Common Diazo Rules for Plone

2011-11-03T09:04:00.003-05:00

Here is a list of useful rules for your Diazo theming needs. Common Plone Specific Diazo Rules Adding the main plone content to a specific container Ensure that the body tag inherits Plone classes

Tag multiple items at once in a Plone site

2011-10-27T20:18:00.003-05:00

One feature that I'm looking for in my Plone sites is the ability to add new tags to multiple items at once. This could be achieved in the folder_contents view, perhaps with a new button called "categorization" (similar to the "change state" button).

Global expiration date for Plone sites

2011-10-27T09:49:00.000-05:00

Wouldn't it be nice to have a little control panel that configures a default global expiration date for content? To make it better it should be granular enough to vary default expiration dates by content type.

Weekend Project: Image Thumbnailer - Day 2

2011-10-23T23:43:00.001-05:00

Day 2 6:18 am - Rendering output as JSON Javascript Object Notation (JSON) is almost expected nowadays when deploying an API. Pyramid has a convenient approach to doing this, by providing a renderer called 'json'. I edited my view information under 'imageuploadr/__init__.py' so that it now looks like this: The result is that the response is rendered as JSON. When viewed using

Weekend Project: Image Thumbnailer - Day 1

2011-10-23T23:41:00.000-05:00

Day 1 8:12 pm - overview I'm about to dive into the process of creating an image thumbnailer, I'm giving myself 2 hours. (update from the retrospectoscope: 2 hours would have been realistic with experience, this turned out to be more of a 5 hour undertaking in short bursts over the weekend). So far I've setup pyramid: sudo easy_install virtualenv virtualenv --no-site-packages

PyCurrency - a simple currency conversion solution for python

2011-10-19T00:14:00.001-05:00

I needed a way to add currency conversions to some code, in the past I used a script that retrieved yahoo currency exchange data in csv format and stored the exchange rates. This time around I wanted something simpler, and since I couldn't find anything, I wrote it myself. I've just released an alpha version of PyCurrency. The code is embarrassingly horrible, the doctests pass and most

Turns out that Dropbox.com is powered by Python

2011-09-30T07:32:00.001-05:00

Recently I saw an WSGI error message on the dropbox site. Since I know WSGI to be a Python technology I started to get curious. With a bit of Googling, I found this: Yup! Dropbox is powered by Python.

3 must read books for newbie web designers

2011-09-15T07:16:00.000-05:00

http://www.20thingsilearned.com This is both a technology demostration and valuable education resource. The book makes excellent use of the new HTML5 technologies why teaching valuable lessons about the web, the internet and web browsers. http://html5dog.com A series of tutorials that will walk you from beginner to advanced in the essential web technologies of HTML and CSS. http

Quick TTW Contenttype Conversion Script

2011-05-03T08:34:00.004-05:00

This is a basic working example of a through-the-web (TTW) Plone script that converts one content type into another, in this case I'm converting all News Items to Press Releases. This assumes that you are using the PressRoom add-on on your site.I gave the script the name: convert_news_to_pressreleaseI've posted the script here:https://gist.github.com/953299To use the script, add a new script via

Creating new content types using Dexterity for Plone 4 on OS X

2011-04-24T23:46:00.014-05:00

update: These steps should work with little adjustment on a Linux base OS also.This is a short write-up that helps you to quickly jump to the "important" section of the dexterity manual (http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/manual/developer-manual/schema-driven-types/referencemanual-all-pages). Hopefully this will minimize some of the fumbling on OS X (and Linux also). I provide some

Get Started with Dexterity Development for Plone 4 on OS X

2011-04-24T19:49:00.019-05:00

update: I've updated the steps so that they work for OS X 10.5 and 10.6 as well.For this recipe you'll use:OS X 10.4 or better with XCode installedThe Plone Unified installer (latest stable version 4.0.5)Estimated time: 35 minutesRemember to get XCode installed before trying any of this.While I'm sure there are faster ways to get this done, I think this approach requires the least number of steps

