Joy to the World! DreamHost just started to offer MySQL/InnoDB! Finally we can do transactions. Just three weeks ago they "didn’t have any plans."
Wording of the news is kind of strange: "we now offer InnoDB support on all new MySQL databases anybody adds from our web panel." It turned out I cannot change my existing databases. Oh, well. I can copy them.
Today I learned that this blog is ranked 775,745 by Technorati ! It means that only 775,744 blogs are better than mine. Eat my dust you two nameless losers!
I pledge to continue my standards of excellence and to grow my rank to at least 1,000,000. As a matter of fact I did almost everything I could for that. Now I have to find 224,255 people to join Technorati with their blogs… Damn this Technorati pyramid scheme!
I was able to spend several hours this week to work on upcoming OpenWrt GUI. I use Dojo as a foundation. At this point I coded a skeleton, which works as a proof of concept. As soon as I finish putting in AJAX guts, I’ll switch to meaty functionality. Add some nice skin to it and we have our homunculus up and running.
Huh? AJAX? No, it’s not Ajax the detergent . No, I didn’t mean Ajax the pro soccer club . "Now I clearly remember that AJAX is a Trojan, and I don’t like Trojans and viruses" — clever, but no. Go see the movie about Greek heroes and the Wooden Horse. And let’s skip "Trojan" discussion altogether — I’m trying to be PG-13 rated.
Once again, let’s grab new version of TinyMCE .
I am running new Django cache code now. If you notice any problems with it (e.g., error messages), please drop me a line at once.
My email is at the bottom of the page.
For a long time I wanted to have two TinyMCE toolbars for Django Admin:
It finally happened. Spocke (the main developer of TinyMCE) helped me to figure out how to do it. I updated my article in Django Wiki with new config file, and removed my notes about space problem (new config file solves it) and flickering (new TinyMCE 2.0 RC2 works perfectly).
In my previous post I complained about annoying flickering. Well, I’ve upgraded to TinyMCE 2.0 RC2 and it doesn’t flicker anymore! Run, don’t walk, and upgrade immediatelly!
Finally I bit the bullet and decided to implement OpenWrt web-based user interface using Felix Fietkau ’s code. Well, MIPS processors used by OpenWrt units are not race horses and GUI is slow to my taste. Yes, I know that stock firmware is not faster. "Slow" is absolute category for me.
How do we combat latencies and slow network speed? Exactly. We can apply the same for OpenWrt, where "slow network speed" is replaced with "slow processor on local network". So I decided to do The Right Thing(tm) and implement it using AJAX approach. I will use Dojo .
Hurricane Rita was donwgraded to Category 3 storm (125mph/200kph winds). Here in Dallas we expect heavy rains for 2+ days.
Sunset was very colorful today. I tried to capture it in this picture:
You can find bigger picture on Flickr .
Update: "The Simple Way" part of this tutorial is obsolete now. I am going to recreate examples using new improved RSS framework. Stay tuned!
I was asked several times to explain how I did RSS for my site. Django has RSS framework, which is not documented. Most probably I am not the right guy to explain it but I’ll try.
There are three ways to implement RSS with Django:
If you look into Django’s code, you will find several files related to RSS:
After some requests I decided to publish my code for categories. It’s very simple. It was inspired by following articles: A "category" Data Model (note: this article uses old-style model format, it doesn’t work anymore) and Relating an object to itself, many-to-one .
from django.core import meta
class Category(meta.Model):
"""
Category defines following fields:
name - simple name of category, e.g., 'C++'
full_name - full name of category, which includes names of all parents,
e.g. 'Development::C++'
parent - reference to parent category or null
description - HTML description of category, or null
Notes:
1) full_name is not editable. It is calculated automatically
by calculate_full_name() method during save phase (hook _pre_save).
2) Separator specified by get_separator() method. It can be
overridden in subclasses.
