s one that stuck in my craw: “Slow It Down.”  The basic complaint is common to Ajax-based applications: if you’re [...]

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For multi-select boxes where you have a list of things you want to filter on, and you want the queryset returned to be an OR’d set.
qset = Q(mode__exact=modes[0])
if len(modes) > 1:
for mode in modes[1:]:
[...]

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For reasons I won’t go into, I’ve had to re-activate my “professional” login on my laptop.  In order to distinguish it from the Elf user, which uses Enlightenment, I use Gnome when at the office.  And one thing I absolutely loathe about Metacity, the Gnome window manager, is that when you’re flipping between workspaces, you [...]

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I was trying to write a toy program in Django this morning, something kinda silly and spicy, and one of the things I wanted was a horizontal scrolling special effect, using the animation tools in, say, Dojo or jQuery.
And I realized, as I was writing it, that it had been almost two years since I’d [...]

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I can’t tell if I’m suffering from the geek equivalent of writer’s block, analysis paralysis, overload, or some combination of all of the above.
I’ve been working on a generalized platform for narrator, the story engine for the Journal Entries and everything else. As I’m working my way through the process, I’m thinking in typical [...]

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Today’s lesson: Always use the proper tool. I wrestled for an hour yesterday trying to the the Gimp to do “text along a curve.” It never quite came out right. The few times I got it close, the text looked awful.
This morning I tried a different tool: Inkscape, which is designed to [...]

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