Computing on Personal Site of Tim Child

Open Indiana NTP

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:17:26 +0000

I really like OpenIndiana, but finding some documentation for even the most basic things sometimes is difficult. Take NTP for instance, should be easy right.. And it is if you know what you are doing. vim /etc/resolv.conf Setup the search domain above, then copy the ntp configuration file: cp /etc/inet/ntp.client /etc/inet/ntp.conf Edit the configuration file putting in the servers that are near to you. vim /etc/inet/ntp.conf Enable NTP: svcadm enable ntp

Cantemo update

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:49:39 +0000

Just a quick update to what is happening with Cantemo these days. Firstly we have two main products in the marketplace at the moment, MediaBox and Portal DAM. Portal is our enterprise product, a Digital Asset Management system that can be tailored to suit just about any need or requirement. For instance if you need to build Cloud hosted Digital Asset Management system System that has multiple workflows for multiple user groups A system that integrates with many different parts ( think Business Process Management systems, Transcoder farms, Newsroom Systems, NLEs, Digital Rights Management, Playout servers) and can work as the controlling force for all of that.

Postgres and psql for beginners

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:57:00 +0000

Actually I am not sure whether I can put myself in the beginners pot, having run Postgresql for many years and built several products and service upon it. However a round of using PSQL for common use cases is needed I think. So this basically is for that usual situation where you have logged in to the server that postgres is running on and have access to the user postgres or have the rights to use psql.

Going back to Java applets for upload

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:53:31 +0000

This is something that I didn’t think that I would be writing in 2012 – we are switching to a Java based applet for our uploader. The problem has been that browsers and their operating systems handle uploads differently. Really differently. Evening using a project like plupload, you can’t polyfill over the cracks. There are new APIs coming out (if you want to call it HTML5, not strictly true though), but to handle backwards compatibility, including IE9, there needs to be a mechanism to make it generic and the only thing is Java.

The new web stack

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:21:02 +0000

There is a really interesting article over on Ilya Grigorik’s blog titled []1. Be sure to read the comments if you are interested in how AOL built a similar system many moons ago. I have been thinking about next generation web stacks, with proper (M)VC in the browser, communication with server using SPDY / WebSockets / SSE or similar with SSL, and then the topology of the stack in the background being event driven and that article has some really nice points.

New year, new workflow improvements

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:35:45 +0000

So another new year has started but I continue to improve and refine my workflow and tooling. Firstly git. The more I learn with git, the more I like it, and the more I get into it. I like the fact that I don’t need any other tool, if I was using Mercurial I would still have to use Git because of the amount of excellent code being published into GitHub.

My must have OS X software

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:54:52 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to look at what I would install on a vanilla OS X system and its was quite interesting to look at what I depend on and if I didn’t have it, what would be on my Christmas software list. So here goes: Git: Probably not the first thing that I would install, but it wouldn’t be the last. Via the proper GIT installer Python 2.

Javascript

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:00:05 +0000

Never thought that I would be saying this, but I am really liking Javascript at the moment.

Larger desktop

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:58:17 +0000

It seems that no matter how many pixels I have to play with I could always use more. Consider this number of apps that I have open a day: Browser window with debugging pane (1200 x 1200) Skype (220×1000 high) with conversation window (400×600) Mail (1000×800) Text mate or vim (typically 1600×1200) Terminal windows – at least two. One for Git and one for python shell. (1600×1200) 2nd browser window for looking stuff up though I can use tabs for them.

What’s the coolness

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 07:33:11 +0000

Looking back over the last posts I realize that I haven’t been talking much about the software and and code that I have been using every day and some of it is really quite interesting. Python. I use python a lot, it’s my preferred go to language to solve a lot of problems. It has great libraries, an awesome community and the language itself is compact and non verbose. We are using Django heavily in our solutions and its really enjoyable to work with, and I never feel that coding is a chore.

HTML5 audio support

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:10:20 +0000

As a followup to my last post, and also because Portal needs to support audio as well as video, I have implemented the same kind of detection and serving of files for audio. We transcode audio files into MP3 slightly low bitrate (depends on the clients wishes, but its not a great codec for streaming lots of audio over a network), and we can also do an OGG version. Here is the current support list:

HTML5 video support

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 10:44:31 +0000

At Cantemo for our Portal product we are working a lot with HTML5 video, its starting to get really nicely supported by all the major vendors and we have some nice technology to support frame accurate playback, frameforward and frameback on a lot of browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc). This puts us in a much better position than we have had in the past with h.264 playing back through the Flash player (though this is a fallback mechanism still).

