Psychic Origami

It's been a while since I last updated this blog. Starting a new (now not so new job) and having two kids does tend to make you prioritise things differently. I have also found with the current job it gives me more than enough of a chance to work on …

For the a period of 18 months or so I slowly ported my chess by rss site (chrss) from Turbogears 1.0 to Django. When I started the port Django 1.1 was the latest version. I took so long to finish the port, that Django got to version 1 …

Quite often I'll get distracted with an idea/piece of technology and mull it over for quite some time. Most of the time I play through these ideas in my head and don't do anything with them. It's often just an exercise in learning and understanding. I'll read up on …

If you want to associate extra information with a user account in Django you need to create a separate "User Profile" model. To get the profile for a given User object one simply calls get_profile. This is a nice easy way of handling things and helps keep the User model …

As mentioned in the previous post about my arduino doorbell I wanted to get the doorbell and my Chumby talking.

As the Chumby runs Linux, is on the network and is able to run a recent version of Python (2.6) it seemed like it would be pretty easy to …

During software development it's key to minimize the time between editing code and seeing the results of a change. During web-development the constant tweaking of CSS/HTML/Javascript etc means you're always reloading the browser to see changes.

At work I do a lot of Java web development, which normally …

Here in Brighton a good number of the bus stops have electronic boards, that tell you when the next buses are due. The data for these boards is available online and even provides data for stops that don't have the electronic boards. In fact there's an free iPhone app available …

So here are a few notes on getting a Chumby to talk to an Arduino using PySerial (and Python). It's pretty easy, but I'll document it to make it obvious. As the Chumby is sometimes a bit slow with a few of these steps, it's good to know it will …

Ok so I blogged about a podcatcher/podcast client for the Chumby quite a while ago (August 2008 to be precise). At the time I said I'd tidy things up and release the source code etc. Well that didn't quite happen, but I figured I might as well release the …

So quite a while ago I wrote about avoiding the n+1 query problem with SQLObject. I've since been using Django a lot more. In particular at my day job I've been improving a Django site we've inherited. This particular site suffered from a few too many SQL queries and …