Andy McKay's blog

Between Reginald, Dan, and Imran, I'm starting to get a little worried. I'm more than willing to cut freshly minted software developers slack at the beginning of their career. Everybody has to start somewhere. But I am disturbed and appalled that any so-called programmer would apply for a job without being able to write the simplest of programs

Once upon a time when I did job interviews - I had a question that was really an economics question. But it wasn't phrased in a manner that I understood. I'd spent so long being (allegedly) a programmer I was looking for a literal answer. I flubbed the interview. Always useful having that degree in Economics.

I would hope a portion of these would be down to nervousness, not spotting the obvious, trying to out think things and trying to appear clever.

Lots of talk this week about how the Aussies are banning the old ordinary light bulb. An interesting idea and definitely one that every country should take up. But CBC has an interesting point:

There is also what you might call the beer-fridge problem. Years ago, Ontario Hydro offered huge rebates if its customers would switch to the latest energy-efficient fridges (and other appliances). Many people took them up on the offer, then just put the old fridge down in the basement and used it as a second appliance, a beer fridge, in the process adding to energy demand.

The sad fact is that banning light bulbs is a good move and should be done. But it will only slow down slightly the increases.

Tommorrow I'll be working on an application that I helped write about four years ago. It's sat at a clients site and run constantly for four years. Then the hard drive gave out. Since then Iraq got invaded, I had a family and I moved continents.

I don't think I've written anything that has sat and worked consistently and well for that long. I was chatting to my friend Ian Cottee about this and for a while I got quite sentimental about this. It's a testament to Python and Linux and bright sparks like Ian Cottee who can put this sort of thing together.

I'll have a toast with a glass of scotch for that little application.

[Removed]

My iPod Shuffle nearly died on the weekend, got the:

green and yellow flashing lights of death

On my Shuffle. At this point I was resigning myself to sending to the great environment destroying land fill in the sky. But wait turns out there is a utility to reset them. It's on the apple site.

After a little bit of confusion the first Norweb meeting got off successfully with a talk on Django followed by beers. A good time was had, I promised to post my slides and here there are as a PDF (I have to get S5 running here, on the bottom of a very long list.

Django - an Introduction, talk given by Andy McKay to Norweb Thursday 15th, only made sense if you were there really.

SCPlugin: Working SVN support in finder, or Tortoise SVN for the Mac if you like. This hasn't worked for ages, but finally got an update (credit limi on #plone): http://scplugin.tigris.org/

Inquisitor: to quote "Inquisitor... it's like Spotlight for the web. Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with ideas to refine your search." http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/.

Iterm: an ok replacement for terminal that has a few nice features, about 50/50 on if I should keep it at the moment: http://iterm.sourceforge.net/.

Good article on signals in Django:

Every model object used in a Django application will send these signals. And the beauty of it is that any one request can listen (connect in Django-speak) for a signal on one, more than one, or all of the object types in an project.

I would like to propose the new HTML tag: blah

Blah inserts a paragraph of random greeking text. Instead of having to go to somewhere like http://lipsum.org and tediously copy and paste text down, this would quickly insert the code into your page. Each use would generate different text.

Valid attributes: length the length in words of the text produced

Example:

<b>Demo site</b>  <blah length="10">

Result:

<b>Demo site</b>
  <blah>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer
 adipiscing elit. Suspendisse ullamcorper</blah>

No takers? Oh well. Sad thing is I'd probably use it more than blink.

If everyone was telecommuting this would cause a huge load on the internet. We can see this already in the UK with limiting by all the providers, because everyone goes through BT. The internet will reduce commuting and help the environment, it can be a key player.

Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly fall apart as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic.

So I've got this neat Django app that pulls together photo's linked in with locations on a google map. I want to scroll through those photos using a nice little Ajax or Flash app that does all those nice things like cross fading and browsing. There's loads out there, but they've all got server requirements like php. I haven't found anything that takes a xhtml page, parses the DOM and produces the photo viewer from that.

Today the Guardian has articles on road congestion and flexible working arrangements, but does not connect the two.

On Thursday I was delighted to find the speciality section at Tesco that sold sushi ingredients, the rice, seaweed and so on. I then spent Thursday thinking about sushi. Roll around early Sunday morning and we are looking at the cheap for sale section in Somerfield. There is cheap salmon steaks, going for 50p each. Gleefully I grab them and plan for sushi.

I'm sure someone has done this before, but I couldn't find it in searching. simpletemplate is a library for Django that allows you to use SimpleTAL in views. You can use TAL, metal in Page Templates and render them back. At this current time of writing, this site is using them.

Found I was getting this error in Django running tests:

Got an error recreating the test database: must be owner of database test_clearwind 

Did a bit of googling and took a while, so in case I get it again the answer is to run the following in psql:

alter user django createdb;

Had to laugh when saw these at our local supermarket. For those of you without kids, these are diaper liners. They go on the diaper, so when the kid has a poo you can flush this down the toilet. Leaving the diaper ready to be cleaned (or back to the diaper service). I've seen some code that needs flushing down the toilet, and there's probably some PHP that needs flushing too I'm sure...

We got Tesco DVD Rental service a couple of weeks ago. It's a post you the DVD service, with a 2 week free trial. We rented 3 DVD's, two of them were unwatchable. The last had a big crack in it. This means the entire service is rather useless if only 66% of the DVD's are unwatchable.

To Tesco's credit, I found out that even though we could return the last DVD as soon as possible, we would be out of our free trail by one day and hence pay a full month fee for cancelling. I complained, our 2 week trial was extended and once past the 3 "are you sure" screens, the service was cancelled.

After reading around for another service I'm now a little disillusioned. All the users of the services complain of one thing, never being able to get anything popular or new. The problem is simple, its a DVD store. Only it's got 1,000,000 subscribers and say 1,000 copies of that new DVD. If 50% of the people ask for it, who get's it?. From what I can gather, it's useless if you want to watch new movies. We generally don't worry about that, so we might go ahead with a different provider and see how it goes.

Maybe, maybe not. But time to get WordPress off of here and move to a nice fast Django blog, that uses Page Templates. So expect a few outages.

Things seem to be a struggle here sometimes. I know its just because I'm off the plane and "wet behind the ears" but things seem to take 5x as long and just be a lot harder than they should be.

Today finally we got an internet connection at home, almost one month after moving in. The really nice part was when the ISP (Virgin) didn't move my account from my mothers to here, they disconnected me at my mothers 8 days ago and then reconnected me here.

We've made a concious decision not to have a TV in the house now, which being TV addicts has made us suffer a bit of withdrawal. To add to this our actual belongings are still in transit, they phoned up today to annouce they will deliver them next Tuesday. So that marks around 9 1/2 weeks since they left Canada. Not the 3 1/2 they originally promised. This lead to a few nights of saying "I've read every book and the library is closed", what now?

Oh well. Makes us realise in a home environment how important the internet is, since its TV, entertainment, radio, phone, games and a few other things.

We've formed a new user group in the north west of england here called Norweb. We tried to broaden it beyond just Zope and Plone this time: About.

The first talk is next week and is on Django:

For the past few weeks Andy has been dabbling in Django which advertises itself as a "Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines". Andy will present an intro to Django, hopefully some of the basic apps he’s written will work for a demo and he will tell everyone why he thinks it's better than Ruby on Rails.