Plone: Improving the user experience - A design pattern database

2010-12-18T10:53:00.007-05:00

It is important to see how others are doing things, it gives you a chance to see where you could do some things better. I propose that the Plone community begin to bookmark valuable design patterns.Think of it as a study of the artifacts of other applications, in a sense a bit anthropological as Limi suggested at the 2010 Plone conference (see http://blip.tv/file/4310012 start at 39:24).The

Tangent - The truth about UWI, my version

2010-12-12T08:22:00.003-05:00

Just read a blog post entitled "The Truth about The University of the West Indies: Mona Campus (That they won’t ever tell you about)". It certainly seems to have hit a nerve with some UWI graduates :). The article is largely tongue in cheek, but I consider it an important reality check especially for those who are actually University staff (like me).For those of you who want to be spared the

Installing easy_install on a shared hosting account

2010-12-09T12:24:00.005-05:00

These are the steps I took to setup easy_install on a shared hosting account (in this case bluehost). They only have python 2.4, but it worked.echo "export PYTHONPATH=~/tools:$PYTHONPATH" >> ~/.bash_profileecho "export PATH=~/tools:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profilesource ~/.bash_profilemkdir ~/toolswget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.pypython ez_setup.py --install-dir ~/tools/Then I was able

Using the pshell interactive shell for Pylons/Pyramid Projects

2010-12-05T07:47:00.003-05:00

update: I was using an older version of Pyramid, the documentation is up to date for the latest version.Following the pyramid docs at http://docs.pylonshq.com/pyramid/dev/narr/project.html in the 'Interactive Shell' section the instructions there mention using '../bin/paster pshell development.ini MyProject' to launch an interactive shell, this did not work for me. It returned the following error

QRCode this URL for Plone

2010-11-30T09:47:00.002-05:00

A nice project idea: Create a browser view for plone that generates a QRCode for the current resource. As soon as I have enough to procrastinate about I'll jump on this as a weekend project.

A Python Webframework for teaching

2010-11-27T11:13:00.008-05:00

I'm on the hunt for a Python webframework that I can use to teach web development. The candidates in order of my bias are:PlonePyramidPinax/DjangoFlaskWeb2pyIn general I'm looking for a framework that will reduce distraction and keep newbies focused on the task of web application development. The non-exhaustive criteria are as follows:Fast iterations - This means make and view changes quickly. In

Installing Pyramid on a shared hosting platform

2010-11-27T09:45:00.004-05:00

Taking a little break from my free website experiment, I've decided to take a peek at the new Pyramid framework. Don't be fooled, Pyramid has good pedigree and is battle tested as it existed for more than 2 years under a different name. It's also one of the best documented frameworks out there (bar none).These are the steps I took to get Pyramid Running on a shared host.note: The default python

A nicer way to manage translations - infrae.i18nextract

2010-10-30T05:50:00.003-05:00

I've been introduced to infrae.i18nextract by thomas_w (that's his IRC nick).If you're familiar with buildout it's as simple as adding the following to you buildout.The example below is specific to how I added the i18nextract to manage translation strings on plone.app.themeeditor.[buildout]...parts = .... translation...[translation]recipe = infrae.i18nextractpackages =

Get Plone Themeeditor Up and Running in 15 minutes or less

2010-10-29T16:55:00.006-05:00

Assuming you start with a working buildout (I recommend downloading the unified installer to have this setup for you)Steps to get an instance of Plone Themeeditor up and running quickly:If you don't have an instance of Plone yet, download and Install Unified InstallerEdit your buildout.cfg so that plone.app.themeeditor is in the eggs and zcml and zope.schema is pinned to 3.6.0 (see the snippet

Plone Conference 2010 Ideas

2010-10-23T14:56:00.008-05:00

These are the things I'd love to see happen at Plone Conference 2010. If I have other ideas I'll post them here.Open SpacesScaling Plone with Google App Engine as a Front End. I'm interested in hearing ideas or seeing examples of how people may be using Google App Engine as a 'presentation layer' in front of Plone.Plone Deployment including discussions about deploying using packages (deb,rpm,tgz,

Plone 4 makes upgrades fast and easy

2010-09-02T17:07:00.005-05:00

You probably know that Plone 4 is really fast. Here's a screencast of us upgrading our site from Plone 4.0rc1 to Plone 4.0.As you see, not only is it very responsive, it's also pretty easy. I have done a few, less trivial upgrades from Plone 3 to Plone 4, hopefully I'll remember to do a screencast about that in the future.

