Stupid Foot

I’ve been coding python for over two years now. I’ve mostly used it for console back end applications. Talking to Postgresql or Sqlite. I love Python. Before Python I was doing pretty much the same tasks with Perl. I’m not going to go into the Python vs Perl thing now but I will say that Python is a much, much more friendly language to use.

I got into Django with the 1.0 release. Developing with Django is fast. Crazy Fast. The Django ORM makes dealing with the database an extremely pleasant experience. Looking for a post with the slug ‘hey-i-am-the-post-you-are-looking-for’? Its as simple as Model.objects.get(’hey-i-am-the-post-you-are-looking-for’).

Django follows the DRY principle. Don’t Repeat Yourself. The thing that I miss the most when dealing with other web frameworks, like CakePHP is the lack of  get_absolute_url(). I love that there is just one place where you define the url structure to a type of object. Want to change all of the links to your posts from /posts/<slug> to /not-posts/<slug>? Easy, change the value of get_absolute_url() in the Posts model.

With Django you can go from an idea for a webapp to a fully functional site in an afternoon. Django’s ORM is great to use even if you are not going to be using Django to build a web site. If you have not, spend an afternoon with Django. Get cozy. Learn to love it.

If your computer claims to be tainted by Three Rings‘ game Puzzle Pirates then you can’t create a new account. There is an easy way to fix this.

1. Uninstall Puzzle Pirates.
2. Remove hash.dat.
3. Install Puzzle Pirates.
4. Create account.

I’m not sure where the file lives in Vista but in XP hash.dat is located in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\

I’ll post later why I needed to figure this out.

Everyone has seen the Game of Life. Last week there was a post on digg about a project that used it to produce text. This morning I’ve stumbled across someone who effectively turned the Game of Life into a dot matrix printer. It is the kind of project that I think is really neat but can’t come up with a practical use for it.

I was doing some research trying to decide how to price and promote the app I’m building for the iPhone and I came across this article. It points out the really obvious fact that if you are trying to do iPhone development full time then you need to charge enough for your app so that you can actually live on what money you do make.

It also points out that the current pricing structure of the app store is flawed. The article states that most if not all apps should be bumped up $10.00 in price, $0.99 apps becoming $9.99, $4.99 becoming $14.99. This is a very valid point, how can anyone expect to live on $0.70 a copy of their software? Don’t say they will make it up in volume because that is much harder than one would think.

I now need to sit down and figure out how much I should charge and make sure that I would actually be able to make money with what I’m planning.

I’ve had my macbook sense sometime around June of 2007. It’s was the first Mac that I’ve had that I actually used on a daily basis, before the macbook I had a G4 Cube I picked up off eBay to play with PPC OpenBSD so that doesn’t really count.

I can honestly say that I love my macbook. It is hands down the best computer I’ve ever owned. The only thing that I wish was different was the graphics chipset. I would love, I mean love to be able to play WoW and have it not run like crap.

In the year and change that I’ve had my macbook I’ve been ever more interested in learning to code for Mac OS. Now that the iPhone App Store is up and running and the SDK has had its NDA lifted I figured that I might as well try to cash in on the App Store Gold Mine.

I know Python, Perl PHP and bits and pieces of a few other languages but I have not touched C or C++ sense my 10th grade C++ course. I figured that it couldn’t be to hard to spin my Python knowledge of objects into C objects and decided that I should just dive right in.

I didn’t want to go it alone though. I spent a day or so looking on Amazon for Objective-C books and reading reviews. I finally decided on Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition). I’ve had the book for a few days now and am really enjoying it.

Skimming digg this morning I found a story discussing a visioning change to the Linux Kernel. Historically odd numbers were development versions and even numbers were stable. The 2.6 Kernel series has been out for five years now.

Greg KH posted a new naming scheme YEAR.NUMBER.MINOR_RELEASE. To me this seems silly. Referring to the kernel as 2.6.22 sounds better. 2.6 is a known stable version. I can see it being very confusing to people to call the kernel 2008-10 or 2008.2.1.

My wife, brother and I have been playing with Photoswap by Padadaz for a few days now and it is now one of the most used applications on my iPhone.

You take a picture and send it out. It is received by one and only one person. If they find it interesting they can directly reply to you with a picture of their own. Thats it.

I’ve personally had a ‘conversation’ last for over two hours, sending pictures of random toys in my office and getting random toys in return.