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More fun with Canvas - a JavaScript Starfield!
The canvas element is awesome. JavaScript is fast enough that you can run some pretty computationally intensive stuff (I've seen 3D games, a NES emulator, and much more all done with JS!). This script shouldn't push your CPU to the limit, but it does show how easy it is to create cool effects with just a small amount of code.
Nokia Snake with JavaScript + Canvas
Keeping with the theme of yesterday's post - "a stroll down memory lane" - I thought I'd re-create the Nokia Snake game (a distant relative of Nibbles) using JavaScript and the canvas element.
A Stroll Down Memory Lane: Scripting AOL
When I started working at my current job I was surprised to see that everyone used IRC as their primary means of communication - much more so than email or IM. I recently wrote a small irc bot library in python - it was a ton of fun and reminded me of some of the first programs I wrote that were bots and scripts for America Online.
Django Patterns: Model Inheritance
This post discusses the two flavors of model inheritance supported by Django, some of their use-cases as well as some potential gotchas.
Django Patterns: Pluggable Backends
As the first installment in a series on common patterns in Django development, I'd like to discuss the Pluggable Backend pattern. The pattern addresses the common problem of providing extensible support for multiple implementations of a lower level function, be it caching, database querying, etc.
Generating aggregate data across generic relations
Aggregation support was added to django's ORM in version 1.1, allowing you to generate Sums, Counts, and more without having to write any SQL. According to the docs aggregation is not supported for generic relations. This entry describes how to work around this using the .extra() method.
Self-referencing many-to-many through
How to implement self-referencing many-to-many relationships in Django. Example use cases are modeling asymmetrical following (a-la twitter) or symmetrical friendship (a-la facebook).
Looking at registration patterns in Django
Django uses several types of registration patterns for some of its most notable features. This entry looks at the way django implements its different types of registries.
Describing Relationships: Django's ManyToMany Through
In this post I'll describe extending many-to-many relationships in Django to support additional columns on the junction table. I'll be using the following table structure as the starting place. Imagine an RSS aggregator consisting of feeds, articles and categories. Articles come from a feed and may belong to any number of categories.