"""
name = meta.CharField(maxlength=50)
full_name = meta.CharField(maxlength=250, unique=True,
editable=False)
parent = meta.ForeignKey('self', blank=True, null=True,
related_name='child')
description = meta.TextField(blank=True, null=True,
help_text="Use raw HTML.")
class META:
verbose_name_plural = 'Categories'
module_name = verbose_name_plural.lower()
admin = meta.Admin(
list_display = ('full_name',),
search_fields = ['full_name',],
js = (
'/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js',
'/appmedia/admin/js/textareas.js',
),
)
ordering = ('full_name',)
def __repr__(self):
return self.full_name
def _pre_save(self):
self.full_name = self.calculate_full_name()
def get_separator(self):
return '::'
# note: used in templates
def get_all_children(self):
"get list of all children of the category"
output = []
children = self.get_child_list()
for c in children:
output.append(c)
output.extend(c.get_all_children())
return output
# note: the last object of the list is the category itself
# note: used in templates
def get_all_parents(self):
"get list of all parents of the category from top level parent down"
id_list = []
object = self
while True:
id_list.append(object)
if not object.parent_id:
break
object = object.get_parent()
id_list.reverse()
return id_list
# note: used in templates
def calculate_full_name(self):
"calculate full name from parent list"
return self.get_separator().join([x.name for x in self.get_all_parents()])
# note: used in templates
def get_path(self):
"get relative path of the category"
return 'categories/%d/' % self.id
As you can see it is very simple. This model defines full_name field, which is auto-populated. I was toying with an idea to keep parent_name and produce full_name by concatenating parent_name with name. But after some trials I decided against it: it introduced a lot of complexities and runtime overhead by saving a few bytes in database. In my opinion it doesn’t worth it. This model defines some convenience methods as well. They are meant to be used in templates.
Finally we have official Django badges . Wilson Miner did a great job putting them together. I decided to use this one:
How do you like it?
If you are a fan of 80 by 15 pixels badges, don’t fret — Dave Hodder has you covered with his rendition of "Made with Django" theme. Collection of his small badges are attached to ticket #509 . Check it out too.
Today is the day of new releases: OpenWrt just released new White Russian RC3 .
BTW, contrary to popular belief, it’s not just for Linksys WRT54G . You can run it too, if you have supported hardware . I run it on Buffalo WBR2-G54 .
Wow, they move fast! Go and grab Tiny MCE 2.0RC2 .
Finally I added RSS 2.0 using Django’s facilities.
Default RSS feed is for my blog. Categories have two versions of RSS feed: exclusively for documents of the category, and documents for the category and its children. (I hope it is not news anymore: I have hierarchical categories.)
Update: InnoDB is in the house !
In my previous post I already complained about lack of transaction support by DreamHost. The only database option is MySQL with InnoDB engine, which doesn’t support transactions. Everybody knows that transactions are nice. So what about MySQL/InnoDB or PostgreSQL?
So I hit DreamHost forums and found several posts from DreamHost people about PostgreSQL and InnoDB:
So I’ve got the impression that PostgreSQL is out for now, but MySQL/InnoDB is really close to be implemented and offered to customers. I decided to ask the support directly and got two firm answers: MySQL/InnoDB — No, PostgreSQL — No. They don’t have any plans to introduce them.Why? No reasons were given. Obviously "it could change" over time. But for the last several years it didn’t.
Now this blog runs on sql:. I use MySQL as my backend. Before that I tested it locally with SQLite
(so easy to install!) and MySQL.
I learned today that MySQL, which is provided by my host (DreamHost ), uses MyISAM for all tables. MyISAM doesn’t support transactions. AT home I use InnoDB, which supports transactions. However the hope is not lost — DreamHost mulls over InnoDB support. But as far as I know, they don’t have an implementation schedule yet.
This site was running using locmem: caching option, which is fine for small web site. Now it runs using file:. Please let me know, if you spot any issues.
I am planning to implement sql: next.
TinyMCE 2.0RC1 is out. Take it while it’s hot! I’ve upgraded my admin pages and it looks better than previous one (duh!).
Nevertheless I see annoying flickering in FireFox. But it flickers less now.
I am not talking about multithreading problems. locmem: doesn’t have them. But it does have problems with gzip. Sometimes I see binary stuff on my screen. It looks like a gzipped web page without proper gzip encoding flag. I don’t do anything related to compression in my cache.
Is it a bug in Django’s caching? Hmm… Apparently it works properly with memcache. Can it be some bug in simple: implementation, which was a base for locmem:? Weird.