Quick update

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:32:28 +0000

Haven’t had much time recently to post anything on here, though lots has been going on that I could write about. Been to Cyprus for a family wedding which was really nice, pity that we had some stuff stolen including my iPhone, Nikon DSLR and video camera but otherwise it was great. At work we are building new HTML5 based tools, improving the look and feel and capabilities of our main product – should really write up about some of the technology being used.

WebM/VP8 and H.264

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:32:36 +0000

This is probably the best over article on the whole WebM/VP8 and H.264 issue: http://antimatter15.com/wp/2011/01/the-ambiguity-of-open-and-vp8-vs-h-264/ Well worth a read.

Celery, RabbitMQ and sending messages directly

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 09:47:10 +0000

Been using RabbitMQ quite a lot at Cantemo, where we use it for long standing jobs, working with other languages and for notifications. But I needed to decouple some of the code from my application, to be able to distribute it and talk from other systems – exactly what we needed to do, run tasks that are in the application from another application via posting messages to RabbitMQ. Tasks are held in Celery, and started usually within the code base.

Compiling RabbitMQ on Ubuntu 10.04

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:05:33 +0000

As part of my on going effort for realtime web updates on one of our applications I needed to install RabbitMQ HEAD (That is the development head) with the RabbitMQ STOMP adaptor. Talking on IRC channel it was recommended to me to install from source, but unfortunately the documentation is out of date. So the following will do it cleanly: [cc lang=“bash”] sudo apt-get install erlang-crypto erlang-snmp erlang-syntax-tools libsctp1 lksctp-tools erlang-runtime-tools erlang-mnesia erlang-public-key erlang-os-mon erlang-ssl erlang-base erlang-parsetools mercurial git-core build-essential erlang-dev zip erlang-tools erlang-src python-simplejson erlang-edoc

psycopg2 OS X – _PQbackendPID

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:21:26 +0000

If you are having problems with _PQbackendPID, psycopg2 and OS X and have tried the forcing to 32 bit mentioned in other posts about the web then it might be time to try a more forceful approach. This is an example of the error that you might face: [cc lang=“bash”] dlopen(/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so, 2): Symbol not found: _PQbackendPID Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so Expected in: flat namespace in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so [/cc] The first thing to do is get rid of your old Psycopg2 (just in case), so locate the site-packages directory:

Switching from YUI to JQuery

Mon, 17 May 2010 12:41:06 +0000

I have been using the Yahoo YUI Javascript library for more than a couple of years now (perhaps about 4) and although I really like it, I have never felt particularly productive using it. Over those years I have also dabbled in other frameworks, including: ExtJS (mainly from my old work looking at theming it – and its heavily based upon YUI.) – I dislike the licensing on ExtJS so it really isn’t an option for me any more Looked strongly at Cappucino, but there was no real productivity gains to be had, and I wasn’t writing my current application as a solely Javascript app MooTools – Seems nice but never really gelled with it and I haven’t liked the documentation SproutCore – Love it so far, but again I am not writing a pure Javascript App.

VMWare player IP address

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:21:05 +0000

This was something that really annoyed me when trying to configure VMWare Player 3, there seemed to be no easy way of changing the IP address range or the DHCP addresses when using Windows as the host OS. Actually there is but in a stroke of genius by VMWare it isn’t installed properly. The program that you require is called vmnetcfg.exe and is included in the installer but isn’t installed. Its really difficult to find anything about it on VMWare’s site so to get to it:

Django on RedHat or CentOS

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:07:21 +0000

I am normally using Debian, Ubuntu or even Suse for deploying Django, but a recent customer needed to deploy on Red Hat Enterprise Server 5. We decided beforehand to test deployment on RHEL5 and also on CentOS 5.4 and so these instructions should work for both environments. NginX will be used as the webserver. The first thing I like to do is to upgrade the repository and add EPEL. This wasn’t needed I found on the RedHat box I was using, but was needed on CentOS but your mileage might vary.