Notes on setting up plone.app.themeeditor on Plone 4

2010-06-24T15:19:00.008-05:00

I used a fresh install of the latest Plone4b4 then added the following to my buildout:(Note the use of plone.app.jquerytools 1.1b5 since plone4b4 doesn't use that version. also there's a note below on getting the 'test-plone-4.x.cfg' file.)[buildout]...extends = ... test-plone-4.x.cfgextensions = mr.developersources = sourcesauto-checkout = plone.app.themeeditor...[sources]

HTML5 is here - With a doctype I can remember

2010-05-28T09:21:00.003-05:00

As you know (or maybe not), HTML documents are prepended with a doctype.Typically something like:oror

Dealing with High Traffic Sites - my notes distilled

2010-05-25T19:51:00.008-05:00

This post was inspired by recent crashes of sites like radiojamaica.com (they seem to have found their feet again though), the Trinidad Guardian and Express during the Trinidad and Tobago elections.Disclaimer: this is based on research and "on the ground" experience. I'm sure there are persons who have significantly more experience than me.If these strategies seem overwhelming, then grab an

My Public Speaking Video List

2010-04-07T15:04:00.002-05:00

I just put together a very useful set of videos that will help to teach good public speaking practice. (wow!... this post is so short, it could almost be a tweet).

TTW Plone for Designers – Part 1

2010-04-01T11:53:00.004-05:00

If you missed it, or just want to quickly revise the course material,visit the video on demand (sorry about the ridiculous lack oflighting):http://www.livestream.com/pigeonflight/video?clipId=flv_47945cb1-281c-40da-857c-1cb474b973c7I've noted some special times in the video so you don't have to endureall the bumbling:Watch live streaming video from pigeonflight at livestream.comContent18:20 -

Note to Self - Using Prototype.js to dynamically insert spans within an a tag

2010-03-27T06:38:00.008-05:00

update: I've updated the code snippet below because blogger was stripping out some of the code (note to self, may be worth looking to a new blogging platform in 2011).For a project where I did not have access to JQuery and had no control over the generated HTML, I found myself needing to use Prototype.js.The goal:Starting with a list base menu in the form below:Make it "magically grow" span tags

More Ajax for PloneFormGen I Hope

2010-03-19T09:42:00.003-05:00

I'd like to find out more about the plans for the more "ajaxified version of PloneFormGen". Personally I'd love to see some inspiration taken from Wufoo and Google Docs.I've been looking at the roadmap but it doesn't give me a good picture of the ajax plans. Will the development build on KSS or will the Ajax functionality be done using more JQuery? Or will it be a mix of both?I think it is a

Tech is Art – A new club I'd like to start

2010-03-11T08:37:00.004-05:00

Tech is Art (Techia) is my vision of a Digital Art Club. These are the basic ideas in bullet form.Use technology to support performance artHave an annual showcase of digital art (mixed media with performance art)Encourage the development of the core technology skills (Design, Programming, Electronics)Bring programmers and designers togetherCreate crazy experimental stuff such as interesting

AntHill Skinner, yet another theming approach for Plone

2010-01-10T20:15:00.009-05:00

Anthill Skinner is another approach to theming Plone, developed by Simon Pamies of banality.de. It is inspired by collective.skinny and collective.editskinswitcher It claims to be easy..."er".It provides utilities to create a nice public facing theme while relying on the default Plone theme as the administrative "backend" interface. This approach allows a developer to quickly create a front end,

Will Cyn.in clear the Knowledge Bottleneck?

