http://www.codingadventures.com Captain's log Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:32:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For a side project, I've been looking for a batch queueing system - i.e. a system that I simply submit a command script to, and the script gets executed on the next available server. The output is logged - while running - into a central database. Bonus points if there's ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2009/06/the-dearth-of-batch-queueing-systems/ Over time, I've accumulated quite a few projects on my hard drive. And while I like having them there, I always feel it's a very fragile place to keep them. Yes, I do back up - less often than I should. But even then, it's just an earthquake away from ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2009/06/hosting-my-source-code/ Since I really like my databases to be backed up, I wanted to make sure there's at least a very rudimentary dump of my databases every night. (Note: While I host on Dreamhost, this should apply to other hosting services too) Requirement #2 - I don't want to manage my ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2009/05/66/ In my ongoing quest to build my web-based Django web site, the next step is creating a blog. The problem - there is no definitive blogging application for Django. That's I guess true for any decent web framework - blogging is an application that's simple enough that nobody bothers to ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2009/05/blogging-applications-for-django/ The first step in setting up my new online presence with Django is of course to just present a static home page. The goal is to be up and running as soon as possible, after all. Unfortunately, it's a bit harder than just slapping your html and css files onto ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2009/05/preloading-your-django-application-or-how-to-keep-static-data/ I've been going through quite a bit of changes in my life lately - and as a part of that, my home blog (not this one - the personal things) will be moving to http://www.rachelblum.com. And since I felt like I need more experience with web frameworks in general, I'm not ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2009/05/getting-started-with-django/ I've finally decided to give that "Lisp" thing another try - my first one being back in about 1978 or so. So, first order of business, find a good set of tools. A lot of programmers are ranting and raving about the wonderfulness of Emacs, so I decided to give ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2009/01/getting-lispy-on-osx/ These days, I get quite a few questions from my fellow co-workers about resources to start with Cocoa development. So here's a quick list of books that I absolutely recommend: Objective C in general: Programming ObjectiveC Intro to Cocoa: Learning Cocoa with ObjectiveC Getting your feet wet on the iPhone: iPhone Open Application ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/07/learning-cocoa-book-recommendations/ I've been recently playing a little bit with GLSL/Core Image shaders. One of the earliest limitations I ran into was the fact that you cannot have conditional results. In other word, if you do an if/else test, the output of your shader cannot depend on it. (Not entirely sure why ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/06/threshold-filter-in-glsl/ RubyCocoa is one of the most fascinating tools on OSX. It makes it more than easy to rapidly prototype and try ideas with Cocoa. But unfortunately, out of the box, a RubyCocoa project seems to require an Objective-C shell to start it up. That means firing up XCode for every ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/06/standalone-rubycocoa-applications/