Skip to content

Reliably Broken

Grep template tag for Django

Nice and easy couple of Django template tags that filter lines of text using a regular expression. I had a block of text where I wanted to remove some of the lines but not others.

Read more →

July 15, 2009

The nature and purpose of AppleScript

An amusing sentence from the first chapter of AppleScript The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuberg:

Read more →

July 8, 2009

Casio versus Canon versus Fuji

I bought me a Casio Exilim EX-Z29 (lipgloss pink) to replace a four-year-old Canon Digital Ixus 50. The Canon in turn replaced a Fuji FinePix F40 or something.

Read more →

June 20, 2009

Tuples to dicts, toot sweet!

Looking through Trac’s search internals I came across a chunk where a list of tuples is converted to a list of dictionaries for the convenience of the template engine. Each tuple has five fields: href, title, date, author and excerpt.

Read more →

June 19, 2009

Installers: correlate of hate

The degree of hatefulness for a Mac installer often correlates to the degree of hatefulness for the software it installs. Adobe Creative Suite is this rule’s exemplar. And if you have a Blackberry mobile phone you may have had fun trying to get the PocketMac for Blackberry software working.

Read more →

June 18, 2009

Fiery RIPs, old-fashioned installation hate

Whether you buy from Canon or Xerox (or Epson or Konica Minolta, etc.), if you are buying a printer for heavy-duty use in a Mac design studio then it will probably have a Fiery RIP1 manufactured by Electronics For Imaging.

Read more →

June 10, 2009

os.walk and UnicodeDecodeError

My Python program was raising a UnicodeDecodeError when using os.walk to traverse a directory containing files and folders with UTF-8 encoded names. What had me baffled was the exact same program was working perfectly on the exact same hardware just minutes earlier.

Read more →

June 9, 2009

Django and time zone-aware date fields

Django makes it inordinately complicated to support time zone-aware dates and times because it has so far simply ignored the problem (so far being Django 1.0.2).

Read more →

June 7, 2009

Installer sympathy for Linux

Nice to see the installation process on Linux can be as misguided as it is on Mac OS X.

Read more →

May 31, 2009

Adobe AIR installer, a hateful tradition

Tweetdeck seems to be the path of least resistance for a desktop Twitter client on Mac OS X 10.4 (there are other free Mac desktop clients, Nambu and Tweetie but unfortunately they both require 10.5).

Read more →

May 23, 2009