2009-12-26T00:25:00.007-05:00

We've been suffering from "knowledge bottleneck", where one person in the organization knows what's up about something, but others don't. This isn't the first time we've identified the problem or tried to fix it. As a result I'm very wary nowadays about throwing new techniques and technologies at problems.A Simple Plan So here's my new plan:Agree on the problem being solvedGauge expectations and

Configuring Munin.zope - message to future me

2009-12-19T16:59:00.005-05:00

When working with munin.zope your buildout should look like this: parts = ... munineggs = ... munin.zope[munin] recipe = zc.recipe.egg eggs = munin.zope scripts = munin=munin arguments = http_address='${ports:client1}',ip_address='${hosts:client1}', user='${users:credentials}'The arguments line was not very clear to me. Here's how it works.'http_address' is really the port number (e.g

A Remarkable Presentation - New and Converging Technologies

2009-11-26T10:32:00.003-05:00

So I'm in Montego Bay at the UNESCO Regional Media and Information Literacy Workshop and I'm going to be doing a presentation on "New and Converging Technologies".So I came up with a "Remarkable Presentation".

Setting User Passwords - still counter intuitive in Plone 4

2009-11-20T13:39:00.006-05:00

This discussion revolves around the question - How can I as an administrator set user passwords?Let me start by saying, I am an active user of Plone and as far as usability (for administrators and content editors) goes, there are few CMS systems that I've worked with that can hold a candle to Plone. This observation is related to a small issue that I would love to see "fixed".Before the RantPlone

Python Imaging Library (PIL) with Plone 4 on OS X

2009-11-20T09:42:00.005-05:00

The Python Imaging Library (PIL) was not working for me with the Python 2.6 packages that I installed on OS X Leopard.I resisted for a while, but in the end the solution to my PIL problems on OS X was to compile Python 2.6.I'm assuming that the following are already installedXCode should be installedSubversion (I use fink to get and install subversion)I downloaded Python 2.6 from the python.org

Sending mail from EC2 Servers

2009-10-26T11:02:00.003-05:00

Sending mail from EC2 servers, is for the most part the same as sending email from any other dedicated server. Setup Postfix and then use the "sendmail" provided by postfix. In your web applications just use "localhost" as your smtp server. This works, except that Amazon EC2 IPs are now blacklisted by Spamhaus, so corporations that fight spam based on Spamhaus info will block all your

960.gs css grid framework, mockups and failing fast

2009-10-19T07:35:00.005-05:00

Finally I've gotten around to making use of one of these css grid frameworks. Based on some cursory research I decided to use the 960.gs framework.Why I like 960.gsNo new knowledge - This framework builds on my existing css knowledge, it doesn't require me to install ruby/java and compile my css or any weirdness like thatEasy to learn - The principles are very easy to learn, this is important and

Installing Plone 4 on Solaris

2009-10-15T13:50:00.009-05:00

Plone 4 is still under development, but I've heard enough to get me curious. This is how I got it working. I ended up installing it on OpenSolaris, should work just as well on Linux. I had issues with MacPython on OS X.update: I was able to get it to successfully install on OS X Leopard by "downgrading" to macpython 2.6.2. Will need to try the same on Linux.Important notes:Use Python 2.6 less

Spliish Plone buildout for shared plone hosting

2009-09-04T10:36:00.006-05:00

I'm doing an early release of a little pet project.The Spliish hosting platform will hopefully, help to simplify the setup and management of a zope server which hosts multiple Plone instances.I've already used it in one production project, but it needs some more "love".My first step is to place the code in the collective so that other Plonistas can tinker with it.Get more info in the README

Break down of sites using Plone by Industry

2009-08-19T09:47:00.014-05:00

This is a breakdown of Plone usage in different industries based on data reported at Plone.net.Under reportingThere are many Plone sites that I am aware of that are not reported at Plone.net (I'm guilty, I don't list the Plone sites I build at Plone.net). Just visit delicious.com and check the plone-site tag. In this context "reported" means, someone responsible for the site visited Plone.net,

