Artful Code

I’m old enough that I remember when email happened on the local university’s VAX system or by dialing into some yahoo’s computer running Angelfire BBS with four phone lines.  I remember just how blazingly fast a 9600 baud modem seemed.  I’m even old enough to remember typing ATDT into Telix :).  Alright, I’m only 30, but even at my age I sometimes feel confounded by current trends and am just beginning to have that urge to shoo youngsters off my lawn.  Not that they are ever on my lawn.  They are generally at home, on MySpace or Facebook. Read more…

For the past few weeks I’ve been using the NetBeans (with the new Python module) as my primary IDE.  I generally use TextMate, which is more than an editor and less than the kitchen sink, lying somewhere between BBEdit and Emacs.  TextMate is fast and a pleasure to use, but lately I have found myself in need of something a little more robust. Read more…

Artful Code has a new look.  Well, not entirely new.  I didn’t write the theme or anything.  But I did migrate to WordPress because it’s a hell of a lot easier to maintain and I don’t have to write every new feature I want myself :).

If you notice anything that does not work, leave a comment and let me know!

Django’s cache is useful to speed up access to data from slow sources, such as a remote RSS feed. But if the remote source becomes inaccessible, the data disappears after the cache expires it. One solution is to store the data longer, but that can lead to stale data. Another solution is to keep two cached copies for differing lengths of time, but that can quickly eat up a lot of memory. Read more…

MySQL’s full-text search functions provide a simple framework for an easily implemented, approximate site search. Many sites, written in an interpreted language and powered by MySQL, can use MySQL’s full-text search to avoid third party dependencies. Read more…