Using Hudson to build Sphinx documentation

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:47:32 +0000

I have become quite the fan of both Hudson and Sphinx. At Cantemo we are using Hudson for Continuous Integration testing, and its a large improvement over buildbot which I was trying before. For documentation at the moment I am using Sphinx, a python based documentation generator. We require the documentation to be updated at the same time as the development and tests are built so it is becoming second nature to build documents soon after development is done.

Postfix and Gmail

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:07:03 +0000

I have been using Hudson as a continuous integration server for a short while now and I am super impressed. I have it running on Debian and is really quite feature-full. One thing that I did have a problem with was with the standard Debian 5 Java environment there was a problem using TLS for mail it seemed, and I didn’t just want to send stuff to gmail’s SMTP server all the time so I configured a local Postfix SMTP relay on another server.

Django staff member required

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:30:50 +0000

Here is a simple decorator that isn’t mentioned properly in the Django documentation. [cc lang=“python”]@staff_member_required[/cc] It basically checks to see if the user is logged in and has is_staff before allowing a user access to the view. Use like you would the normal @login_required decorator. [cc lang=“python”] from django.shortcuts import render_to_response from django.template.context import RequestContext from django.contrib.admin.views.decorators import staff_member_required @staff_member_required def my_view(request): return render_to_response(‘page.html’, context_instance=RequestContext(request)) [/cc]

Extending Django’s user admin

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:06:23 +0000

The built in admin pages that you get in Django can be useful, but they particularly become useful once you start to add a lot more functionality to them. For instance the Django’s User authentication system (which lives in django.contrib.auth ) is widely used, and quite often you need to extend the user’s profile by using AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE and a separate model. But having a separate Admin screen for this is kind of pointless.

gcc and python

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:18:14 +0000

Had an interesting little problem with gcc and python today on OS X 10.6. Basically I was trying to use graphviz and pygraphviz, and installing from source I got messages like this: [cc lang=“bash”] gcc -arch ppc -arch i386 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-long-double -no-cpp-precomp -mno-fused-madd -fno-common -dynamic -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -I/usr/local/include/graphviz -I/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/include/python2.5 -c pygraphviz/graphviz_wrap.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5/pygraphviz/graphviz_wrap.o cc1: error: unrecognized command line option “-Wno-long-double” cc1: error: unrecognized command line option “-Wno-long-double”

How do we kick our synchronous addiction?

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:29:46 +0000

How do we kick our synchronous addiction? Really interesting post. Pity I don’t have the time to discuss it in more depth – too busying developing!

Django settings in template

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:51:18 +0000

So what do you do if you require a django setting in your templates, much like we have MEDIA_URL today? Well there are use cases for this, (if you are in doubt have a look at the original ticket for adding MEDIA_URL to django ). The easiest way that I have found so far is to write a context processor. For example in my settings I might have JAVASCRIPT_URL (which in my real life code changes depending on whether I am running in debug, test or from a CDN):

is that an iPhone or a MiniMac?

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:04:30 +0000

is that an iPhone or a MiniMac?: “ []2 Love it. (Via swissmiss.)

mkv to mp4 for ps3 on Ubuntu

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:48:02 +0000

This is some notes about what I have been trying to do with converting video for the PS3. I have actually decided to use Plex as a media centre as the PS3 is rubbish in its networking and format support. I hope they sort it out sometime. sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix gpac mplayer Need to install NeroAacEnc so download from here: http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-nerodigital-nero-aac-codec.php Unpack linux directory, chmod +x neroAacEnc and copy it to a location of your choice (within your path)

Leading zeros in django

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:28:55 +0000

I am always forgetting about the stringformatting tag in Django’s templating language. For instance for leading zeros: {{ variable|stringformat:“02d” }} This will always put a leading zero.

Absolutely loving Bluelounge’s solutions

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:02:42 +0000

Really nice looking products from Bluelounge for helping with cable maintenance and other traditionally boring things: Wish they did a corner desk solution though.

Django test fixtures and contenttypes

Fri, 29 May 2009 03:46:38 +0000

Just came across an interesting problem with the contenttypes contributed application and the test framework. If you are using fixtures in the test frame work you might find that the database gets out of date as you are working on it, particularly if you are creating new models all the time. To get around this you need to regenerate the contenttypes database. If you depend on this, the following steps could give you problems so make sure that you back up your data (dumpdata) beforehand.