First 24 hours on old Mac

2009-08-13T09:34:00.007-05:00

I'm on a Mac for the moment. I managed to resurrect an old PowerBook G4 15" by replacing the PRAM battery following an ifixit tear down guide. I got the battery from PowerbookMedic and it works great now.So what's the first apps that I installed?Yuuguu - so that I can do quick, ad-hoc screen demosCyberduck - so that I can use SFTP and WebDav (I'm absolutely fearful of FTP)Skitch - It is

Growing an XFS partition on Amazon EBS

2009-08-02T15:17:00.004-05:00

Amazon EBS is Amazon's Persistent Storage service. I think of it as the ability to have a "thumbdrive in the clouds". I can then "attach" that drive to an Amazon EC2 instance (a machine in the clouds).Today I needed to add space to a filesystem. The filesystem was 10G XFS partition and I wanted to make it 30G. (don't try this if you're not using XFS, some of these notes are XFS specific).With the

Apple Can't hear me here in Jamaica (semi-rant)

2009-07-17T15:39:00.008-05:00

So I'm hunting for a laptop, I came across the Windows Laptop hunter ads and started thinking hmmm.... maybe I should just buy a PC. After returning to reality I started to think about my next few months of scheming to get an affordable Mac. Unfortunately, even though I'm associated with an educational institution, Apple doesn't care. When they say that they offer EDU discounts it seems only to

MySQL admin access on a plesk managed server

2009-06-23T07:49:00.001-05:00

The following got me straight to the mysql prompt with all the privileges I needed.mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -P8306 psaOnly works as the root user though.

The Plone Visual Training Project Idea

2009-06-14T09:33:00.004-05:00

I'd like to see a Plone visual training series, released under a CC style license.The idea is to have a series of 1 to 5 minute screencasts professionally produced. These screencasts would make up a complete "track/series" for example the "Plone Theming Series" or the "Plone Developer Fundamentals Series" or "Administering Plone".How would it be funded?We'd need to determine the real production

Ubuntu in Windows

2009-05-23T18:06:00.004-05:00

I couldn't take it anymore, been using this windows XP laptop for almost 48 hours. I finally cracked and decided to get Ubuntu on this thing. Since I'll need to return this machine unaltered (read, with Windows still on it). This is my recipe:1. Download the Desktop ISO of Ubuntu from ubuntu.com 2. Install winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel this makes it possible

Linux may not be as difficult as you think

2009-02-08T23:52:00.007-05:00

or... people are really uninformed....Look at the reaction of these people to a KDE based Linux desktop (only they don't know that it's Linux. Thanks to Dshepherd for the link.

MemcachedPageCacheManager- A faster PageCache

2009-01-18T15:27:00.005-05:00

With Plone's CacheSetup tool, it's pretty easy to get better performance out of Plone. In fact, with really aggressive caching, using Varnish as the proxy I've gotten up to 1000 reqs/sec.Varnish and Squid are so great, why something else?Fear of stale content. There are some scenarios where there is no reliable way of purging the proxy cache when a cached item has changed. In these cases, caching

SplashStart Tour

2008-12-19T11:17:00.001-05:00

Instead of Education

2008-11-27T23:11:00.004-05:00

Not sure why I didn't discover this book earlier in life. I stumbled upon it very unintentionally.While "browsing" some courses in the MIT opencourseware catalog and discovered a course called "how to learn almost anything" (why didn't they offer courses like that when I went to university?). On the reading list for the course was stuff by Holt, following the link eventually got me to the title,

EC2 Plone Presentation gets "props" at Slideshare

2008-10-16T11:36:00.004-05:00

Nice! My slideshow EC2 Plone Presentation - Plone Conference Washington DC, October 8,2008 has been included in the 'Spotlight section' on the SlideShare homepage.EC2 Plone Presentation - Plone Conference Washington DC, October 8,2008

Trajan everywhere. See if you agree.

2008-10-14T15:18:00.002-05:00

Stumbled on this while I was (uhm...) working hard, being really productive.

Which Sprint?

