How to add duration info to a FLV file with the flvtool2 command

Very useful. Sometimes some flv conversion tools don’t include info that is vital for playback. In this case, the seekbar wouldn’t show up in the player until after playback finished. I’ll be testing to see if this resolves it but either way, this is good to know. The first hint was this post stating that [...]

Pure AS3 preloader

Well I wasn’t making a game but I just went through what the author describes: finishing up the app, gotta set up the preloader. I did a manual version of this but I like this idea. However I am not using FlashDevelop. I am in the Flash IDE for compiling. I have thought of [...]

Howto: Flexbuilder 3 to debug Flash CS3 projects?!

I have to say… if you EVER have to code in AS3 for Flash, using Flexbuilder is just downright awesome. Code completion (that ignore case unlike the Flash IDE), refactoring support, all kinds of goodness in general. Man… even things like searching for references to a particular function throughout the code base of the project. [...]

Django, Sphinx, and full-text search

This makes some interesting things possible. And it makes sense just looking at it. That’s even better.

Announcing django-sphinx 2.0.0 Full-text Search | David Cramer’s Blog

One of my tasks lately has been updating the django-sphinx
library to work with Sphinx 0.98, as it includes GIS components which
we have been wanting to possibly utilize [...]

Django blogging apps…

that are more or less ready to use. The list is at the following link.

Empty Thoughts: Django Blogging Apps
People ask about blogging apps for the Django platform all the time. I
have not investigated each and every one of these, but so far I still
feel pretty confident that not one of these is fully [...]

Bash and Django - working together

A note… definitely something to come back to.
Talk Funnel » Blog Archive » Django bash shell shortcuts

SmileyChris had a post up recently on setting up bash aliases for Django. He uses the classic alias command which works for one-line shortcuts. I got inspired to put mine up too, but if you want to [...]

Snippet to update Django tables to utf8

So you get the dreaded illegal mix of collations:
Pythoneer » Convert MySQL table to utf8
Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE)
What do you do? Not too bad fortunately. And if you’re working with Django, it’s a little bit easier. Launch the shell with python manage.py shell. Then in the shell do something like [...]

Full-text search for Django

Just making a note…
Extending Django’s database API to include full-text search (Mercurytide)

Flash Javascript combo upload script…

Pretty cool. Just making a note of it.
SWFUpload News | SWFUpload
SWFUpload is a small JavaScript/Flash library to get the best of both worlds. It features the great upload capabilities of Flash and the accessibility and ease of HTML/CSS. See it in action….
* Upload multiple files at once by ctrl/shift-selecting [...]

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 [...]

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!).

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cairngorm factories for xml in and VO out

I’ve linked to this article before but I wanted to bring up another point now. I have a good xml data set that is becoming the local store for a chunk of a UI. But because it is xml, it doesn’t update the way it should. I need to try to implement this xml > [...]

Actionscript sprintf

I like python and the ability to do variable substitutions. In AS3 you have to do… well see the example below. Alas, this is for AS2, not AS3.
sprintf : Downloads : Nate Cook
Formatted strings are a real convenience—one that is sorely missing
from the Flash Actionscript library. This adds in the sprintf
functionality, which lets you reduce [...]