PostgreSQL for Mac and language support – PLPGSQL

Tue, 26 May 2009 12:48:45 +0000

Seems sometimes the PostgresqlforMac package doesn’t have support out of the box for PLPGSQL or other stored procedure languages and you can’t simply change to the correct user to upgrade it instead call the createlang command like this: [cc lang=“bash”] /Library/PostgreSQL8/bin/createlang -l DATABASE -U USER; [/cc] Obviously changing DATABASE to your database and USER to your user. This will list all the languages enabled for that database. To add PL/PGSQL, try this:

Python

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:41:21 +0000

I really like Python, and hence this made me laugh:

Installing Windows 2008 on MacBook Pro 10.5

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 21:07:42 +0000

Windows 2008 Server is probably the most robust operating system to come out from Microsoft whilst still supporting most of the modern features users demand. The robustness and speed of it is just two of the advantages it has over Vista. To install on a MacBook Pro its probably easiest to use Windows 2008 Server x86 CD 32bit. 64Bit and bootcamp is not recommended at the moment! First steps of the installation:

History of Python

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:35:40 +0000

A nice start to the series History of Python.

Arstechnica on windows 7

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:58:27 +0000

Arstechnica does its usual good job of looking in depth at Windows 7 Beta, and then they compare it to Vista: “Windows 7 shouldn’t make anything any worse” Outstanding.

Facebook is AOL 2.0

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:30:09 +0000

Facebook is The Borg: “ Much of the activity that used to happen out in the wild unfettered Net, over email, open (XMPP-based) IM and blog posts is now happening inside the Facebook silo. It is AOL 2.0. I avoid the place, but that’s getting harder. On this current visit I see 7 friend suggestions, 273 friend requests, 6 event invitations, 5 good karma from debo requests, 1 good karma request, 220 other requests, 4 new updates, 235 items in my inbox, 7 pokes and 522 friends to start with.

A new year, new computer

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:11:34 +0000

Well not really, but every year I do some maintenance to make sure whatever I am using is up to date and fresh and this includes installing the latest versions and services packs to everything including: VLC Microsoft Office 2008 Skype Skype 2.8 Beta is the one that I am looking forward to using, included in the new features is screen sharing – which apparently works across different operating systems, which should prove really handy for debugging and helping my parents with their PC from my Mac.

This is awesome – Papervision

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:34:58 +0000

This is really really awesome, and you have to really check it out for your self. Its a little flash application that uses a webcam or other camera attached to your computer to project a little ‘Proto’ guy on top of a printed piece of paper. They have even got some code released for it. Check it out here with some images and video, but it really works better to try it yourselves:

Last FM

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:58:18 +0000

I recently thought that I would check out my listing on Last FM to see stats etc.. and to see what features they have added. Looks like I had forgotten to run last.fm on my Mac so it wasn’t updated since February. So that’s probably about 1000 hours of music unlisted, and lots of music missing. Gutted. Oh well, perhaps I will remember now.

Creating workflow diagrams

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:22:01 +0000

I haven’t seen any good examples recently of workflow diagrams, at least not more technical ones based around software, services and workflow. Creating a diagram like this its always nice to see other examples of how people have approached the problem but in this scenario I have yet to see anything. Even Edward Tufte came short on this, though the diagrams and illustrations he provides examples for are excellent. So this is what I came up with to illustrate a workflow with our software in a newsroom environment.

Looks like Django is really taking off

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:42:56 +0000

Since the introduction of Google’s appengine which includes support for some of Django’s code, and the template system there has been an incredible amount of press for Django. At the moment there is no backend support for AppEngine in Django (and DB2 support is still lacking – there was a blog post about a year ago but nothing seems to have happened since, and I would love to be proved wrong on that one) but it must only be a matter of time before this happens so for the moment you have to disable the ORM support.

Installing ffmpeg on OS X

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:38:17 +0000

This is a work in progress for installing ffmpeg on OSX by a custom compile This is another thing that I have needed to do and decided to put what I am doing in a blog post, I might need it in the future or it might be helpful for others. So firstly download LAME – this is needed for supporting MP3 audio files, such as those in FLV and also for vorbis support.

Django and URLS naming

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:51:20 +0000

Django URLs naming can be a pain sometimes, unless it is just me but an easy way to debug is to use Django’s shell and import urlresolvers: python manage.py shell >> from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse >> reverse(‘nameofurl’) If there are arguments in the URLS field (for instance passing in the slug): >> reverse(‘nameofurl’, ‘slug’) [/sourcecode] Then it should resolve the name to the URL path needed.