2008-10-10T09:11:00.002-05:00

So many, so little time. The conference ends today but the fun continues, there are going to be sprints* on the weekend... and everyone knows Jamaican's are the best sprinters. FacultyStaffDirectory PloneFormGen Theming ZopeSkel Documentation Vice Beginners

My EC2 Presentation

2008-10-09T18:06:00.002-05:00

Updated my EC2Plone wiki. I also did a little video which I used to explain stuff. The video isn't perfectly accurate but gives a good idea of how things work.

Plone Conference 2008 - Day 1

2008-10-08T15:12:00.004-05:00

SeminarsI went to the content mirror, usability testing, Plone ecommerce (see getpaid). I'll try to blog more about these.Other Cool StuffI met Shaun Sephton from South Africa today, he's working on BroadcastCMS - A CMS built on Plone, designed specifically for the broadcast industry.Laptop StatsOther cool things - Of the 310 attendees, a random sampling shows the following: More Ubuntu than

Early for Pre-Conference training part 2

2008-10-07T07:33:00.003-05:00

I left my power supply in the training room yesterday so I've been "internetless" for most of yesterday evening. I actually watched television last night and this morning (having withdrawal symtoms). I got here pretty early today.The three most valuable things I learnt yesterday (or was reminded about):Omelette - allows you to see all the code in one directory (good for referencing and learning)

Day 1 - Pre conference training

2008-10-06T09:58:00.001-05:00

Well the workshop is going well, our presenter is Martin Aspeli and he's going through the details setting up a Plone development environment.I'm having a hard time seeing a Windows machine, I see one near the front. Lots of Dells, but they're mostly running Debian and Ubuntu. A guy in front of me is using an Asus EeePC and of course an good number of Macs.I'm in a group with Jerome from France

Gearing up for my first Plone Conference

2008-10-02T21:08:00.002-05:00

Among conferences that I have attended, this one is shaping up to be the one that I stay most awake in. No offence to previous events, it's just that I work with Plone almost daily so I'm really interested. Plus I got lucky enough to do a talk about stuff I'm doing with Plone and Amazon EC2.

Plone on Amazon EC2

2008-09-30T16:56:00.002-05:00

I'm scheduled to give a talk next week on using Plone with Amazon EC2. So I've started a wiki for my talk. The hope is that I'll get feedback from the Plone community and thus make my talk more relevant. So visit the wiki and comment.

Adventures with Supervisord

2008-09-17T23:48:00.003-05:00

Supervisord has a companion program "supervisorctl". Turns out that supervisord does not reread its configuration file unless you forcefully restart it. My initial thought was that it might be enough to change the configuration and then simply run a command like "supervisorctl restart instance1". Unfortunately my new settings were not detected.(wasted nuff time...)In the end I had to kill

NGINX entity too large, no more

2008-09-17T08:37:00.002-05:00

Sometimes a simple sentence can make a world of difference. It did that for my nginx configuration this morning. Since setting nginx in front of Plone, I've had an "413 entity too large" error for files bigger than 1 MB.My configuration uses a special conf/proxy.conf file which looks like this:: # proxy.conf proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $host;

Supervisord and Memmon

2008-09-16T20:44:00.003-05:00

Three problems I've had with Plone.How to start and stop Plone instancesHow to deal with Plone instances that run away with memoryHow to restart Plone processes that have diedNumber 3 was more of a problem a few years ago with older versions of Zope, more recently Zope/Plone seems to run "forever". I used to use DJB daemontools to solve these problems and I still have servers that are "supervised

Chandler and Trac - Getting them talking

2008-09-15T10:49:00.005-05:00

Okay... I've been bitten by the GTD way. So I've been trying to adopt tools that help me to get things done. The key philosophy I've taken from GTD is having all my todos in a single trusted location. Trust is important, if your brain is still trying to remember things you're wasting energy.My key tools (trusted locations) are Trac Tickets (I use other features of Trac also, but less so) and

ATImageEditor - Image editor for Plone

2008-09-03T00:10:00.005-05:00

I had seen something about an image editor for Plone a couple months back, nice to hear that ATImageEditor is improving quickly. For a current project we've actually integrated snipshot.com into our image editing workflow.Personally, I would give it a different name, like "Imagr".

