Category: Development

jQuery Sparklines and flot

In the past few months, I came across these two jQuery-based plug-ins that use the canvas (or VML, in the case of IE) capabilities of modern browsers to draw charts and graphs. Both seem like they might have legitimate uses, and are definitely fun to play around with. Sparklines provides small inline charts, whereas flot is much more sophisticated and can produce full graphs with zoom functionality.

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Django, MySQL & UTF-8

Last week I finally decided to switch my hosting service from MediaTemple to SliceHost. I have been postponing this move for almost a year, since I simply didn’t have the time to redeploy ten separate domains and move all their e-mail accounts. But, in a moment of foolishness, I cancelled my MediaTemple account and opened a brand new SliceHost one with Ubuntu 8.04 - little did I know what I was getting myself into…

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Slicing A List Into Equal Groups in Python

There are several ways to do this, but I found out today that it’s possible to use itertools’ izip method to achieve the same effect as well, so I thought I would note it down here to reference later.

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SmartyPants in Django Templates

John Gruber’s SmartyPants script is a great tool for converting a body of text into a more typographically correct and visually appealing version. Chad Miller’s Python port makes it really easy to implement this functionality as a template tag, but I wanted to take it a step further and use SmartyPants as a Markdown pre-processor, just as I did with Pygments.

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Python 3.0 Released

So Python 3.0 is finally out. I have already gone over the What’s New document, but I’ll need to do a few more readings before I grasp every change. I am curious to see how this will affect the Django release schedules.

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