Month: January 2006

Dean’s mini is finally ready. He’s called it BigBad. Have a look at this video and turn your speakers up all the way cause this little thing absolutely screams.

British photo ID
actually ends up decreasing security abroad. British citizens are able to watch CCTV live from their lounge room – privacy has gone completely out the window. How do you know people won’t use this to track people and then rob them (in the places where the cameras don’t go – and they know everywhere where the camera goes). It also sounds like a boon for drug dealers, see the cops approaching!

A realm has finally opened the gates to AQ I believe. This post sums up their experiences up to it.

Visualise Regular Expressions.

Is anyone else watching this? Its insane. Check it out on 6pm weekday’s on SBS, its a huge rally across Africa. Its got bikes, cars and these huge trucks like giant lorries that tip over all the time and have to get dug out of the sand. The teams help each other out and frequently have to dig out of trouble. The bikes are the craziest, they shake wildly through the crazy terrain.

An Australian died a couple of days ago. It was very sad. I hope it doesn’t stop this race its cool.

Try and change the netmask of a computer overseas. It leads to much pain and waking up at 3am to ring the states.

That’s awesome.

I recently developed an application in django. Django is a full featured web framework for python, including ORM, automatic admin interface, URL mapper, template and caching systems. Basically if you want to write a blog, or a web forum, or an online poll you will find django to be an incredibly efficient and speedy way to develop. I wrote a survey framework and felt incredibly efficient despite learning the language (and as I was working on the cvs version it was changing on me constantly).

The best thing about django is its ORM. I admit I haven’t used many other ORM solutions but the sheer elegance of the code you get out of it is incredible. I used to spend literally hours typing away php objects that would map to select statements from a database, with django I never felt the need to write a single piece of SQL (or even think in terms of tables). I’m sure its pretty much hands down the most inefficient way of handling large databases with a large number of joins, but for small versatile websites it is perfect.

The template language was slightly disappointing in that it is very much geared towards non-programmers. It strongly inherits the idea from HTML that a page is a single definite entity which is very rarely true in dynamic web apps. How often is it that you use the way a blog entry is displayed or a forum post only once? To some extent you can get around this limitation by pushing most of the format into CSS, but CSS just isn’t there yet to not have some kind of template system where the templates are modules that can call one another.

Python as a web langauge works beautifully. Its like very much like PHP but the language is inherantly more secure and the django constructs are consistent and mostly easy to use. The django debugger is an incredible tool.

Finally caveat is that this runs on mod_python under apache2, and apache2 is still a bit of a dark horse even after years of development. I still tend to stick to apache1 if I can, but this implementation is definately worth it. Have a look at the project if only for interest to question the PHP methodology – it opened my eyes a lot at how far web development has yet to come. Also be on the lookout for the suite of apps they intend to develop, I wouldn’t be surprised if they spring up very quickly indeed.

If your MBR is wiped out the easiest solution is to re-install grub. If you have a “rescue” disk this may be simple, but in my experience it almost never is. The solution is to install boot with knoppix, mount your root partition and mount the /dev/ and /proc/ directories inside the chroot. Depending on your partition structure, if /boot/ is a separate partition you’ll need to mount that inside as well.

Warning: Don’t enter any of these commands unless you know what you are doing

mv /mnt/hda1/dev /mnt/hda1/dev.backup
mkdir /mnt/hda1/dev
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/hda1/dev
mkdir /mnt/hda1/proc
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/hda1/proc
chroot /mnt/hda1
grub-install /dev/hda

Bob is, quite literally, your uncle.

If you use Debian as much as I do you may have been searching for a utility or function with apt and dpkg that can tell you which package provides a particular file. The utility is called apt-file and it is an absolute life saver. It is not part of the apt system, it caches package file listings.