Coder’s Eye

I’m so pleased by how useful and concise jQuery has been for my development of a dynamic FAQ module for Drupal. I can’t share that module yet, but I can talk about the jQuery that gives it a snappy and useful facelift.
It isn’t original, of course. Just click-to-toggle questions on a faq page. […]

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Developing sites for clients involves a lot of heavy CSS work for me.

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I keep needing to do this, darn it! I leave a project for a few months, possibly push it live, and then I go back to fire up the dev server but I simply cannot remember the password I used for admin during development.Why don’t I use my stupid-development-password? I don’t know, but this seems to happen with some regularity.Luckily, it is trivial to fix with a few lines at the python commandline.Deep:/opt/webapps/invisible bruce$ ./manage.py shell 20:49:14 DEBUG root: loaded from /Volumes/Shoebox/Users/bruce/.logging.invisible.conf20:49:14 DEBUG settings: DEVELOPMENT MODE20:49:14 DEBUG settings: DEVELOPMENT MODE2007-02-16 20:49:15,610 - root - DEBUG - loaded basic config20:49:15 DEBUG root: loaded basic configPython 2.5 (r25:51918, Sep 19 2006, 08:49:13) Type “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.IPython 0.7.2 — An enhanced Interactive Python.? -> Introduction to IPython’s features.%magic -> Information about IPython’s ‘magic’ % functions.help -> Python’s own help system.object? -> Details about ‘object’. ?object also works, ??

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I’m continuing to enjoy working with jQuery.

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I just got my beautiful new color laser printer from Dell. I did a lot of research, and I really think Dell’s CN3100 is the best color laser under $400 (if you buy it from delloutlet.com).

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I’ve always disliked having to write __repr__ methods for my classes. In Django, it is especially important, since the admin pages use that method to give you Python is moderately unusual in that it allows classes to have multiple inheritance.

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Finding this technique took more time than I thought it should, so I thought I’d share a quick and simple music transcoding tip.Converting WMA to MP31) Get mplayer and lame installed.

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Yet another great use for Django is to make trivial the creation of shared tables & forms for internal projects.

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This is just a quick post to confirm that Django does indeed work perfectly on Rimuhosting with very little effort required to set up. It is fast, it connected to my Mysql db without a peep of a complaint, and it is making me a happy developer.
Setup details
I’m using Rimu’s “MiroVPS3″ plan. It […]

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The situation was that my wrists and fingers hurt almost all the time, and it was clearly due to computer use.I decided to do some real research with the intent to follow up by adopting a new scheme for interfacing with my computer…. I was willing to learn new keyboarding skills, even to the point of learning to chord-type.Searching for the Ergonomic Holy GrailMy solution constraints: must be possible to use for the medium-term future…. should be programmer-friendly What I came up with: retrain from qwerty to dvorak typing vary posture get a zero-force touchtyping keyboard with an integrated mouse I knew it was going to be difficult to change my keyboarding habits…. With a QWERTY layout, one can only type about 10% of the words in the English language without leaving the home row…. For example, the home row for the left hand has all the vowels, with only “Y” requiring any finger stretching, and that is with your strongest finger, the index. The right hand has “DHTNS”, which makes many word startings-and-endings immediately accesible.Here are the steps I took to switch: Bought Dvorak key labels for all three of the keyboards I use at the houseIt took about two weeks of mental pain before it “clicked” and I regained any real ability to touch type…. The stick was that I really hate wrist pain and I honestly believed the ergonomics would help (even if only marginally) decrease my pain…. I can’t honestly say how much the Dvorak has played a part in this wonderful change, since I changed a few other aspects of my approach to computer interaction at the same time…. Changing layouts allowed me to relearn some other aspects of data input, which would have been difficult to address in isolation.I am now a somewhat faster typist than I was before, and I have not lost my QWERTY skills.

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