Category Archives: Code

Custom tags for node links in Drupal 6

In this post I’m going to try and explain how to add custom tags that link to node pages to a Drupal 6 input format. That probably sounds a bit far-fetched, so I’ll attempt to clarify by using my own project as an example.
last.fm has this nifty feature where you can write [artist]Meshuggah[/artist] and it’ll [...]

Fixing lousy introspection support in Python DB APIs (partially)

For my internship at Think Wize, I’ve been working on a custom Django management command that compares the current model definitions (models.py) and the current database schema, and tries to spot the differences. I’ve called it checkdb. Optionally it can also attempt to fix them, with checkdb –fix.
syncdb is not agile
Django’s syncdb management command, used [...]

Apache rewrite rules are almost as horrid as XSLT

It’s time for a rant. I haven’t posted in a while because I haven’t been doing much that might be of interest to anyone, in terms of coding. Apart from my internship, perhaps; I’m working at Think Wize, a company based around Django, for six weeks. They are hoping to set up a continuous integration [...]

Capturing the mouse with jQuery

I’ve been working on a Javascript-driven Django application pretty much non-stop for the last week or so. I’ll leave my experiences with the Django framework for another post1. There’s more than twice as much Javascript code in this application than there is Python code, so I can’t really claim that I know Django yet, to [...]

Scoped mixins

A while ago I read one of Peter Harkins’s posts about open classes in Ruby, and how insanely awesome and useful they are. As you can probably tell, I wholeheartedly agree. Open classes are just one of those things that make me choose Ruby over pretty much anything else, whenever I get the chance to [...]

define_method and argument semantics

define_method is an odd creature. Paul Gross’s post about its unusual behaviour inspired me to do some research. I even went and browsed through Ruby’s source to attempt to understand it, but that turned out to be unnecessary: I reimplemented it in pure1 Ruby. In this post, I’m going to try and explain why [...]

Javascript arrays smell

Last night I was writing some Javascript for a Django1 application I’ve been working on. I was discussing some of Javascript’s quirks on IRC with someone else who was also scripting.
He wanted to know what happens when you add both values indexed by number, and values indexed by strings (e.g. expando properties – no, I’m [...]

Merb is getting merged into Rails 3! Hell yes!

Rails is an MVC web development framework for Ruby. Rails is awesome and magical! Rails helps speed up development, and it’s just a lot of fun to use because it takes care of all the stuff that is annoying about developing web applications. Most of it, anyways.
Merb is an MVC web development framework for Ruby. [...]

Prime Factorisation

Project Euler rocks. Someone showed me what it was all about a few days ago. Basically it’s a collection of questions that can be answered with an integer. The idea is to write efficient algorithms to calculate this answer in the programming language of your choice. My choice should be obvious by now
Anyway, [...]

Deep Thought

puts !?*?!?#:%%%+%?%#{”%c”%(?/+?@)}?%?”+%#!#*(?)-?()#”
Look at this baby. Try and feed it to Ruby and be amazed. My syntax highlighter can’t even handle it
Mikoangelo from #ruby-lang crafted it in a good five minutes, and it took me about five times longer to decipher it again I’ll break it down now, because, well, I have [...]