Author Archives
23
Jul 10
href.be services ported to GAE
The short URL service at http://href.be/ now runs on Google App Engine. It uses the latest version of Django and thanks to the App Engine it uses BigTable as its storage backend. This migration will surely result in a better availability and responsiveness of the service! While we’re at it, I’ve also published a PHP [...]
22
Jul 10
href.be tools
Just pushed some tools to the Python Package Index to integrate the http://href.be/ short URL service with your Python and/or Django software: python-href django-href Also, the service API now offers click statistics for your shortened URL’s, so you can keep track of your outgoing links. In case you have any suggestions, remarks or bugs regarding [...]
22
Jul 10
Python ternary operator
Python has no ternary operator, or has it? At least not directly, we had a discussion about possible solutions in the #python IRC channel on FreeNode and after some filddling I came up with this hack abusing the Python slicing magic: class Ternary(object): ''' Ternary-ish emulation, it looks like C-style ternary operator:: x = a [...]
13
Jul 10
We’re in this together
A song by Nine Inch Nails, called We’re In This Together. It reminds me of current times, so this one is for my lovely fiancé: I've become impossible Holding on to when When everything seemed to matter more The two of us All used and beaten up Watching fate as it flow down the path [...]
3
Jun 10
Django chroot, securing your web application hosting
For me the best way to run Django applications has proven to be mod_wsgi and Apache. This setup allows for scalable application pools to run as a seperate process, featuring threading and extra privilege separation, which is great. To make your application even more hardened, you can use the mod_wsgi chroot feature, as discussed in [...]
27
May 10
Slicing an ext3 disk for Time Machine
Since a while I wanted to upgrade my Mac to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, but I never got around to do it because I needed disk space for my backup first. I have a 1TB USB2 disk containing data, but I didn’t want to wipe the disk contents. There was about 400GB of data on [...]