Show the date in the OS X Menu Bar

A good tip and set of instructions on how to show the date in the menu bar so you don’t have to click, hover, etc.
How To: Display Date in OS X Menu Bar – PaulStamatiou.com
While getting things settled down on my MacBook it became apparent that I did not want to rely on [...]

A Django HttpRequest QueryDict is not your normal Python dict – i.e. getting ids from a friend request-form

Doesn’t work:
ids=request.GET['ids[]‘]
Does work:
ids=request.GET.getlist(‘ids[]‘)
A typical Facebook friend invite sends the ids to be invited to your site as an array in ‘ids[]‘. Normally, you can pull values out with just request.GET['key']. But since the value of this particular key is an array and not just a string, you can’t (at least I wasn’t able to) just [...]

Google, Search, Flex

Oooooh sweet. According to this article, Yahoo’s search API is still more “developer friendly”. Either way, having them available is quite cool.
Google Search REST API
More than one year after Google discontinued the SOAP Search API, it finally got a proper replacement. The AJAX Search API can now be used from any Web application, [...]

Python array copy

I had heard about passing by reference vs. passing by value. Here is a case of passing by reference.
In [76]: a=[1,2]In [77]: b=aIn [78]: b.append(3)In [79]: aOut[79]: [1, 2, 3]
That’s not what I was looking for. I was hoping to get ‘b’ to be [1, 2, 3] leaving ‘a’ unchanged. Oops. It passed ‘a’ to [...]

Concat Django Querysets

Here is a good discussion on concatenating Django Querysets. Very helpful! It also introduced me to itertools. This leads to some other talk about itertools. Very interesting!
The jist though is like this:
How do you concatenate two querysets? – Django users | Google Groups
import itertoolsq1 = Model1.objects.all()q2 = Model2.objects.all()for thing in [...]

Jump to path in OS X finder

Not sure where I saw this, but if you have an OS X Finder box open to, say, upload a pic to Facebook, if you hit Command-shift-G, it’ll give you a box you can paste a path in. You can also type the path in and it should give path completion so I’ve heard.
Nifty.

Potential facebook app success story

I think whereivebeen is far, far over 250,000 users. It’s successful. The problem is getting it to at least pay for itself. I haven’t seen an update past what is here though. I know some ads were put in and they aren’t obnoxious or anything so as a user I am fine with them. But [...]

VideoEgg Egg Network

Monetize monetize monetize… it’s the big mystery. How to do it? So that it actually works? VideoEgg has done interesting stuff so this is another one to take a look at in the future.
Ad Platform – Publishers | Videoegg
You can integrate the EggnetworkSM AdPlatform in less than a day and begin monetizing your [...]

Free open source video platform?

So says Miro. Interesting. Will have to look into it more later.
Creators: publish your videos the open way.
If just a few companies dominate online video, creativity will be restricted. If the most popular video tools rely on closed, proprietary distribution systems, free speech will suffer.
Miro is specifically designed to give video creators and [...]

Textmate and FBML… Eclipse/Aptana anyone?

I sure wish there was something like this for Eclipse and Aptana! Perhaps this could be a start? Here’s to hoping…!
Facebook Platform Developer Forum / TextMate FBML plugin
Put together a start of a TextMate Bundle for Facebook. Does some cool stuff, like code completion and doc lookup. If anyone wants [...]

Django snippets to check http_referer

Django snippets: Referer-checking view decorators

Here are a couple of Django decorators for limiting access to a view based on the request’s HTTP_REFERER. Both raise a Django PermissionDenied exception if the referer test fails (or a referer simply isn’t provided).

The first, referer_matches_hostname, takes a hostname
(and port, if specified) and matches it against the referer’s. [...]

Working with field level permissions with Django

This might be useful but, buyer beware.
Django snippets: FieldLevelPermissionsAdmin
Have you ever needed to customize permissions, for example, allow only some fields for editing by some group of users, display some fields as read-only, and some to hide completely? FieldLevelPermissionsAdmin class does this for newforms-admin branch. Not tested well yet (>100 LOC!).

