Deadly Bloody Serious

Default arguments in Python: two easy blunders

garth — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:05:12 +0000

I’m glad I stumbled across Patrick Altman’s tweet about a “default bug in Django“. I’d never have guessed you can pass a callable to a field’s default= argument, otherwise. That’s quite a powerful idiom, and I think I’ll use it a lot. To balance the karma, I’d like to post a quick reminder to everyone else [...]

Twitter Emergency Backup

garth — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:32:56 +0000

Dave Winer has been thinking about ways to preserve the Twitter community even when Twitter is down. His latest effort is a web service to save Twitter feeds...

Twitter’s Famous Last Words?

garth — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:33:39 +0000

Just before Twitter went completely dark, I saw this: I’m sure it’ll be back up soon, but ’twas nice to have a laugh before hitting the sack. (Speaking of irony: I have 666 unread items in my feed reader’s Productivity folder…)

Wireless network “appears compromised”

garth — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 12:02:52 +0000

I’m seeing a lot of this disturbing little error message: “The wireless network appears to have been compromised and will be disabled for about a minute.” A poke around the Internet doesn’t show much other than other people complaining about the same problem. Some find the only way to solve the problem is to disable WPA. [...]

Zephyr’s sense of humour, age 2.5

garth — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:34:41 +0000

Zephyr, this morning: Zephyr big boy. Daddy big boy. Mummy big girl. Willow big chicken pox.

QuickPost Wordpress Plugin - Version .4 is now available

garth — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:03:00 +0000

QuickPost Wordpress Plugin - Version .4 is now available So far, so good, except for the database error (wp_categories doesn't exist) under WordPress 2.3…

Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax

garth — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:31:52 +0000

Yep. Quadruple-barrelled. I always wondered what'd happen if one double-barrelled person married another double-barrelled person. Reg Drax here seems to be Exhibit A. Our kids are double-barrelled. To save them from Reg' fate, we carefuly chose their middle names so they could ditch the two surnames entirely if necessary. Thanks, Merlin!

Django vs feedparser on dates

garth — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 10:17:33 +0000

I'm having trouble storing feedparser results in a Django model. It's all about timestamps. Feedparser returns timestamps in a standard time nine-tuple, asserting UTC. Django wants datetime objects. So, I'm trying to translate: django_timestamp = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(time.mktime(feedparser_timestamp)) feedparser_timestamp = django_timestamp.utctimetuple() This works fine for the majority of timestamps, but sometimes translating to datetime and back mutates the timestamp. In [...]

Push the tempo?

garth — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 06:06:19 +0000

I'm much more likely to post to Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook than here. The environments are pleasantly slack: I don't feel like I have to write masses of highly insightful prose. Today, I noticed another key factor: their tools are optimised for speed of posting. You can tweet or tumble as fast as you can send [...]

0wn3d

garth — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:30:28 +0000

My web host just rang me to ask me to upgrade WordPress. Some benefactor of humanity had used a hole in WordPress to turn his web server into a spam-bot, and he was going to get black-holed any minute. Rather than turn me off entirely, he rang me. How's that for customer service? I sincerely [...]