SmugMug
January 20, 2010 — 3:35PM
Ok. New camera, so I need a cool gallery to put shots in. First up, an ugly head shot.
Beavers eat cheese
January 8, 2010 — 8:44PM
Beavers eat cheese from Martin Diers on Vimeo.
Suicidal deer meets Saturn
January 5, 2010 — 6:42PM
This happened on the North Shore of Lake Superior, four miles north of Silver Bay on Highway 61. I was coming over a bridge, and was greeted by a suicidal deer of indeterminate sex who jumped out of the creek/culvert, and met my right front fender.
As Silver Bay was a ghost town at 5:30AM, I drove on to Beaver Bay and snapped these pictures in the parking lot of the Holiday gas station.
Click for larger image
Thankfully that was all the damage there was, so the car was totally ...
Karate Kid
December 24, 2009 — 11:21PM
When the words "karate kid" and "remake" appear in the same sentence, the mind begins to imagine putting out a contract on the head of whomever came up with this sacrilege.
Then the words "Jackie Chan" are added, and peace and harmony are restored to the universe.
Avatar
December 19, 2009 — 6:53PM
Umm, wow. Lots to talk about here. Not sure where to begin. Saw it today on IMAX 3D at the MN Zoo. I'm going to do a more detailed breakdown on some of the more "controversial" parts (nearly naked tall blue chicks with tails, gaia spiritism, etc.), but let me just say that this is a fabulous film! Highly entertaining, breathtaking. Yeah, it's got some kitchy Hollywoodness about it (Come on. It's James Cameron, after all.), but, honestly, it didn't harm the movie at all.
Not to get too far ahead of myself, I'll just say this: I know that some of ...
Snow Leopard
August 31, 2009 — 10:38AM
Yeah. I couldn't wait. Just HAD to update. As you can imagine, I do not run your average Mac system, but when I saw that VMWare Fusion, Macports, and a number of essential system level utilities were all 10.6 ready, I took the plunge. It mostly went ok.
First problem: Random spinning beachball freezes. A lot of them. But after seaching around and finding that this was not the general experience with Snow Leopard, I assumed it was something in my system. Since the entire system was freezing, I assumed this was something kernel-level, and indeed it was. I was using ...
Julia squared
August 20, 2009 — 10:48PM
Today is our 15th wedding Anniversary. We had free movie passes, so we splurged on a movie. Nothing much playing right now. I read the description to The Timetravellers Wife, and bailed on the words "romantic drama" mixed with the sappy movie poster. But then saw a movie that I wanted to see and forgot about: Julia & Julia. There were two things that turned me off about this movie right away went I first heard of it: Meryll Streep, and Julia Child. Now, I've never paid much attention to Julia Child, except in caricature. And I've also never ...
Spam Zombies
August 20, 2009 — 8:32AM
So, I was going through some parts of this site, and decided to check the Comments system - you know, just routine maintenance. I had over 1200 comments. Come again? Hit the front page. Checked the comment list. Nothing on any published articles. Checked one unpublished article. 1200 Comments. Every one an ad for Viarga or Cialis.
As I went about deleting these, I noticed that they were being posted every few minutes, automatically. In other words, this was a spam bot, and I was in its rotation - but only on one article, and an unpublished one at that.
A few ...
Brimstone
July 15, 2009 — 10:36PM
This evening, during devotion, we were reading from the Treasury of Daily Prayer, the New Testament reading for today, July 15th. The window was open behind me, and I was sitting in the recliner with Peter in my lap. Suddenly, about 2/3rds of the way through the reading, there was a strong smell of brimstone. I smelled it, and David, across from me with his back to the entertainment center, started coughing, and complained that it was hard to breath.
The smell did not dissipate. It completely ceased a moment later, like it was never there. One moment it was strong ...
Sheep Hacking
June 4, 2009 — 9:14AM
At first I thought, "The monotony of sheep herding has finally gotten to these guy's heads." Then I was blown away. 1 million points, guys. You are my new heroes.
The Holy Roman Galactic Empire
June 2, 2009 — 9:36AM
Somehow, I knew this all along.
Props to itsnbits.
Elegant Application Integration with Hooks
February 6, 2009 — 8:49PM
In a previous post, I lamented the corner into which I seemed to have developed myself into as I am creating a CMS framework on Django. The essential problem: If pages are created on-the-fly in the Admin, and these pages are dispatched from a catch-all view, how does one go about tying in form processing or application logic to a specific page, without touching the underlying framework? The idea of my framework was to provide a core CMS around which I could add additional functionality without having to mess around with the framework application proper.
I finally have developed an ...
Django Sites framework and a multi-site CMS
December 9, 2008 — 2:01PM
The Django Sites framework has been widely adopted by many Django apps, as a way to use a single Django installation and a shared database, to serve multiple sites, while keeping the various model objects separated. This greatly simplifies the job of managing multiple Django applications, and makes it possible, for instance, to serve an article up on multiple websites, each running its own separate set of applications, some or all of which may be shared.
The framework is fairly flexible. As the documentation demonstrates, one may use it to associate content with sites in a OneToMany or ManyToMany relationship. ...
OpenLazslo
December 5, 2008 — 9:43PM
I just ran into OpenLazlo. If you have not seen this before, then go there now, and run through the tutorial. While billed as an Internet Platform it is better understood as a very easy way to write a UI that compiles either to Flash or to DHTML/Javascript.
OpenLazlo's native language is called LZX, which is an XML language with embedded Javascript. OpenLazlo can be run in a Client/Server configuration, where the OpenLazlo server can function as a proxy for other media, and a go-between for gathering data and transforming it to XML. It can also compile and serve a ...
Django as CMS or Django as App Framework?
November 26, 2008 — 7:06PM
Like many of you, I once developed my websites by hand, in static HTML. I was proud of my Notepad skills. I learned CSS. I became enlightned and switched to Linux on the laptop, started using vim for everything, and eventually ended up (back) on a Mac, where I happily sit today. As I become responsible for managing more and more sites, doing everthing in static HTML became impractical. I had put off migrating to a CMS for quite some time, mostly because too many CMS's gave you the kitchen sink (Plone, Drupal) but made it a burden to develop ...
Using CodeMirror with Django Admin
November 23, 2008 — 6:29PM
Having gotten a little experience using CodeMirror, I believe I made the right choice. CodeMirror does not use regex for syntax highlighting. It implements an actual code parser. This makes more powerful, but also slower, than regex solutions. The speed, of course, will depend upon your browser's Javascript implementation.
Integration with Django's Admin is not difficult, with a little help from jQuery. For this example, you will need to download the CodeMirror and jQuery source.
Extract the CodeMirror source. The archive will contain a css and a js directory. Place these in the media directory of your app. In this ...
First post - CodeMirror
November 21, 2008 — 3:52PM
First post!
When I began creating my CMS as my first major Django project, my first goal was to eliminate the necessity of editing text files on the filesystem. Therefore it was necessary to store Django Templates and stylesheets in the database. This was easily accomplished. However, it was immediately obvious that editing HTML, CSS, or Javascript inside a conventional browser textbox was a very poor way to create and maintain a site.
I set out to correct this situation, figuring that somebody must have implemented a Javascript-based editor, doing for code what WYSIWYG editors do for content. I quickly found More...
