When working as part of a team on a Django project, it is often useful to have a per-host settings file. There are many ways to do this but the approach that I liked most is creating a local_settings.py file in each environment. I’m often the only programmer on web… Read more“”

A couple of months ago, we started working on a project, code named firemote, to help in the detection and prevention of forest fires in Lebanon. I didn’t say anything about it because i was waiting for it to be announced, and the announcement was finally done a few days… Read more“Firemote project is finally public”

Upgrading an older project to Django 1.4 So many little changes that make development with it oh-so-sweeter

Was writing some code today and ended up with “Dictionary<string, List<Dictionary<string, string>>> resultDictionary” Does anyone else think that this is hideous? It’s a dictionary keyed by strings and holding lists of dictionaries keyed by strings and holding strings. And it is what you get when you have a statically typed… Read more“Ugly code”

Shocked that my last project at the hospital which my boss assured me will only take a few days to complete is going to take much longer.

There are 10 types of programmers in the world, those who have written a compiler and those who can’t read binary. I’ve never written a compiler. At college, I had to drop the class because of a conflict and have always wanted to write one ever since. Even if just… Read more“Jack Compiler”

The DisplayShelf’s original website is at http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/components/tutorial-displayshelf-component/ and this is a quote from that website. The DisplayShelf component demonstrates using a number of flex and flash concepts to provide a rich, templatable control to display a faux-3d view of a list of items. Its behavior is similar to the CoverFlow… Read more“Project: DisplayShelf Modifications”

has been a vital source of information for me and hardly a day goes by where i don’t use it to read up on something. Amazingly, topics covered on it range from the down right silly to the most advanced technical topic. All reviewed and scrutinized by the mass public…. Read more“On Wikipedia and freedom of access to information”

Update: I removed the source code from the blog post. You can now find it on my . Most Hadoop tutorials use the wordcount application as a demo application. And while this might be a good demo application, it is not particularly helpful. So i wanted to think of an… Read more“Working with Hadoop: My first MapReduce App”

Last week, i sat through a demo of a certain document management system provided by a vendor. The system in itself is pretty good. Although if it was up to me, I would never choose a proprietary system for a vital project. Since you essentially would be putting yourself and… Read more“On Licensing Terms”