10 Signs that you have outgrown Weebly

2007-11-25T19:42:00.001-05:00

del.icio.us Digg slashdot StumbleUpon Weebly.com is an online service which allows anyone to build, and host a website for free.Where as Weebly is great to get you started I've put together a checklist that might help you decide if it is for you. Maybe you already have a Weebly site, this will help you to decide if you need to move on.You know you've outgrown Weebly if

Troubleshooting Apache (blast from the past)

2007-11-22T16:01:00.000-05:00

This happened to me last year April, and I blogged about it at the Jamaica Linux User Group website.I thought it would be worth keeping, so I've "re-blogged" it here (am I allowed to do that?)Got an email from a client this morning saying their site was inaccessible. After a bit of poking around, it was clear that the problem was related to Apache. I'm sure this will help someone else, so I'm

Kinetic Style Sheets (KSS) - Using your CSS knowledge to do Ajax

2007-10-29T00:41:00.001-05:00

If you understand Cascading Style Sheets then you know enough to do Ajax with Kinetic Style Sheets.I found these notes helpful: http://svn.zope.org/megrok.kss/trunk/src/megrok/kss/doc/README.txt?rev=80509&view=markupeasy_install megrok.kisseasy_install kss.coreeasy_install kss.demoeasy_install hurry.query

Me Grok? You Ruby?

2007-10-27T14:29:00.000-05:00

So I learnt the basics of Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) this week. I built a simple application following a tutorial, so I don't know if that counts.Then, yesterday, I discovered Grok, I'm pretty good at discovering things months after they have existed, being launched in October 2006, Grok is already celebrating its first birthday.Grok represents Zope 3 for humans. A framework that simplifies the

How to learn any new programming language (checklist)

2007-10-23T18:30:00.001-05:00

del.icio.us Digg slashdot StumbleUpon So you want to learn Javascript, C#, Mono, Perl, Python, Boo, PHP, Whatever (well, I don't know if Whatever is a language), here is what you need to know.BackgroundI Googled, and didn't find anything that had a step by step, structured way to learn a new programming language. So this is my attempt to capture the process as best as

I've switched to flock (for now)

2007-10-16T19:35:00.001-05:00

I've used flock, on and off, as my "other" browser. Just upgraded to Flock/0.9.1.3, which is built on Firefox 2.0.0.7. and I must say it rocks. The one thing that was keeping me on Firefox was Firebug, which did not work with previous versions of Flock, but now that Firebug is working, I've switched.

Run,swim, install IE6 on OS X

2007-10-13T10:08:00.000-05:00

Morning (uhm) RunI brought my young daughter along for the morning run with the jamdammers, the plan was to have her ride her bicycle next to me while I ran. Unfortunately she had other ideas about the riding (like not riding). So I went at her "running" pace, which was mostly walking. I eventually managed to convince her to ride while I ran and held the handlebar with one hand.This did not help

CSS, every other browser.... then there's IE

2007-10-12T21:49:00.000-05:00

[Figure 1][Figure 2]So I'm working on creating a wonderful look for a new website. CSS and design can be so much fun. Looks great in Firefox 2.0.x, Opera and Safari on OS X, but it is always important to check your site in different browsers. So I go to browsershots, figure 1 above shows thumbnails of how the site looks in most browsers, it also happens to be how I designed the site. Figure 2,

Mic Check!

2007-10-12T21:41:00.000-05:00

Brief history, I used wordpress before it was called Wordpress. (anyone remember b2?). Setup a blog for my sister, which she used for about a year.I've had this blog for a while, doing nothing with it, since my plan was to run my own blog using Plone or something "pythonic"....So... here I am starting my first official blog post using blogger. More will come.

Flight of the Pigeon

Dexterity Development Quickstart using zopeskel.dexterity