I was cruising through my RSS feeds when I ran across this snippet on Daring Fireball. Specifically, it was a link to this article about how Apple is dealing with the fact that it rejected several authors applications, saying:

Apparently, Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings:

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE

You know, I think Apple is a very innovative company, but it has this nasty habit of shooting itself in the foot. If they’d only embrace the community of developers, they’d rule the cell phone world. But no, they can’t do that. They insist on silencing criticism instead of realizing that this outcome is entirely of their own choosing. I was contemplating getting an iPhone when my contract was up. I think I’ll be choosing something else. This is the first time I can honestly say that I’m disappointed to own a Mac.

I was browsing around this morning catching up on a few things and ran across James Bennett’s presentation at DjangoCon on writing reusable applications. Very nice! A video of the talk is also posted on YouTube.

If you’ve been watching the django-developers list, you might have seen references to “I want a pony”. Looks like James responded in his own way… scroll down to the bottom and check out his Pony Powered site! :-)

Now that I’ve started to spend some time on my site capturing links and other tidbits, I’m realizing that my sidebar needs to be wider. There simply isn’t much room over there. I bumped the font size down by a pixel—any more than that and it doesn’t look decent. But frankly, I may revert that as well. I think I’m going to have to expand the area, and then I need to revisit how that affects the width of my code blocks. It might be worth the trade-off though.

There are many little tools/tricks/snippets of information that I use all the time. So I tried to capture these on a page here on my site: Snippets of Useful Information and Tools. I’ve only got a few of them up right now, but they’re the most useful ones, IMHO.

I’ve got this artistic streak in me that I’ve been figuring out how to channel for a while. I’d love to play music—and I still might give it a try, but I never played an instrument as a child. It feels like it would be an uphill battle. I like to draw, but stink at that. I love graphic design, but I’m not very good at that either and feel like I’d need formal training to really get there. So, after watching the Strobist guys for a year learning so much and seeing how many of them have developed, I decided to give photography a whirl.

Continue reading Trying my hand at photography…

As I mentioned earlier in the year, I got tired of Wordpress and it fighting me with posting code. So here’s the new site, rewritten using Django, Pygments, Python-Markdown, Static Generator, and the Django Basic Apps (just the blog portion). I also wanted the site to be more friendly presenting code, so I changed the main column to be wide enough to avoid having to excessively wrap the lines.

It took me much longer to write the HTML and CSS than anything else—and I still have more that I want to tweak! It also took considerable time trying to figure out a useful IT setup. As you can see by now, I’ve moved the site off of an old box in a corner to a VPS managed by SliceHost. I really like their setup, and if you want to use Django, then SuperJared has some wonderful tools and tips. In the end, I chose to use Nginx and a fastcgi backend for the blog. I was really hoping for an alternative to Gallery2, but I couldn’t find anything that worked the way I wanted and looked halfway decent.

I intend to make the code that drives this site open source. I haven’t quite figured out what my plans are on that front. I may end up hosting my own Trac instance, or using something like Launchpad. I have several projects I’d like to push out there though.

Oh, and I’ve revisited my comments policy and a colleague has all but convinced me to enable them. However, Django’s comments system was changed at the last minute, so I’m going to wait it out a little while longer while django-comment-utils catches up. Besides that, I need to style the comment forms and such.

I’ve done my best to preserve everything, and even went back and corrected a couple broken links in the original articles. I hope you enjoy the new site!

..since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been in the process of rewriting my site. I’m tired of Wordpress, tired of escaping code, tired of futzing with code to make it readable, and basically tired of Wordpress working against me rather than with me. So I took a look at other blogging systems… and none of them had all the characteristics that I wanted. So I’ve been busy in background developing my own using Django. This will allow me to write code in blogs much easier, and I didn’t have to jump through the pain of trying to design my own Wordpress template.

The other big change I’m going to make is moving this site to a hosting provider. This site is run out of a box in the corner on a machine that’s a number of years old… it’s definitely on it’s last legs. I’ve purchased a slice from Slicehost, and hope to be moving this site there in the not too distant future. I’m going to do my best to try and not break the RSS feeds… but I can’t make any guarantees.