Thinking about it

Category: programming

  • AI

    I’ve decided to use the free time I have to learn more about AI. I had taken the Andrew Ng ML course a long time ago so I know what some of the words mean but I wanted to also have a better understanding of the things people are actually doing now. First, I wanted…

  • Django CRUD and Angular.js

    In the post on Simple Django Class based CRUD views the focus was on setting up simple views with ModelForms to build all the CRUD views for a Model. I have been playing around a bit with Angular.js and wanted to see if I could link the two up. A word of caution. I really…

  • Simple Django Class based CRUD views

    Class based CRUD views in django have been around for a while, but I haven’t been using them because every time I tried I ended up with more code that seemed no better than the old way. I just started a small project from scratch and decided to give it a go again. The basic…

  • Flattening the Backbone.js Learning Curve

    I just spent some time getting into Backbone.js finally.  The learning curve was a little steeper than I expected, mostly because I think I expected Backbone.js to be something that it is not. From the docs: Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions,views with…

  • Coder’s Block

    I have tried before to write about what makes programming hard. I’m not really happy with that post or the followup. I still believe that Complexity in all forms is the biggest problem thought its not the only one. Sometimes designing an algorithm can be really challenging even for something which feels pretty simple. Same goes…

  • Accessing the Child Class In Django Multi-Table Inheritance

    Django has 3 different ways to deal with model inheritance: Abstract base classes Multi-table inheritance Proxy models The differences are described pretty well in the linked documentation so I am not going to recapitulate them here. I just want to talk about a specific pattern I have been playing with for Multi-table inheritance. In Multi-table…

  • No Virgina, there is no such thing as Write Once Run Anywhere

    I think the first time I heard “Write Once Run Anywhere” was the uscd-p system pascal. From Wikipedia: UCSD p-System achieved machine independence by defining a virtual machine, UCSD p-System began around 1974 as the idea of UCSD’s Kenneth Bowles[1], who believed that the number of new computing platforms coming out at the time would make it…

  • Django Logging Setup

    Post 1.3, Django has some nice integration with the python logging module. It can dictConf to specify the formatters, handlers, etc. This is all pretty well documented here. What wasn’t immediately obvious (to me anyway) was that you can use any of the handlers in django logging and pass the __init__ params to them in this config. So for…

  • PySide + PyInstaller = Joy

    I have a small project to make a pretty simple windows GUI executable. In the past I have always used wxpython + py2exe for this kind of thing but decided to try something new. After some poking around I settled on PySide which is the bindings for QT from Nokia. Its nice. Seems a little…

  • Email only Signup

    One of the things that bugs me about the web is having to create logins everywhere. There are lots of attempts to deal with this problem (OpenID, Facebook Connect, 1Password) etc. but they all seem to have problem or require me to do things like: Use only sites that implement them Copy and paste stuff…