the reality tunnel

I’ve been experimenting with using Lettuce for a project.  When not using Django’s test runner, you can use the framework’s test database hooks by calling create_test_db() (see the Django docs for create_test_db()) from a method in your terrain.  Django Full Stack Testing and BDD with Lettuce and Splinter is a great resource for seeing how [...]

This was originally posted on the Local Fourth blog as part of my participation in a community media innovation project at the Medill School of Journalism. I first became acquainted with the term hackathon in college. A computer science student group organized an all-night event in one of the computer labs and ordered in pizza [...]

This is a jQuery bookmarklet to extract an attribution string and link from a Flickr photo page. To use the bookmarklet bookmark this link or drag it to your browser’s bookmarks bar: Flickr Attribution The code is available at github. At the time that I wrote this bookmarklet, I was using the the Monochrome Author [...]

Often, I find myself needing to do string mangling in spreadsheets. For instance, in an Excel dump of an MS Access database, the names of institutions were sometimes written as “Foo, University of” or “Foo U”. I wanted these to be formatted as “University of Foo” and “Foo University” respectively. I may be misinformed but [...]

Note to self:  If you want to make your custom django-admin command work, you need to have your django app in your PYTHONPATH.

This post is for PHP stuff that I needed to use, but couldn’t easily find on the web ‘pass’ in PHP Maybe it’s bad to start using conventions from other languages, but I find that sometimes the code is more readable if you write an if statement so that nothing happens if the conditon is [...]

Thomas said this book is paradigm shifting. What little I know about Domain-Driven design makes me think about using Domain-Driven Design to teach computer science+social justice in the same way that the Algebra Project is trying to develop a math curriculum based on real-world stories that include social justice themes. Link to info on the [...]

My paid job is doing tech-support work and I often have to convey information to users over the phone.  To make sure we’re on the same page with spellings, I use the NATO phonetic alphabet.  But, I can never remember certain letters.  One solution would be to just remember the NATO alphabet.  Or, I could [...]

The top seller queries weren’t working properly so I re-wrote them.  The update implementation is contained in the ‘book top sellers’, ‘books sold in last 2 months’, ‘comic/zine top sellers’, and ‘comics/zines sold in last 2 months’ queries.

Spent a good amount of time fruitlessly looking for how to get future posts to show up in RSS feed (to allow syndication of events). The place to start looking is in the main method of the WP class (wp-inst/wp-includes/classes.php). Just follow the sub-methods and the relevent code is in there somewhere. Update: look for [...]