strangely entangled

Looks like somebody (me!) is going to MESH in Toronto next week. Thanks commandN!

(Wow, that was very link-happy, wasn’t it?)

I’m looking forward to MESH in a big way. There are some interesting sessions scheduled … plus, it’ll be good to be back in my old stomping grounds for a few days.

Over the past two months I’ve been building a fairly straightforward database-driven application for a client. Originally we were going to code it in PHP, then I started looking around at some of the newer application frameworks out there. Ruby on Rails was considered, but Django really got my attention as it is Python-based, and I have a soft-spot for Python.

Yesterday, my client requested a series of changes be made to records in the database. Nothing too nasty, just adding prefixes to certain fields, renaming a few others based on the contents of another field, etc. Django made it simple.

For example, to prepend “ns-” to the name of every Novell server in the database:

from servers.model import Server
server_list = Server.objects.filter(os_architecture = “novell”)
for server in server_list:
    server.name = “ns” + server.name
    server.save()

I know, it’s a simple example and easily done in other languages and frameworks. I just like the fact that I could do it in Python, quickly.

I was browsing through my Flickr page the other day and noticed that one of my photos has over 30,000 views! I took this photo on Robson St. in Vancouver, back in 2002. Nat and I had flown out here for a week to take a look around and see if Vancouver was somewhere we’d want to move to.

We were walking down Robson St. together when I caught this out of the corner of my eye. The sidewalk was pretty busy, but I managed to get a slightly blurry photo. I never did check out the website or call the phone number listed on the sign to see what it was really about.

What’s funny is that a quick Google for “Missing my imaginary friend Steve” shows that the photo has been downloaded and re-posted all over the place. That’s very cool, although I am a bit annoyed that some places like imagepoop.com have gone and stuck their own watermark on the photo. But whatever, I didn’t come up with the poster in the first place, I just took the photo.

The text on the photo reads:

Missing: My Imaginary Friend Steve
(Picture taken 3 years ago) Last seen March 21. Frequents discount sushi bars and polka raves. If you see him, tell him Vince is sorry about the ice cream and to come home.