mon petit blogue sans importance...

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I love my nexus one! My impressions so far.

I had been waiting for a while to get a newer, real smart phone, like the cool kids. But i don't like the iPhone - it's just too closed (get a mac to develop on it? can't officially sync from linux?) and i'm tired of having to work around stubborn companies. The Palm Pre doesn't excite me. Neither do the latest offerings from RIM. That leaves Android devices. Here in Canada, Rogers has the HTC Dream (aka the G1) and Magic, which are the older ones, with slowish processors. I was just waiting for the Nexus One and when it became available, i jumped on it. Ordered an engraved N1 on tuesday at 19:00, and friday around noon, had it in my hands. Here are my impressions after a week of using it, the gist of which is that this phone is a WIN.

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Tags: english, geeky, linux, screwtheman

by wiswaud on 26 March 2010 | 0 comments

Vidéotron's and Bell's deceptive tactics and internet access ripoffs

It's funny how we hear about Vidéotron's Ultimate Speed 50 Mbps access, and now Bell's Fibe 25 Mbps access (i can't link directly to the service - click on Fibe 25) and we're told how great they are. They're actually both humongous ripoffs, if you have even basic math skills and 5 minutes ahead of you. Why? They both advertise those great speeds, but hidden behind those figures, in very small print, behind 2-3 clicks from the product pages, you'll find abysmal monthly transfer caps. This means that, yes you have a very fast connection. But if you were to use it fully, you'd very quickly fall into a lot of debt.
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Tags: english, geeky, screwtheman

by wiswaud on 17 February 2010 | 0 comments

How do normal people sync their life between computers?

So i have a laptop and a desktop, like lots of people do. My desktop is great: large monitor, quadcore CPU, 8GB ram, RAID-1 hard drives with lots of space, wired connection. My laptop, a Lenovo x300, is also great but in different ways: it's very small and sturdy, and still kinda fast, but nowhere near the desktop. So i work on both frequently - even within a single day i'll work on both. But i want my files to be accessible from both places easily, and synchronize them... But not all of them. And particularly not the hg /svn/cvs/bzr/whatever sandboxes: for those, i want to use normal DVCS flows, and if i need to move in-flight work i'll use mq patches. So what i came up with is this:
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Tags: english, geeky, linux

by wiswaud on 11 February 2010 | 0 comments

flu vaccine scares...

I'm tired of all the quacks out there touting all sorts of imbecilities about the H1N1 flu and its vaccine. My level-headed friend Alison pointed out an article published by McGill. This is a most excellent article about the different scary stories out there that have people panicking about the vaccine, and getting a lot of people to not get vaccinated, which is frustrating to someone like me who, in a few days, will be holding a newborn and bringing her to various holiday parties. Problem is, anyone who believes the 30-second shocking blurbs from the quacks out there is just not the type of person who would actually read such an article, even if you threw it in their face.
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Tags: english, quacks

by wiswaud on 19 November 2009 | 0 comments

Damn Consultants

Consultants have a bad reputation with salaried workers, who see them as overpaid and stealing the best work. So they don't always understand why those consultants get to do work in their company. Conversely, many of those salaried workers want to become consultants so they can make the big bucks, but as i'm setting out to show you, it's actually nowhere near as much money or fun as what most people think. Here's a look at the pros and cons of consulting, from the point of view of a consultant and that of a company giving them a call. The first section deals with you as a current employee who's either pissed off that your company hires consultants, or is thinking that he'll make the jump to consulting so he can make the big bucks (here's the spoiler: don't). The section after should be required reading for any company who thinks consultants are expensive or not worth it.
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Tags: consulting, english, hiring

by wiswaud on 17 November 2009 | 0 comments

Updates to the site, now with blueprint goodness

I pushed some updates to my puny little site, the most significant of which is that i now use the Blueprint CSS framework for layout, as it nicely includes everything i want: reset, columns, and a nice set of base styles. And it's small and fast to load. I wish there was the same thing but fluid: where it would adjust the column width to the browser's resolution. I've always been fairly opposed to fixed-width layouts, but i really wanted a nice, easy to use, cross-browser column layout thingy and i couldn't find a non-hacky, clean fluid one. I also put in a cleaner, text-only widget for my tweets. Nothing exciting, really.

Tags: english, geeky, web

by wiswaud on 27 July 2009 | 0 comments

A look at rackspacecloud.com vs AWS (updated)

Is slapping an API on top of a VPS hosting provider's systems enough to call it "Cloud Computing"??? I think not, but Rackspace thinks so. A look at rackspacecloud.com. I've been using Amazon Web Services for a while, for Akoha and now for a client. In particular, using EC2 ("cloud servers" - on-demand virtual servers, basically), with EBS (attached storage, a little like iSCSI drives), and some S3 usage (cloud object storage, for storing server images, scripts, and all sorts of files). But Rackspace, a great and huge more traditional hosting / colocation company, has recently gotten in the cloud server game with their rackspacecloud offering. But how does it compare to AWS?
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Tags: cloud, english, geeky, linux, web

by wiswaud on 16 July 2009 | 0 comments

why i like google's NeatX announcement

Just saw a post on /. about Google releasing a Free NX server clone (Google Open Source Blog post), NeatX. That's good news for all - see below for why.
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Tags: english, geeky, linux, python

by wiswaud on 15 July 2009 | 0 comments

PEP-8 cheatsheet

When writing python code, i do try to conform to the PEP-8 coding style, but quickly looking up some detail in the spec always takes more than a few seconds as it's rather verbose. So i wrote example python code that concisely shows all the PEP-8 recommendations in 1 page of commented code. You can download the PDF version or the raw script. Read below to see it inline.
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Tags: english, geeky, linux, python

