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As prob­a­bly many of you already knows, on May 31 will begin the Django dash com­pe­ti­tion. Djan­go­dash is:

[…] is a chance for Django enthu­si­asts to flex their coding skills a little and put a fine point on “per­fec­tion­ists with dead­lines” by giving you a REAL dead­line. 48 hours from start to stop to pro­duce the best app you can and have a little fun in the process.

I’ll be par­tic­i­pat­ing, so if you haven’t reg­is­tered yet, do it now! And don’t forget to check out the cool prizes :)

The Python’s built-​in range() is an extremely useful func­tion, but has a little prob­lem: it doesn’t include the right extreme of the range. For exam­ple, a call to range(1, 10) will be eval­u­ated to this a list of num­bers from 1 to 9 (not includ­ing 10):

>>> range(1, 10)
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Today I need for a work a range() func­tion that includes the right extreme, so I had to develop mine. Here it is:

def inclusive_range(start, stop, step=1):
    """
    A range() clone, but this includes the extremes
    """
    l = []
    x = start
    while x <= stop:
        l.append(x)
        x += step
    return l

Of course there are faster imple­men­ta­tions of this func­tion around here (and if you know one, please let me know) and surely this one is not one of the fastest, but it works and that solves my prob­lem right now.

Ultimately I had to force the size of a uploaded image in the django admin area to a fixed dimen­sion of 620x250px. Even if it could look a simple thing, in fact it isn’t.

The main issue is that even if an Image­Field has a width_field/height_field option that refers to (pre­sum­ably) inte­ger fields that will be auto-​filled with the image size, we can’t ran a val­ida­tor across those fields (we can do so only in a form, but my prob­lem was to val­i­date the image in the admin area). So we have to man­u­ally load the image in memory and run a custom val­ida­tor that uses PIL to get the needed infor­ma­tion and val­i­date the image.

(Con­tinue reading…)

Yesterday I had a meet­ing with a cus­tomer about a new site I should develop for them. Since they’re a book pub­lisher, they wanted an online book store. Apart from the tech­ni­cal details (the site isn’t as simple as you may believe, they need a lot of not-so-easy-to-do stuff), the most impor­tant point we focused on is the fact that they have an inter­nal IT tech­ni­cian that han­dles all their com­puter needs. If you’re asking your­self why this mat­ters, keep reading:

• me (to be precise, my company) stopped development of PHP sites about one year ago in favor of Python
• we release the web site’s code to them
• for this project, we haven’t been asked any kind of future support; this means that when the site is finished, we won’t touch the product anymore (unless they don’t pay us to do the modifies they need)
• but they don’t want to pay us to these modifies, because they have their internal IT technician
• their technician knows only PHP (and he never even known the Python’s existence until yesterday)

(Con­tinue reading…)