Zeta-Puppis.com

And I’ve been 6th. So I won a shared 2 host­ing plan at web­fac­tion and a 12 pack of G33K B33R caf­feinated root beer (still trying to under­stand what this is exactly, anyway) from bawls. Anyway, here fol­lows a short resume of what hap­pened from Sat­ur­day through Tues­day (if you’re asking your­self why it didn’t ended on Sunday, well, keep reading).

The com­pe­ti­tion began very well, I worked nor­mally for the first part of the day but then I had to stop for a while. When I came back, svn and djan­go­dash web­site was not work­ing any­more. I ini­tially thought that it was some con­nec­tion issue but when I saw that other sites were work­ing prop­erly so they def­i­nitely had some problems.

(Con­tinue reading…)

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 :)

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…)