Import from blog.cottee.org
> I hate Dell with a loathing that is hard to put into words. Nevertheless, I now have a Dell laptop. I love screen space and this 15” monitor has a 1920×1050 screen. Portable (it’s bigger but lighter than my MBP) and with a great screen resolution it’s great for developing. Build wise it sucks. A lot of keyboard flex which doesn’t bother me but doesn’t say much about quality. The surround around the screen is also very flexible. It…
> I have only had to shout down the phone twice in my life. Once was in 2005’ish I believe. The other time was this week. Both times were to Dell, although the first time was to technical support and this time was to sales support. It’s somewhat encouraging to know that their sales support is as bad as their technical support. I assume their presales support is better otherwise they wouldn’t sell anything. So here’s the story. One of…
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> Hello. I’m not dead yet, although the current quantity of phlegm etc must suggest otherwise. As I can’t sleep and as I have just reinstalled one of my laptops AGAIN I thought I’d take the opportunity to offer some comparisons of the different machines I’m running and how they compare. There are currently five machines I use daily. Three of them are portable (yes, I’ve been carrying them all backwards and forwards to the office) and two of them…
>This is a little embarrassing. You may remember this. Well, I now have one of the new model MacBook Pro’s. 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB 1066Mz DDR3 SDRM-2x2GB 320GB Serial ATA @ 7200 SuperDrive 8X DL Mini DisplayPort – DVI Adapter N0 VGA Adapter No Modem No Remote No iWork Preinstalled No Final Cut Exp Preinstalled No Aperture Preinstalled No Logic Exp Preinstalled KYBD/User’s Guide -B Country Kit-GBR What happened to the old one? Well there was an ……
>We have a cat. For people who know us this may be a surprise. I love cats and Akemi doesn’t. I also am/was allergic to cats. But we now have one. We had a holiday in Normandy in August and I noticed then I wasn’t sneezing when playing with the landlady’s cat. So far I’ve not sneezed once since Calvados came home (or even when I visited the cat home). Alisa loved playing with the cat in Normandy and as…
>I don’t normally blog cartoons but this one made me pause for thought and laugh.
>A post in two parts. First of all – thanks to Magus on #django for pointing out one of my errors to me. I’ve been working through Practical Django Projects over the last couple of days and it talks about having named urls. Take a look at these three one liners: # from urls.links.py (r’^$’, ‘archive_index’,link_info_dict, ‘coltrane_link_archive_index’), # from urls.py (r’^weblog/links/’, include(‘coltrane.urls.links’)),# In my template I get the url using {% url coltrane_link_archive_index %} We give our view a name…
>Practical Django Projects (Chapter three), talks about defining an admin interface which is all well and good unless you’re using the NewForms Admin branch (which is intended to become part of Release 1.0). So if you’re an early adopter or reading this after the big change, you’ll be needing to do the following. The reason I bothered writing this was I couldn’t work out how to override the fact that FlatPage had already registered a ModelAdmin (try to register yours…
>I’ve run into a number of problems recently with dealing with old databases of ours which are encoded with LATIN1. Now, with postgres 8.3 (maybe before) you’ll get a message if you try to create LATIN1 saying something like createdb: database creation failed: ERROR: encoding LATIN1 does not match server’s locale en_US.UTF-8DETAIL: The server’s LC_CTYPE setting requires encoding UTF8. I got bored trying to work out why – it seems to be that postgres now prevents what it shouldn’t have…