Peterbe.com

I currently live and work from home in Raleigh, North Carolina. Bing maps has a cool feature called "Bird's eye view".

UPDATE

I'm now back in London, England.

About a month ago I add a new feature to django-static that makes it possible to define a function that all files of django-static goes through.

First of all a quick recap. django-static is a Django plugin that you use from your templates to reference static media. django-static takes care of giving the file the optimum name for static serving and if applicable compresses the file by trimming all whitespace and what not. For more info, see The awesomest way possible to serve your static stuff in Django with Nginx

The new, popular, kid on the block for CDN (Content Delivery Network) is Amazon Cloudfront. It's a service sitting on top of the already proven Amazon S3 service which is a cloud file storage solution. What a CDN does is that it registers a domain for your resources such that with some DNS tricks, users of this resource URL download it from the geographically nearest server. So if you live in Sweden you might download myholiday.jpg from a server in Frankfurk and if you live in North Carolina, USA you might download the very same picture from Virgina, USA. That assures the that the distance to the resource is minimized. If you're not convinced or sure about how CDNs work check out THE best practice guide for faster webpages by Steve Sounders (it's number two)

A disadvantage with Amazon Cloudfront is that it's unable to negotiate with the client to compress downlodable resources with GZIP. GZIPping a resource is considered a bigger optimization win than using CDN. So, I continue to serve my static CSS and Javascript files from my Nginx but put all the images on Amazon Cloudfront. How to do this with django-static? Easy: add this to your settings:

DJANGO_STATIC = True
...other DJANGO_STATIC_... settings...
# equivalent of 'from cloudfront import file_proxy' in this PYTHONPATH
DJANGO_STATIC_FILE_PROXY = 'cloudfront.file_proxy'

Then you need to write that function that get's a chance to do something with every static resource that django-static prepares. Here's a naive first version:

# in cloudfront.py

conversion_map = {} # global variable
def file_proxy(uri, new=False, filepath=None, changed=False, **kwargs):
    if filepath and (new or changed):
        if filepath.lower().split('.')[-1] in ('jpg','gif','png'):
            conversion_map[uri] = _upload_to_cloudfront(filepath)
    return conversion_map.get(uri, uri)

Isn't it amazingly positive news that Warren Buffet and Melinda and Bill Gates have put up the $600 billion challenge which is "asking the nation's billionaires to pledge to give at least half their net worth to charity". And if you haven't already read about it, Warren Buffet pledges 99% of this company stock to charity. All good news but what's really interesting is reading peoples comments on the CNN page. A handful pick:

"Interesting article. It is saddening, however, to ponder just how much of this crowd's wealth was made through unfair business practices, worker exploitation, price fixing, etc. I suppose philanthropy on the back end is a nice afterthought, though, and certainly earns more praise from the public than would lessening their profit margins at the get-go."

"Pay their taxes first, then contribute with after tax money."

"If I may be cynical. Perhaps these super rich people should have done more for the people that worked for them so that they made more money and the leaders made a little less. Buffet owns companies that make goods in second and third world countries at some of the lowest possible wages."

"$1000 in the hands of ONE could be investment money. $1000 distributed $1 to ONE THOUSAND could get each a Coke (no fries)."

But also, there are some more "positive" comments:

"There is sooo much negativity in this country! I don't care what anyone of you says...Bill and Melinda came from Blue Collar....and now they are giving back and I think it's awesome!"

"I think what they are doing is very admirable. The Gates Foundation is the reason I was able to pay for college. People need to not criticize what they do with their money, at least they are trying to make a difference."

In conclusion from skimming the comments it's pretty obvious that people in the USA are angry and bitter. What is there to complain about? Really? Poor Obama, he's doing a great job but with all this resentment sizzling around it's going to be very hard if even "extreme philanthropy" gets butchered like this.

Yesterday I found out that Transport for London lifted all restrictions for commercial use of its data that it has made available for developers.

In lack of better imagination I decided to attack the Live Traffic Cameras data and whipped up this little app: tflcameras.peterbe.com

It basically shows a map of London and then shows all the spots where traffic cameras are installed so that you can click on them. The data is updated every 3 hours I think but I haven't checked that claim yet. Use this if you're a London commuter and want to check the traffic before you hit the road.

Oh, and this app uses the geo location stuff so that I know where to zoom in first. But if you're not based in London it zooms in over Trafalgar square by default.

At Euro DjangoCon I met lots of people and talked a lot about MongoDB as the backend. I even did a presentation on the subject which led to a lot of people asking me more questions about MongoDB.

