Makai's Blog

As I contemplate moving from MySQL (or Google BigTable for AppEngine) backends to PostgreSQL for Django project, this OSCON 2011 presentation has been valuable to me.

The presentation goes into model design, efficient ORM usage, and database debugging. Worth a read for all Django developers.

Link: Unbreaking Your Django Application

Also, here’s a related Reddit Django subreddit thread on switching from MySQL to PostgreSQL: Should I Switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL?

For better or worse, the following rant is so true. Whether executed in the large or the small, "big data" does not matter if your organization refuses to see the results of data analysis.

In addition, I agree that simply dumping data in big piles and then performing analysis on it will not lead to any insight into topics outside the domain of the data. That idea seems obvious but it often gets lost when people get all excited about big data.

Link: The Problem With Big Data

I ran into this cryptic little error when trying to initialize a new Gondor project with the gondor init [key] command:

ERROR: must run gondor init from a Django project directory.

Digging through the source code for the Gondor client revealed where the error was coming from: 

files = [

  os.path.join(os.getcwd(), “__init__.py”),

  os.path.join(os.getcwd(), “manage.py”)

]

if not all all([os.path.exists(f) for f in files]):

  error(“must run gondor init from a Django project directory.\n”)

Although I had manage.py, I was missing the __init__.py Python package directory file since I copied part of an existing project into a new directory instead of using the django-admin.py commands. 

So if you get this error just double check that you have both manage.py and __init__.py files in the same directory as you try to init a new Gondor project.

I just finished reading The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar. The book was a quick and interesting read. Here are three things I took away from the story:

1. Building a business is about more than finding a business model. A business must also make a positive difference in the world. The mission must be a rallying cry for you and your employees during your worst times.
2. Figure out how to do what you love now. The “Deferred Life Plan” where you work at something just to earn a paycheck so you can retire later is risky. You may never live to see the time when you have enough savings to live your dream.
3. Life is a journey - we are all mortal so the best thing we can do is to keep the journey going for as long as possible and enjoy the ride.

I looked at Sencha Touch over the weekend. Since I have experience with JQuery Mobile, I wanted to know how the two frameworks compared. Two things struck me so far:

1. Sencha Touch is more mature (not surprising since Sencha Touch has been out longer and JQuery Mobile is still in beta)
2. Sencha Touch is not targeting the non-WebKit mobile browser space, while JQuery Mobile aims to gracefully degrade on other platforms such as Windows Mobile and Blackberry where a full experience is not possible
3. JQuery Mobile uses HTML and enhances it, while Sencha Touch is programmatically oriented and requires more knowledge of their APIs to create widgets

I might be wincing at my lack of knowledge in this post as I gain more experience with Sencha Touch, but that’s my 2 cents so far.