Johnny Chung Lee – Projects – Wii

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:19:11 +0000

I really like what Johnny Chung Lee Wii is doing with his projects on the Wii and the Wii controller. There are many good examples on his website with YouTube movies of tracking fingers, multipoint interactive whiteboard, head tracking and more… Discussion forums are over at .

Low Key Stand

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:25:57 +0000

This looks like a really nice stand for Apple computers with an integral 4 port USB hub. Raising the display might also help usability because I feel the default position is slightly too low. You can get them from Macessity.

Whats happening to coding horror?

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:26:38 +0000

I have been a big fan of Jeff Atwood’s coding horror for some time now, its been one of the best tech blogs on the internet that I have found due to its excellent range of subjects and usually impartial commentary on matters related to the computing world. The last two articles however have seen a significant downturn in the quality and impartiality of articles, so much so that I feel like commenting here, and actually emailing Jeff (comments within articles are so many that one gets the impression that it would be a full time position to keep up with them all).

Sun aquires MySQL

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:02:45 +0000

News just in, Sun acquires MySQL. MySQL makes one of the most popular opensource database in the world and they have just acquired it for $1billion. More about it here: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml

Predictions for 2008

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:00:00 +0000

I don’t think its too late to provide some predictions for 2008, so here are mine. 3D Printers We are going to be seeing a lot more on the subject, although they have been out for a while I think this is going to be the year that we are going to be hearing alot more about 3D printers and 3D printing methods, and seeing a lot more things they can do.

Windows Mobile 6 MMS settings

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:55:08 +0000

I recently upgraded my phone, a HTC S620, to Windows Mobile 6 – the latest version supported on the HTC and had to reset up the device. Of course being Microsoft based it wasn’t all plain sailing and the one thing that I got stuck on was finding the settings for MMS servers. It wasn’t at all where you would expect it and after no help from the manual (still on Windows Mobile 5) I finally found the settings for MMS servers on Windows Mobile 6.

Fixing the screen backspace and delete key

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:58:15 +0000

When running screen sometimes there is a problem using the backspace or delete key and you get the dreaded “Wuff Wuff” message. Try editing ~/.bashrc And adding: alias screen='TERM=screen screen'

Inquisitor on Leopard

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:24:19 +0000

Leopard ships with the latest version of Safari, and there has been much talk that Apple has disabled the use of 3rd party plugins which is bad news for fans of plugins such as the wonderful inquisitor. Well if you download the latest version of inquisitor and are still having problems, try deleting the Input Managers folder under ~/Library and then installing again.

Leopard – OS X 10.5

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:21:44 +0000

This has been probably blogged several million times now, but I am really enjoying the latest release of OS X – 10.5 also know as Leopard. Lots has been written about it including a really good review over at Arstechnica, but for me most of the downsides they note are ignorable. The 3D dock – I really don’t notice it in every day action anymore, it might be because I am using Quicksilver but its not so bad.

Ubuntu 7.04 on Parallels

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:24:37 +0000

Just been installing Ubuntu 7.04 on Parallels for work, and its not as straight forward as it should be. Luckily there is a good tutorial over on simplyhelp.net.

Full time Mac user – sort of

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:39:25 +0000

Anyone that has been on this site before will know that I have an affinity for Apple Macs, particularly their laptops. Since moving to Sweden I have now ditched windows machines – full time, almost! Actually one of the main reasons for getting the new MacBook Pro was that I could run, OSX, Windows XP (or Vista) and Linux/BSD on the same machine. Because of work Windows XP is a major requirement, our software mainly runs on it and a lot of development is done on it and after testing that it ran our OpenGL based VizArtist correctly I knew that it was the right machine to have with 2Gb of RAM of course.

Wiki as project management tool.

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:37:49 +0000

Using a Wiki as a project management tool is something that I have been thinking over quite alot recently. At work we do some project management using our internal Wiki, and its great for everyone else to be able to access it. But there is some nagging doubt in my head. Perhaps its because it requires self discipline to be able to work it properly, or that it we could be doing it better.

