One of the topics that popped up repeatedly at DjangoCon last weekend was how bad purely normalised table structures are, and how denormalisation is good for many things, including making your database cry less.
To that end, during the gaps in PyConUK this weekend, I decided to see how easy it would be to write a new Django field that will automatically denormalise a field in a related table across to another model.
There are not very many things that could tempt me to fly 10 hours twice for only a weekend, but DjangoCon was one of them, and I'm glad I went; it was one of the best weekends I've had for quite a while.
There were plenty of good talks; I can't mention them all here, since as we all know, bytes cost money, but in that vein I must at least mention Cal Henderson's talk 'Why I Hate Django' - a brilliantly done talk on the things Django's missing, as well as the fact we don't have a mascot (or do we?) and that we aren't smug enough.
The world of migrations in Django is definitely warming up now, and with that we're proud to announce the release of South 0.3, the 'intelligent django migrations app', available now from south.aeracode.org.
New in this release are the use of fields rather than dicts for specifying columns in migrations, so migrations now look cleaner, work with all the databases Django supports to a better extent, and even support custom fields.
Also new is dependencies between apps, for those situations where your forum app's Post depends on your accounts app's Profile; South will work out the right way to apply everything so foreign keys don't horribly break.
With the launch of its own site - south.aeracode.org - and Andy McCurdy jumping in to help out, South has been making some good progress. We've made a few backwards incompatable changes, which while annoying will hopefully make things much easier in future.
For the next two weeks or so I'm helping Martin Smith do his Land's End to John O'Groats trip, and so I'll only have slow internets to communicate from. Still, you can read about our travels at the new, shiny, lejog blog.
After the initial release some time last week, and a generally positive reaction, South now has a 0.2 release.
The most important (and only major) change is the addition of MySQL support, so the other section of Django users can finally give it a try. There's also the ability to create all models' migrations at once.
With the recent massive changes to Django trunk - newforms-admin being the biggest - I've found a need to run both oldforms-admin and newforms-admin versions in both development and production; here's a quick HOWTO on both.
Tired of having to drop tables to re-syncdb your django models? Django-evolution not working, or too magic? Then I have just the solution; my newest project, South; intelligent migrations for Django projects.
While I have been a happy user of Wordpress for many years, it was about time I jumped ship and moved my blog to something that let me manage things like project lists more sanely, and so welcome to my new Django-powered blog.
LastGraph has been fixed, at least as far as I can tell; the last.fm team fixed the API bug pretty quickly on Monday, so thanks to them.
It seems that the launch of last.fm's new site has strangely broken the older API that LastGraph uses. I knew I was going to have to update to the new API, but I didn't think it would be this soon!
Well, last night I gave a talk at one of the ever-brilliant Oxford Geek Nights, and in case you're baying for the slides I used (all seven of them), you can find them at this wonderful OGN7 LastGraph Slides link. If you live within punting distance of Oxford, you should really try to come to the next one on August 27th. If not; well, they put videos up on the site...
Being a very visual person, I naturally wanted a nice way of visualising the traffic lastgraph gets (especially as I nurse it through the initial round of bugs, most of which have gone). The ever-wonderful gltail always helps, but the same author has gone one further and come up with gltrail:
Yes, this is my new official term for the server going up and down. It seems that some part of the system causes 100% CPU usage on the box it's running on, and in fact is so nasty to the system that it even makes the serial console lag. This, for those who are not server geeks, is Bad.
After much work, lastgraph3's beta is now out. Please be warned that it may not work, may explode, and may abduct your cat, dog or goldfish in the process of failing.
It really isn't, honest. I'm working on the final part - the graph scheduler, which replicates the previous queued graph functionality - and I'll hopefully be pushing it all live soon.
People who know me, at all, will know I love two things: cheese, and the colour blue. Oddly enough, I don't like blue cheese, but that must be some kind of cancellation effect.
Anybody lucky enough to own an OS2008 internet tablet can be smug and happy knowing that OpenTTD is now available for OS2008.
LastGraph has been given a much needed refresh, including a tweak to the render nodes to stop them running out of file handles/memory/disk space, and the main site so it in fact remembers when it deletes XML caches to free up space rather than wandering around going "I'm sure I put that file somewhere...".