In my current development house, we have the painfully obvious “different settings for different stages of the development cycle.”  Production, obviously, isn’t in DEBUG mode so users don’t see the underlying technology when things go awry, and each dev has his own database.   The solution we’ve found is to create separate settings files with only ( Read more... )

The older stories run on a version of Narrator written in ruby. Yowlers runs on Django, which has slightly different requirements, so the link was borked for a while. I’ve fixed it.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

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I need to make clear that I did not invent the code below. I’m not sure who did, but the topic of making vi’s “paren bounce” feature work in Emacs came up in a conversation I had the other day, and I’m posting the chunk of code that’s lived in my .emacs file since, oh heck, must have been back in my days at F5 Networks.  This code creates a new ( Read more... )

This is probably a “no-duh” to some people, but I had not known this. When you upload something to the CDN, you get a url that looks like this:

http://cdn.mycompany.com/images/someimage.jpg
Which is all fine and good. Django’s MEDIA_URL is usually suffixed with a closing ( Read more... )

Who knows? I might make it by Friday after all:

It was easy then. Remove his infectious code, pull up the registry and edit out all the brutal redirects from his remotes, along with shutdown codes that prevent legitimate anti-malware from running.

The penguin doesn’t care about any of that. To me, all of that’s just bits and bytes, and tromping ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago, I installed the latest version of the Gnome Accessibility Toolkit (Gnome-AT), and while I never quite got it to work the way I wanted to, it didn’t seem to be doing any harm.  I figured once I got to the point of showing the client the work we’d talk about accessibility issues.  (Many of her clients have low vision problems, so ( Read more... )

Functional. Elegant. Foolproof. Pick two.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

No great announcements, just a few writerly things I saw today:

#1: Regarding my recent reviews of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Jo Waltonnails my opinion to the floor:

The techniques of writing and reading [science fiction] have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel-because they are ( Read more... )

In case you missed it, I’ve posted a new story in the Bastet series: Bath Night, which brings us to the most recent decade and a riff on something I read during the Iraq war.

If you’re a fan of the Singularity, here are two stories told from opposite sides of the fence: Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler is an early, and hopeful, depiction of the ( Read more... )