Debian to Ubuntu without reinstall

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:33:31 +0000

So still on this subject I decided that I would do some reading, and everything that I have seen points to the fact that its a bad idea. I upgraded a box from Ubuntu 6.06 to Ubuntu 6.10 last week to test the upgrading, and it really didn’t like it. This was a freshly installed desktop machine with no funny hardware so that is putting me off going from Debian to Ubuntu totally.

YUI and Camino

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:57:48 +0000

So I have been adding some AJAX goodness to the new site that I am building (all will be revealed soon after testing!) and after some help choosing a framework I decided upon Yahoo’s YUI. It helps that some others are already looking at this library, but I am so far having trouble with Camino. Camino is my favorite browser on the Mac by far, so of the niceness of the Gecko browsing engine along with better Mac integration but should I support it.

HellaNZB options and configuration

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:15:06 +0000

As regular readers know I am rather partial to a Usenet program called HellaNZB. Its basically a python application that deals with downloading archives from Usenet either being supplied with a NZB file or a newbin ID. After this is decodes, unrar’s, and pars the file if necessary. I have recently upgrade to a new server with alot of disk space (on RAID5) and I took the decision not to install HellaHella.

Is NetBSD in a bad way?

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:37:29 +0000

Well if this email from one of the founders and leaders of the NetBSD project and foundation it could be. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html From what he is saying is that participation in NetBSD is at an all time low, and contributors have no clear leader pushing development leading to stagnation in the project. Its interesting stuff particularly if you want to know why this project is failing and others succeding, but at the end of the day it is what businesses know all along – one strong leader to push and fight is always better than a committee of joint responsibility, why else would major corporations around the world work like this.

django with apache2

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:31:40 +0000

One thing that I feel is harder than it should be with django is getting it working with Apache2. Sure the built in webserver is nice for development, but there comes a time when you need to step up and use a webserver for development that you can also deploy the site upon. I have used Apache a lot in the past, but recently I have decided to move over to installing everything the Debian way, and this will reflect that.

Django setup

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:29:17 +0000

Over the last few days I have been playing with Django quite alot, installing it on a couple of machines and on Dreamhost. The Dreamhost configuration is now well documented by Jeff Croft in his post: http://www2.jeffcroft.com/2006/may/11/django-dreamhost/ and the on Dreamhost Wiki here: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Django I did seem to use a few different settings on the file: django.fcgi: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys sys.path += ['/home/timc3/django/django_src'] sys.path += ['/home/timc3/django/django_projects'] from fcgi import WSGIServer from django.

Authentication systems

Fri, 19 May 2006 08:48:29 +0000

I have been thinking about this for a while, but I couldn’t see how a single person could build a trust system for sites that don’t need alot of authentication or security. Now it seems that Verisign are tackling the problem by creating OpenID as reported by Arstechnica . As they say, other companies have tried and failed, but I am hoping that it will provide a central, safe and non-intrusive way of sharing logins etc across sites that don’t require strong encryption for credit cards etc.

Introducing Macbook

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:57:20 +0000

It is finally here!!! The new apple Mac Book, available in white and black with built in iSight and with intel core duo. It looks sweet in black but they are selling that at a premium which is probably not worth it. Here it is in white, with a 1.83Ghz Intel Core Duo chip, 60Gb HD, 512Mb Ram and a Combo drive it costs $1099. The specs for the next model up is 2.

Interview with Radia Perlman

Tue, 09 May 2006 18:36:59 +0000

Excellent interview by Network World with Radia Perlman who the also named one of the 20 most influential networking personalities of the last 20 years. She talks about Networks, her spanning tree protocol and what she is doing now including working at Sun on many projects including looking at networking and security. A most interesting Lady (though she doesn’t seem to want any treatment regarding her gender either). Also related is this entry on 20 people who changed the industry, of which she is one and 20 network-changing products in 20 years.

Broken SATA connector

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:19:40 +0000

It looks like the SATA cable connector specification isnt up to much. At first I couldn’t believe it when it broke off with no force whatsoever, but after looking into it and a couple of google searches later it looks like it is a problem that can happen all too often. Luckily the really nice people at Hitachi storage are looking into it at the moment. The drive is a 400Gb Hitachi, one of the biggest they offer.