I did mention to some people that one of the drawbacks of using MongoDB which doesn't have transactions is that you have to create and destroy the collections (like SQL tables) each time for every single test runs. I thought this was slow. It's not

Today I've been doing some more profiling and testing and debugging and I can conclude that it's not a problem. Creating the database has a slight delay but it's something you only have to do once and actually it's very fast. Here's how I tear down the collections in between each test:

class BaseTest(TestCase):

   def tearDown(self):
       for name in self.database.collection_names():
           if name not in ('system.indexes',):
               self.database.drop_collection(name)

For example, running test of one of my apps looks like this:

$ ./manage.py test myapp
...........lots.............
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 55 tests in 3.024s

So, don't fear writing lots of individual unit tests. MongoDB will not slow you down.

Having lived under a rock for a while I've managed to miss this great new feature in Gmail: Muting or ignoring conversions

From their help text:

"you've no doubt been subjected to the 'thread that just won't die!' If you're part of a long message conversation that isn't relevant, you can mute the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox."

That is such a smart feature. Interestingly I didn't even think there was a solution to that problem. I sure I have many times needed something like this. Now, let's hope I can remember to actually use this feature.

Straight from DjangoCon 2010 here in Berlin. Slides from my talk on "Using MongoDB in your Django app - implications and benefits" are available as a HTML5 web page so you'll need one of those fancy browsers like Chrome to be able to view it. Sorry.

django-mongokit is the project you want to use if you want to connect your Django project to your MongoDB database via the pymongo Python wrapper. An alternative (dare I say competing alternative) is MongoEngine which is bridge between Django and straight to pymongo. The immediate difference you notice is the syntax. django-mongokit looks like MongoKit syntax and MongoEngine looks like Django ORM. They both accomplish pretty much the same thing. So, which one is fastest?

First of all, remember this? where I showed how django-mongokit sped past the SQL ORM like a lightning bullet. Well appears MongoEngine is even faster.

That's an average of 23% faster for all three operations!

About 5 years ago Martijn Faasen wrote the wonderful blog article What is Pythonic. One thing that I feel is extremely Pythonic is to not compare certain thing to other things when Python has built-in understanding of what false or true means.

Having reviewed/read a lot of beginner code or senior code but of people coming from lower-level languages I often see this:

if variable == False:
...
if variable == 0:
...
if variable == None:
...
if len(variable) == 0:
...
if variable == []:
...
if variable == {}:
...
if ORM.filter(user=variable).count == 0:
...
if not bool(variable):
... 

To be Pythonic is to understand that Python evaluates all of these to false. All built in types have a perfectly sensible boolean operator which is automatically used in an if statement or an embedded if statement in a list comprehension. Keep it clean a pure just like this to check for true:

if not variable:
...
if not ORM.filter(user=variable):
...

And if you have your custom class such as the example just above with the pseudo "ORM" it's easy to extend it by writing your own custom __bool__ like this:

class MyCustomType(somebuiltintype):
   ...
   def __bool__(self):
       return self.somedate and self.somecondition

By playing along with Python just the way Guido indented it you can abstract yourself from being overly dependent of types. By doing the shorthand notation a variable that is otherwise a list can be None if it's not set and your code will continue to work.

All the above might not be true for more explicit lower-level languages like C++ but it sure is Pythonic in Python and that's a good thing.

The lovely people of Packt Publishing asked me to review Karen Tracey's latest book Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging.

I didn't actually read the book but rather skimmed it, apart from some selected parts and from what I read it's obvious that Karen has an ability to write to people who are not experts on the subject. Years of being a top contributor on the Django users mailing list must have something to do with it.

But here's the cracker. I didn't learn anything from this book (actually, I wasn't aware of the pp command in the pdb debugger). Is that a complaint about the book? No! It just means that the book was aimed at beginners and apparently I'm not a beginner any more. Great!

One thing I would have liked to see is more about testing strategy since this is something beginners often have problems with. I don't know if there even is such a word as "testing strategy" but I'm referring to the thinking behind what to test and more importantly sometimes what not to test. Beginners have a tendency to write tests for the most specific things and thus spending all their time assuring the most unrealistic scenarios are covered. Also, a lot of beginner tests I see check basic things like types which the semi-compiler will just automatically cover for you. Perhaps for a beginner, just getting some tests up and running this is a big step forward.

I'm a little bit disappointed that my lovely gorun wasn't mentioned in the book :) Perhaps the next version Karen?