1and1 and http compression

I have not been able to find any info about 1and1 and http compression. It’s a shame as it really reduces bandwidth, increases transfer speed, etc. Fortunately this little script does a really nice job of it. It’s in PHP and it works a treat on 1and1. With a bit of rewrite magic I should [...]

Neat little Facebook snippet for Django

You can use this to set up a Facebook User within you Django app. This of course uses the middleware which is optional as described here.
Django snippets: Little middleware that create a facebook user

Install **PyFacebook** package.

After make all steps in tutorial above, put this code in your [...]

Django, generic views, and setting the media url via a template context processor

So far I haven’t really used Django for “web sites”. It’s really been used as a data backend. Well the time has come for some web stuff. It’s set up to use a dev, staging, and production server. All is well and good. But each has a different media server. In Django, how do you [...]

Good list of Eclipse plugins specific to Flex

This list has many of the plugins I already use, and there are more that I haven’t looked at yet. I’ll give them a shot in due time, but it’s a good reference.
dispatchEvent » Pimp my ‘clipse – a list of must-have Eclipse plug-ins for Flex/Flash Development
FlexBuilder may have its ups and downs [...]

Flex, MVC, Cairngorm and Universal Mind Extensions

This podcast with Thomas Burleson probably has the best description of MVC with Flex, why to use Cairngorm, challenges of using Cairngorm, why to use the universal mind extensions, the problem of view locators and how to work with those, etc. Good stuff. I wish there was a transcript of this.
UMEvent, UMCommand, Callbacks, and other [...]

Textmate the super text editor

Just a note to remember… blogging from textmate… wow. One more reason to get it…
Andrew Powell’s ColdFusion, Flex, Java, and AJAX Blog
OK, so a lot of Mac users use TextMate for everything from text editor to IDE. I didn’t realize this until recently, but you can blog directly from TextMate. If [...]

Eclipse: updating Buckminster

Recently I have had trouble doing any updates in Eclipse. Buckminster always failed with a 404 not found. My current Buckminster Update Site is:
http://download.eclipse.org/technology/buckminster/updates
Later I found this bit:
Nabble – Eclipse – Buckminster Dev – Has something changed on buckminster update site?
yes, something has changed. Eclipse 3.3.2 was released and Buckminster headless-site.xml was updated [...]

Eclipse, Quicksilver, and hopping to a folder or terminal quickly

You can pull the currently selected item in Finder into Quicksilver with Command-G. Neato! But you can also pull selected text in a current app. You probably need to install and enable the Quicksilver proxy objects. But once you do, you can grab selected text and it’ll show up in Quicksilver.
But! If you’re in Eclipse [...]

Reduce Django facebook server load

So say you have a Facebook app and it runs on Django. Standard practice is to load the middleware. Middleware by default adds a bit of overhead. It’s needed for some bits but completely unnecessary for anything that doesn’t need it. This is one way to take it out if you feel the need for [...]

Pay as you go web hosting

Interesting concept. They don’t work with long running processes like Django or Web2py, but it could be good for static files and regular scripts.
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET FAQ
What happens if I get slashdotted?
A
“major slashdotting” of a site hosted on our service will cost you (on
average) less than $10, one time. The best part about that is [...]

More on MVC

Going to have to do some more reading here later… Joes’ article “An architectural blueprint for Flex applications” was probably the first thing I tried to chew through to understand MVC, Cairngorm, and “separating concerns” while building an app in Flex. Model adapters and view mediators look like something I have been wrapping my head [...]

SWFObject 2.0, SWFAddress 2.1, Flex 3 and getting the starting path

I have a test project running with Flex 3 and SWFAddress 2.1 and SWFObject 1.5. It worked but I noticed that SWFObject was updated to 2.0 and SWFAddress is supposed to work with it. So I upgraded. And getting the first initial URL stopped working. Couldn’t figure it out. Then I saw this:
joeberkovitz.com » UrlKit [...]

autossh – keep your ssh tunnel running

Automatic reconnection of ssh tunnels. This could be quite useful. Found this from here.
autossh

FEATURES

autossh is a program to start a copy of ssh and monitor it, restarting
it as necessary should it die or stop passing traffic. The idea is
from rstunnel (Reliable SSH Tunnel), but implemented in C.

The author’s view is that it is [...]