Automatic key generation with App Engine
After playing Google App Engine for a few days, I’ve realised the power that even the basic framework provided by Google, webapp, provides. Working with Python adds a level of flexibility that I never had when working with PHP many years ago (although this was before OO had really infected PHP).
While working on my first real application for app engine I soon came across the problem of creating sensible key names for objects. If you aren’t familiar with the data object models in app engine, each object has a unique key, generated automatically when the object is created, and a key name (property: key_name) which can be specified by the user. The key name can be very useful if you need object identifiers which are human-readable, such as when you use them as part of your apps URLs.
Google knows you better than you
Recently I came across this article on the Google blog about the launch of Google Web History. If you have a Google account and their browser toolbar installed, it will keep track of all the websites you visit, allow you to search through them, and give you stats on what you do online. It’s like del.icio.us but completely passive and encompasses anything you do with your web browser. Thinking that it sounds rather big brother-esque? Me too.
But that doesn’t stop people from using it. It seems that people really do trust Google with vast quantities of information about their lives. I can just about cope with using their Gmail/Gtalk services, but I’m very conscious about what personal things I send over email, and I say on IM. The concept of keeping everything about your ‘digital life’ in a central place which is easily accessible and linked together strikes me as one of those great ideas that you would find listed in a 1970s ‘Things technology will do for us in the year 2000′ article along with replicators and hoverboards.
However crazy it may seem to most of us, there are some people who take this to extremes, recording every bit of information about their lives in a digital form. While it is possible to understand how collecting so much data about yourself is an intruiging concept (remember the Truman Show?), it’s a whole other thing to hand that information over to a large for-profit company, even if they supposedly don’t do evil.
Cleartype in IE7
I’ve been testing out IE7 in Vista for the past week or so to see how it measures up against Firefox. Most of my usual web haunts seemed to look and work fine, although I’m not a big fan of the interface layout. The positioning of the stop and refresh buttons still catches me out - I guess I just have to get used to it. One thing that was definately strange was the font rendering. I couldn’t really put my finger on it until I switched back to Firefox: suddenly everything was much easier to read and less fuzzy. It turns out that IE7 in Vista uses Cleartype font rendering even if you have disabled it for Windows in general. The offending option is found in the browsers options dialog. I find Cleartype rendering horrific to read at best. I can’t understand why IE needs an independant control for this…
Fixing the filling
I’ve been working on the site for the past few days trying to get used to Textpattern. I’ve updated the look of the site a bit which I will no doubt continue to tweak. For the moment, anyone viewing this in IE6 will see a lot of wierdness due to its lack of support for transparency in PNG files. I will fix this sometime… maybe. Meanwhile, why not try something better?
I’ve added a new code section where I will be releasing several bits and pieces that I’ve written over the past few years, mostly Python stuff. Hopefully someone will find it useful.
Update: Fixed IE problems. Things should look pretty okay now.
Filling the void
So I have decided to take the time (oh I have so much of it you know) to put together a decent website where I can put the many things that I write, code, read, listen to, etc. Unlike it’s many predecessors I will try to use this one frequently and keep it up to date with new things.
The site is running Textpattern and is using a modifed version of the lovely Serene template. You know, just in case you cared.
Speaking of a void, have you checked out neilturner.com?
Windows + Django +svn = Ugh!
After reinstalling windows recently I once again had to battle with the process of installing Django on Windows XP. All I remember about the last time was several hours of googling (if that isn’t a word ti aught to be) and cursing at the *nix-centric installation notes on the django website. So this time I decided to take notes so that I could put together a semi-coherent guide to installing Django on windows for development purposes. Here goes… (more…)
Authentication in Django templates
I recently came across a problem when adding user accounts to a Django application I’m currently working on: I wanted to access information about the current user, e.g. whether they were anonymous or logged in, so that I could display a login message or a link to their homepage respectively. This sounds like a relatively simple thing to accomplish but the problem was that I didn’t want to have to look up the current user’s information in every view method and pass it to the template. Luckily Django provides a way of dealing with this very situation by providing a special template ‘context’. (more…)
