[ Updated: I've had an offer, so this has been taken care of. Thanks. ]

I'm trying to make it to Washington, DC, for the Django sprint on August 1. Is there anybody in the area who has a couch or floor I could sleep on for the night before the sprint and the night afterwards? If I can save having to buy a hotel room around the area in the peak of summer, that would be nice.

Any responses to "malcolm at pointy-stick" (or firstname.lastname at gmail). Thanks.

Topics: software/django

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Clint Ecker doesn't seem to have his posts syndicated over at the Django aggregator. (*) Over the recent couple of days, though, Clint's been posting about a few different Django apps he's been using in his professional projects and has released to the wider world. Plus a few "how I work" tips.

• django-chunks (seriously, dude! That was the best name you could come up with??)
• Super-simple Google analytics
• Three Django tips

Go read them. Now.

(*) Probably because we've reached the legal limit of Chicago people on that page and he lucked out. Ironic really.

Topics: software/django

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Congratulations to Luis and Krissa on their engagement. This makes me very happy. Two very good friends.

Topics: life

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After almost two months of suck, life is slowly returning to normal. One side-effect is that I have an internet connection again and access to pointy-stick.com for email. I'm mostly caught up on email (with the exception of a couple of mailing lists). So if you mailed me about something and are expecting an answer and I haven't replied in the last 48 hours, please try again. Anybody who is unanswered at the moment has had their original accidentally deleted along with the thousands of spam messages I had to wade through.

Thanks to the various people who sent messages of encouragement lately without having any idea what was going on. I saw them yesterday and it was nice to read.

Regular posting on stuff people might care about will resume soon.

Topics: life

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A community service announcement for those who are wondering...

You will have noticed the tumbleweeds blowing through here for the past few weeks. Life has taken a bit of a downturn lately and priorities have changed for a little while. I don't have access to email at the moment, so if you're awaiting a reply for something, please wait a little longer. Really, really important stuff can use the phone.

I'll be back posting at some point.

Topics: life

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A couple of years ago I joined the CGSociety website — a computer graphics website. Mostly so that I could read and, (very) occasionally post, in their forums. Computer modelling and rendering is very much a hobby for me, but I love to read and learn about it.

Periodically, CGSociety send out an email newsletter. Initially I read it with interest, but it wasn't something I had on my "must read" list and lately I've tended to just delete the notification emails unread (the site emails me when there's a new newsletter available). Today I received an email that said, in effect, they'd noticed I hadn't been reading (clicking through to) the newsletters in a while, so I've been unsubscribed. If I want to resubscribe there's a link available.

This is excellent. I hadn't actually bothered to check if unsubscribing was an option since, like most people, spam is a part of my life and this was just one more unread email amongst hundreds. But the site noticed for me and took a positive action. It saves them an email each time and it saves me from receiving pointless email. There's a small chance I will now forget about the website altogether, although in my case that's unlikely, since I browse it fairly regularly. In my book, CGSociety have just gained a lot of positive karma for proactive and much appreciated membership management. Well done.

Topics: software/graphics

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I'm an idiot.

Somebody in New York City sent me some email in the last 24 hours about something Django related. It was sent only to me, not a mailing list.

To whomever that person was, I read your email, noted that it was something I was interested in and then I seemed to have deleted it. Could you please resend it so I can reply? Or contact me on IM or IRC (see the about page for contact details).

Thanks. One day I'll master the technology. Promise.

Topics: life

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Seems to be my week to be interviewed. Shabda Raaj interviewed me over IM earlier this week about Django and Open Source in general. It's been published at The 42 Topics Blog.

Topics: software/django, software/open source

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Michael Trier and Brian Rosner released another episode of This Week In Django and I was asked to play the role of guest speaker. The focus was on internalisation in Django (and in general in software).

I realised after we recorded it that I neglected to mention a few things that are probably of note for developers trying to write international software. Consequently, here's a small follow-up with some additional things I thought of last night.

This isn't entirely Django-specific, since most of these techniques apply to software in general.

(Read more...)

Topics: software/django, software/internationalisation

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For quite a while now, I've been wanting to reorganise portions of this blog, and of www.pointy-stick.com in general. Rather than wait until everything's completely perfect, which will be approximately never, I've decided to roll out the bits that are done now and incrementally work towards the final version of Malcolm Blog 2.0 in the coming weeks or months. Thus, here we are.

[Update: It occurs to me, too late, that I've screwed up some file naming and expiry time settings. So one updated stylesheet is still served with the old name and had a one year expiry time. Thus, if the style looks a little off, try forcing your browser to reload all the page components. I'll fix that in the next rollout and try to be less of a bozo next time.]

Slightly different color scheme, different organisation of information, different layout. All new and yet mostly the same. As usual (where "usual" means "two years ago when I last rolled out some code here"), I've made the source code available for download in case you want to see how things are done. Keep in mind that this is still a work in progress, so there are changes to come.

For those who care about design-y features:

• the CSS is based off the YUI framework for the basic grid system and sizing. I've also put in a bit of effort to baseline-align a lot of stuff (thanks to all the people who've written articles about that over the past year or so) and keep things regularly spaced vertically, but it's not quite perfect. I won't be invited to the cool parties yet, since pages with images and code fragments both drift and there's a mixture of ems and pixels that mess things up on a long page. I'll fix those things one day.
• The site now works (better, at least) in IE 6.0, with the sidebar being at the side instead of falling off the bottom. No idea what it looks in Safari et al. I'm a Linux user, so I've checked it using Firefox 2 and using IE (running with Wine). That's all.
• I was unhappy with the amount of space the previous version devoted to metadata — things like dates and categories and permalinks. I don't want to not display that information, but I've put some effort into using the available space more efficiently by floating things around with CSS. For designers, this is possibly second nature; for me, it's closer to really hard work.
• Not amazingly happy with the colour scheme, but it's the best I've come up with so far. Didn't want to have too many colours and, surprisingly, the thing I found most difficult to style were the hyperlinks. The default blue didn't always work and I was struggling to find a mix between visible and intrusive. That was a lot trickier than I realised.

Topics: meta/blog

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