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Twitter Mailing Functionality
8.4.2009

I had to jump on the Twitter bandwagon to enter a contest and must admit - I'm quite frustrated with the features that are present. Twitter seems to be mostly SMS driven in a world of emerging (and free!... with data plan) PUSH email. Therefore, since I refuse to pay extra for SMS, I must log in to check for @reply's to my tweets. Also, I can't just send a quick email update to Twitter on my mobile device, but rather have to log into their web interface on my painfully slow mobile device.

Anyway - I have started ...

2 comments
Stylesheets
31.3.2009

Ok, I get it. The site needs more color. I had a decent older design, but I decided it was time for some housekeeping during the server move. Thankfully, the guys at merge may have motivated me. I feel like I have dedicated enough time to learning the nuances of django, and now it's time to work on the fsckd UI a bit more.

Anyway, I spent some time in a photo shoot tonight trying to with merge's give a shirt contest, and thought I would share the results.

3 comments
High Altitude Weather Ballooning
31.3.2009

I just finished up a weather balloon project over the weekend. Here are some pictures of the launch and subsequent recovery.

The goal was to measure atmospheric gravity waves by using direction tubes and thermistors to detect pressure differences between the two openings of the tube. Our apparatus measures the associated temperature fluctuation, and logs ADC readings to a CF card every half second. In order to compensate for balloon rotation, we stuck a HMC6352 digital compass in the payload as well.

Our data logging system was composed centered around a TS-7200 from Technologic Systems. We opted for the add-on ...

no comments
Captcha
29.3.2009

Bots started posting spam here this morning, so I implemented my own captcha based on FIGlet. I may eventually switch to reCAPTCHA, but it didn't work to my liking last time I implemented it.

FIGlet offers several benefits over traditional captchas at this time. First, FIGlet doesn't have to do any CPU intensive image generation. FIGlet is also a much simpler program in general, which makes it more malleable to the developer as compared to something such as PIL. And most important (at least for now), every capcha bot that I have seen is based on OCR. Because ...

5 comments
<3 Django
27.3.2009

Let me save you lots of trouble, and start by saying that Django is the perfect MVC framework. Ok, maybe not perfect, but compared to others it certainly looks that way. The community and documentation alone are enough reason to switch your existing projects - not to mention the built-in admin interface and endless time-saving features. Each week I learn about some new that could have saved hours of coding.

Moreover, Python's functional programming attitude combined with the Django furthering the concepts of DRY for the web create a rapid development and high performance environment that blows PHP out of ...

5 comments
PostgreSQL Recursion
19.3.2009

Here is that example code I promised about SQL recursion. Basically, blog_comment's have a parent_comment_id field that refers to the id of its parent comment. You would call the function below with something like: 

SELECT * FROM get_comments(1);


- which would return the children comments of the blog_comment with id 1. I know the code can probably be cleaned up quite a bit, so understand this was my first time writing SQL logic while you're reading it. 

CREATE FUNCTION get_comments(integer) RETURNS SETOF blog_comment AS $_$DECLARE
    tmp blog_comment%ROWTYPE;
    tmp2 blog_comment%ROWTYPE;
    BEGIN
        FOR tmp IN SELECT * FROM ...
4 comments
Remodelling
19.3.2009

Most of the XHTML has been cleaned up, and I have begun tweaking the backend of the site. In other news, I spend ~6 hours soldering components that ended up not working. After chucking the borked PCBs, I purchased the same devices for around $1 a piece online. When at first you don't succeed, you can probably just buy it cheaper off the internet anyway. I suppose it was a good learning experience anyway.

6 comments
Comments
15.3.2009

Comments are now working (although still have much room for improvement). It will probably fail if you leave it blank and uses a nasty workaround for reCAPTCHA to correctly validate input. Next up: the entire site's CSS and cleaning up the XHTML/Python :)

2 comments
PostgreSQL Recursion
15.3.2009

This isn't really covered anywhere, but PostgreSQL has a built-in language that makes a comment system really easy. You can recursively find the comment hierarchy, which will give you a Reddit-style comment layout. This ends up being much simpler than flat solutions or depth tracking.

Edit: example code here.

no comments
Server Move
15.3.2009

The server has just been moved to a more ideal OpenBSD solution. I've begun working on the site again, and just got basic functionality for the comments system working.

no comments
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