Carson Workshop podcasts

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:27:58 +0000

There are some really excellent podcasts of The Future of Web Apps One day conference/summit hosted by Carson Workshops. Ryan Carson has really put together an excellent summit, pity being in Norway that I couldn’t go, but luckily for all of us he has made the podcasts available on the carson workshops website at: http://www.carsonworkshops.com/summit/ All are worth listening to I think, and there is something for everyone thats involved in development whether web based or not.

Working!

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:56:49 +0000

Well I have been really busy working at Vizrt, getting to know the systems, and getting to know python and a damn horrible Java website. Python is really nice, been running through the tutorials at home, looking at this Django framework for websites which I might write my music site in, if I can get it to run properly on Dreamhost. Django doesn’t have the AJAX support built in yet, but otherwise it is fairly close to what Rails is doing to Ruby.

VMWare free version

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:20:42 +0000

Just read on the register that VMWare is going to offer a free version of its server product. There is no mention of this on their site yet unless they are talking about the VMWare Player which can be used to host VMware / Microsoft and Symantic virtual PC sessions. I am really interested to see where they go with this. For instance at home it would make for a really good test system and its a good competitor to Xen running on Linux.

DeMudi

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 20:45:21 +0000

Well the posts have been slowing down again, probably because I started at Vizrt this Monday, all going well so far. Will probably post more stuff regarding that when I am more settled. Anyways, before I moved to Bergen I was looking through my cupboards getting rid if excess so that I didn’t have to take unwanted items when I found that I basically had enough bits of computer to build a complete new one.

RFID in phones

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:33:22 +0000

I’ve been interested in RFID for along time now as it presents amazing possbilities both good and bad once some of its problems are sorted out (such as IDing alot of goods at once, range, personal rights issues) and there are some interesting developments going on particularly in the retail space. Well things are set to get more interesting with RFID being put into phones, such as the Nokia prototype being beta tested by Mook that shows off what a difference it can make to usability.

Problems with iPod Nano

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 05:33:08 +0000

I haven’t posted anything about the Nano before, mainly because it came out whilst I was busy not posting but reported on the BBC site (its not like I read much iPod stuff elsewhere at the moment) here is there is a fault with the lovely little screen on a very small percentage. Lets hope they work it out as this is my favourite model they have yet to come up with, I love the thiness, portability and just the solid state nature of the thing.

MITs $100 laptop

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:41:05 +0000

I have grabbed this from a forum I frequent often, but it was too good not to post. It has been talked about before but according to beta.news.com.com the $100 is getting closer to launch. The reasons for creation are obvious, and the main one – bridging the poor rich information divide a good one, but its the design of the thing that really impresses and I think it even betters the design of Apples best products.

Playstation 3 processor out

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 12:47:19 +0000

Thought I would leave this until their was a decent review out and now there is by the great people over at Arstechnica. Love the fact that Arstechnica also has its own file extension, perhaps I might do the same on this blog. Perhaps not. Can see the problems with PCs that don’t know the extension… http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars There is also more information over at IBM who jointly developed the processor with Toshiba and Sony, and who will also be bring out a workstation based on the Chip.

I have a new mouse!

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 13:31:31 +0000

And I think it is fantastic. Although a normal mouse will do the job just fine, if you spend as much time as I do in front of a computer then your input devices are very important. I already had a fairly good mouse in the shape of a Microsoft Intellmouse Explorer. It wasn’t wireless, but it was optical, had the scroll wheel and enough buttons but I noticed that it wasn’t particularly precise.

Usability labs

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:48:30 +0000

Today I went down to look at our digital vision web site being used by a couple of users in a usability lab hosted by flow interactive. I watched 2 users, both experienced with looking at royalty free stock photography, but one had heard about us and one hadn’t. It was extremely interesting seeing at which points they found it hard to decide where to go, but there where some similarities in the way that they wanted to use the site.

iPaq 3715

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:10:57 +0000

At work this week I got hold of one of the latest HP iPaq’s to come out, the rx3715 model. This was my first iPaq (I have had a Palm a while ago, but it still didn’t have the features I needed), so it was interesting to get involved with some technology that I didn’t have much experience with The primary reason for getting it is to basically get myself organised, put in task lists, track projects and use a project management system and have wireless access to be able to get in to our systems in case of an emergency from anywhere

Wireless anywhere?

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 16:47:24 +0000

Will Wireless become so prevalent that they will become just another commodity available worldwide, with free access to all? I think so…