In my current development house, we have the painfully obvious “different settings for different stages of the development cycle.” Production, obviously, isn’t in DEBUG mode so users don’t see the underlying technology when things go awry, and each dev has his own database. The solution we’ve found is to create separate settings files with [...]
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, [...]
Amazon’s CDN is picky. Django can make dealing with it annoying.
24 Feb
Posted by Elf Sternberg as Uncategorized
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 [...]
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 [...]
“Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two,” rule for web applications
14 Feb
Posted by Elf Sternberg as Uncategorized
Functional. Elegant. Foolproof. Pick two.
Clients from Hell: I Should Like to Register a Complaint!
04 Dec
Posted by Elf Sternberg as Uncategorized
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 [...]
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:]:
[...]
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 [...]
Going back to basics: CSS, Viewports, and sliders with jQuery.
27 Jul
Posted by Elf Sternberg as Uncategorized
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 [...]
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 [...]
