blogging

COHPy Meeting – October 2010

wmelvinLeave a comment

Here are some links from last night’s meeting of the Central Ohio Python Users Group.

Austin Godber talked about virtualenv. Materials from Austin’s presentation are on GitHub.

Eric Floehr, of Intellovations, presented Building a Small Business/Personal Website With Django. He discussed some Pythonic choices for building web sites such as Blogofile for generating sites that are static content, and Plone for enterprise-scale content management. Django falls somewhere in the middle as a good choice for small business or personal blogging sites.

Other links from Eric’s talk:

Also (FWIW), here’s a bit of .bash_history from my following along with part of Eric’s presentation on a VM running Ubuntu 10.10:

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv python-pip
mkdir dev
cd dev
mkdir oct
cd oct
virtualenv --no-site-packages pyenv
source pyenv/bin/activate
sudo apt-get install mercurial
pip install -e hg+http://bitbucket.org/stephenmcd/mezzanine#egg=mezzanine
mezzanine-project sample
cd sample
python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py runserver
pip install django-debug-toolbar
python manage.py runserver
pip install django-extensions
python manage.py graph_models blog>blog.dot
sudo apt-get install graphviz
dotty blog.dot

I’m not presenting this as a how-to or a tutorial, just some notes. If you don’t know what the above commands will do then I’d recommend not running them.

CONDG Meeting – July 2009

wmelvinLeave a comment

Wow! I have been remiss as a blogger. No posts since April. I logged in and see there are five drafts I haven’t finished. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the fact that I started using Twitter in the meantime. Twitter: It’s like a sputtering of creative sparks, 140 character sparks at most (and mine not all that creative), that burn through the fuel of creative energy but never really get the fire going. There is something addictive about Twitter when you’re a geek. Maybe I shouldn’t blame my lack of writing on Twitter. There have been a lot of other things going on the last few months. On the bright side, I doubt many read this blog (if I checked metrics I’d know) so it’s not a big deal. But even if this is only a journal for my own future reference I should keep it up, right? Well, on to the meeting.

At this month’s meeting of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group, Jeremiah Peschka (already following Jeremiah on Twitter) talked about SQL Server and Object-Relational Mapping. Jeremiah talked specifically about the NHibernate ORM tool. I’ve read a lot about NHibernate but so far have not worked on a project that used it. Prior to showing NHibernate, the support for hierarchical data in SQL Server was discussed. It seems that this hierarchical data could be useful in ORM scenarios. I really enjoyed the presentation and look forward to working with some of the tools and techniques that were discussed.

On a side note: Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about Jeremiah’s mannerisms that reminds me of Clark Howard (just followed Clark Howard on Twitter). Of course Jeremiah is a much cooler guy than Clark, maybe not as rich. Of course I say that without really knowing either of them. And maybe I should be tweeting this instead.