Archive for 2006/09

• Django on Dreamhost: An adventure

  Somehow Dreamhost's server setup must be really strange ... For the last 4 hours I tried setting up a dummy Django project on Dreamhost using basically a combination of the tutorial in the Dreamhost WIKI and the tutorial on Djangoproject.com for using Django with FastCGI ... but first things first:

  At home I'm using a prefix setup for all Python libraries I'm using including Django which seems to work quite well ... at home. I now tried to mirror the setup on Dreamhost but received only 500 errors whenever the script should have been called via FastCGI. The reason for this seems to be very simple: For some reason, easy-install'd package appear not to work the way they should when called from FastCGI. Well, to solve this you have the common solutions at hand:

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  • django
  • dreamhost
  • fastcgi

  2006/09/01 at 13:19:00

  1 comments

• Learnt today: .pydistutils.cfg

  Are you a Python developer? And do you have tons of libraries installed somewhere into a non-standard prefix? Since I started coding in Python again, I wanted to avoid installing libraries globally so that I could easily manage them. So I now install everything with a --prefix=~/.python . Distutils setup.py makes this very easy since all you have to do is append this option to the python setup.py install call and change the PYTHONPATH environment variable accordingly.

  But distutils has something that makes this procedure even easier: If you're tired of typing --prefix=whatever again and again you can also set a default value for each user. If you're under MacOSX/Linux/Unix/blob create $HOME/.pydistutils.conf and add following lines:

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  • distutils
  • learnt-today
  • python

  2006/09/03 at 13:55:15

  0 comments

• Getting Starcraft for Mac ... Or dying trying

  Sometimes I really wonder, if people actually want to sell their stuff. For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of Starcraft + Broodwar for MacOSX. First I went to blizzard.com and found both for 9.99USD each ... Great, I thought, and went straight to their online shop just to find out, that they aren't shipping to Austria. So I tried to get in contact with someone from Blizzard Europe to ask why shipping to Austria isn't possible and basically help me with getting a copy. dieing

  What did I get as response? That they can't recommend me any shops that have it and that I should ask some of my friends if they've made any good experience shopping online ... What? I somehow doubt who ever wrote that actually read my mail and so didn't really notice that I was talking about their own online shop that is listed on the German Blizzard site.

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  • blizzard
  • gaming
  • mac
  • starcraft

  2006/09/05 at 00:40:37

  1 comments

• Fear those 1337 rocket/plasma skillz

  If you've ever played Quake3 and know the basics about Rocket Jumping and Plasma Climbing, this movie brought to you by Shaolin Productions is for you:

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  • gaming
  • q3a

  2006/09/05 at 23:58:51

  0 comments

• Lessons learnt yesterday

  1. If you pay lots of money for a gun in a game, better use it. For the last year or so I was avoiding finishing Ratchet & Clank for the PS2, because I always died in the last stage and got reset to somewhere right after the start. A few months before that happened for the first time, I played it quite a lot to get these 1.000.000 credits to get the super weapon in that game: The R.I.D.A. ... just to never use it. Yesterday I used it for the first time, and finally finished the game. Hurrayyy. Next.
  2. Trust Apple to surprise you. Well. To make a long story short: I love the new Core2Duo iMacs ;-) The specs look really great and I can't wait to get some money to get myself one of them for my birthday in 2 months ;)

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  • apple
  • core2duo
  • gaming
  • imac
  • playstation2
  • playstation3
  • ratchet---clank
  • sony

  2006/09/07 at 23:15:47

  0 comments

• Ruby's website redesigned

  Finally Ruby has now also a nice website. The whole site is now in my opinion much more usable with offering links in prominent positions to guides on how to find an use 3rd-party libraries, the documentation and so on.

  The site now also uses Ruby on Rails in the backend with a CMS that has been written in the process of creating that site and that has also been open source'd. Great work :D

  For more details, check out the announcement on ruby-lang.org.

  Via O'Reilly's Ruby channel

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  • radiantcms
  • ruby
  • rubyonrails

  2006/09/12 at 17:01:39

  0 comments

• Random Python stuff

  Some random Python hints I learned over the last week while writing on my first Django website (Note: All things mentioned here are in the official docs, but I haven't noticed them before looking at code others have written):

  If you want to have a tuple, better play it safe and write ("hello",) instead of ("hello"). Since the braces can also be used to control the precedence of a statement, adding the extra "," will make sure, that you really get a tuple, no matter what number of elements is in there.

  Named groups is in my opinion one of the coolest things I've seen with RE done so far. I don't know, if this also works in other languages, but it just makes regex much more readable if you have something like this:

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  • development
  • python

  2006/09/13 at 22:36:07

  0 comments

• My Nintendo Wii launch bundle

  • European bundle (+ Wii Sports)

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  • gaming
  • nintendo
  • wii

  2006/09/15 at 18:21:47

  2 comments

• Amazon and the money

  Seems like Amazon is fed up with the whole international currency situation and has decided to create one of its own. Although, a name would have been nice. 205,72 what?

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  • amazon

  2006/09/16 at 10:36:38

  0 comments

• Tony Hawk offline at Playstation3 launch

  Is it just me or is Sony really preparing a big disaster for their PS3 launch in Japan and the USA this November? Today GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer reported (quoting IGN), that the PS3 version of Tony Hawk's Project 8 (which is slated as a launch title for the blue diode sucker) will not include an online component because they still haven't received all required libs and no details about the online components of the PS3. I guess, who wants to do some Skateboard magic online will have to do this on Xbox Live then.

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  • gaming
  • neversoft
  • online
  • playstation3
  • sony
  • tonyhawk

  2006/09/18 at 23:11:00

  1 comments