by wiswaud on 9 July 2009 | 0 comments

django, you make things so easy

Adding RSS feeds was super easy, with Django's syndication framework in the contrib applications. I wanted to be able to have RSS feeds that would only follow entries tagged with something, so that you could only follow my entries written in english or that are about django. It turns out i got that done with a 7 line change.
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Tags: django, english, geeky, metablogging, python, web

by wiswaud on 15 April 2009 | 0 comments

PyCon 2009, day 3

This is day 3 of the conference (see also my notes on day 1 and day 2). They've also announced that PyCon 2010 will in Atlanta, GA, on February 19th to 21st, though the precise dates might change a little. I am unfortunately unable to attend the sprints that will be happening this coming week, and i'm going back to Montréal today. Thanks to Akoha for paying for the trip, and for the entire PyCon team for putting the conference together. It was a great conference, and if anybody reading this is wondering whether they should go, by all means you should try to make it to Atlanta next year. In the meantime, read below for my account of the talks i attended today.
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Tags: chicago, django, english, geeky, pycon, python

by wiswaud on 29 March 2009 | 0 comments

PyCon 2009, day 2

This is day 2 of the conference (see also my notes on day 1). Another interesting day full of interesting talks, with a keynote by Guido, a few django talks and some more random things. You can definitely feel how django is just taking off, it's amazing. Last year there were roughly the same number of talks on each of a few different web frameworks. This year it seems that django has the same number of talks as all other frameworks together... Well not quite: i just counted 4 full django talks, 5 web framework non-django talks - but still.
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Tags: chicago, django, english, geeky, pycon, python, web

by wiswaud on 28 March 2009 | 0 comments

PyCon 2009, day 1

I am very happy to have come to PyCon for the third year in a row. This gathering of python geeks is a very good conference to go to. The mix of people, from basement hobbyist kids to corporate types, is great. I got to PyCon by getting up at 3:40am this morning and taking the 5:44 flight from Montréal. The hotel is much nicer than last year; i got an awesome room on the 10th floor, with a balcony! So far the conference itself is pretty much like last year, with the talk and speaker quality varying wildly. Lunch was pleasantly improved, and served, not a buffet. The wifi pretty much just worked for me, and still works quite well, but there's again many... less technically-inclined people who keep creating adhoc networks with the same name as the conf network. Still, working a lot better than last year, so far. In general, many kudos to the organizers: the amount of things that need to go right for such a conference is incredible, and the registration fees are ridiculously low and yet the result is an extremely well organized conference. Overall, i'd say that if you want to watch a few presentations, from what i saw today i'd recommend you watch the python namespaces, automated qa, coverage and the everyblock talks. The videos are surely not up yet, but i'm assured they will be at some point. Another nice addition is that the schedule has diamond ratings which give a rough idea of the technical level. Here's a dump of point-form notes with some commentary from the talks i attended.
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Tags: chicago, django, english, pycon, python

by wiswaud on 27 March 2009 | 0 comments

in chicago this weekend for pycon

A quick note to say that i'll be in Chicago this weekend for PyCon - the annual python conference. I'm actually arriving right on time for the keynote friday morning, and leaving sunday night. If anyone wants to chat, ping me!

Tags: chicago, english, geeky, python

by wiswaud on 24 March 2009 | 0 comments

django ajax comments with reCAPTCHA

It turns out that the default django comments mechanisms for fighting spam are not very effective at all, contrary to my expectations. So i had to bring reCAPTCHA back. But then i figured i might as well do some kind of ajax comment form if i'm going to rewrite my commenting. A few problems cropped up, and it's still ugly, but it works now, and i haven't had a single spam comment since, whereas i consistently had a couple a day before.
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Tags: django, english, geeky, metablogging, python, web

by wiswaud on 24 March 2009 | 0 comments

updated to django 1.0.2

I finally updated this site to django 1 - 1.0.2, specifically. It took me a while, simply because i was an idiot and the way i customized the comments application so it would use reCAPTCHA to detect non-humans was just retarded. That, and i was lazy.
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Tags: django, english, geeky, metablogging, spam sucks, web

by wiswaud on 13 December 2008 | 0 comments

Django templates, and proper decorators...

It all started with a very simple thing: make a decorator that will make a view only accessible by users who are part of a certain group. But it rapidly degenerated...
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Tags: akoha, django, english, geeky, python, web

by wiswaud on 4 December 2008 | 0 comments

mirror, mirror, tell me where to get my software!

There are many mirrors for Debian, the linux kernel, and Ubuntu (the 3 main pieces i care finding mirrors for). But if you're in Montréal, there's better ones than what you see in the official lists, for when you want to download the latest Ubuntu CD.
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Tags: english, geeky, linux, ubuntu

by wiswaud on 14 November 2008 | 0 comments

Trying out plurk.com's widget

I use ping.fm to update my status on different sites (twitter, pownce, facebook and plurk), just for kicks (i don't use those nearly as much as others, and of course nobody reads mine :) ). Plurk has a nice little widget, and we'll want to have something like that for akoha, so i thought i'd put it here (it's on the RHS of my blog)... as an added benefit, it'll put update content a little more often here...

Tags: akoha, english, geeky, web

by wiswaud on 13 July 2008 | 2 comments

fourth day at pycon 2008

This fourth day at PyCon 2008, the third and last day of actual talks, was quite good. Updates on the OLPC, on python in Mozilla, and another keynote on creating and distributing python applications, and talks about python internals, then TurboGear wrapped up the talks.
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Tags: django, english, geeky, python

by wiswaud on 17 March 2008 | 0 comments

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