Elf Sternberg

If you work with Django for any period of time, the day comes when you’ll be accepting outside data from your users: files, images, and the like.  Django provides only two places where you can store these items: in memory, or to a file.  Django storages provides for two more critical locations: BLOBs in your [...]

I recently got a full-time job and have had only limited time to dedicate to doing freelance, but I’ve been working on finishing up three clients, one of which I’ve had for a long time, and sending them merrily on their ways. The most recently acquired of these clients is an interesting challenge.  They’re lobbyists.  [...]

I resolved, earlier this year, to start finishing some of my projects.  That hasn’t gone too well– the day jobbe appears to have chewed up most of my time.  But after my Palm V died, I no longer had a chiming program to help me get into the rhythm of the day.  I’ve since replaced [...]

There are plenty of places where you can find great examples of 404 pages. Salon.com is not one of them. I learned this today because I followed some links off an article about George Carlin that were poorly coded.  Those links took me to Salon’s 404 page, which uses Salon’s standard layout, complete with ads. [...]

According to a service that tracks such things, the most popular types of websites people put for which there is a subscription fee include (in order from most to least popular) How to lose weight Health products – Vitamins, minerals, colon blow Starting a home-based business How to make money from your existing business How [...]

Django has just about the most awesome syndication system on the planet.  It’s bog stupid simple, and if you want to implement it, the django documentation is great.  But those of us who use and love RSS appreciate the ease and speed with which the WFW standard allows us to syndicate comments as well, and [...]

I’ve recently watched John Underkloffer’s presentation on 3D UIs, and how he helped create the presentation for the film Minority Report. You know the scene, the one where Tom Cruise is working his way through the UI with a series of hand gestures (although the one in Iron Man 2 is an upgrade). As I [...]

I was going to respond to this on genehack, but recovering my password proved to be onerous, and besides, the issue is an important one worth discussing.  John SJ Anderson wrote: Elf digs into some Javascript on a particular high-traffic site. In the same way that some people love reading about high-performance cars or bikes they’re [...]

I recently had to convert a few GIMP palettes into color schemes for a website, and since I’m very fond of LessCSS, I decided to create LessCSS variables and use that as a plug-in to my CSS.   The trick was converting on the fly; GIMP palettes store their variables in decimal, and I like [...]