I’ve been putting some time into building out the Django Admin site for one of my company’s projects. Here are some notes I’ve taken about straying away from the beaten path. I find surprisingly little information about how to do these things on StackOverflow or elsewhere. These were put used when working with Django 1.6.7. Fake The Model, Make The View You may want a form on the Django Admin that exists along side the model views but doesn’t actually represent a model. This strays somewhat from what the Django Admin is set up to do (some on the #django channel on Freenode have stated that the admin should only be for CRUD operations on Django models.) None-the-less, if you do want to inject a form into the admin along side your models, this is a method that worked for me. ...

Here is a quick dump of some of the better resources that I came across while learning AngularJS. StackOverflow: How to ’think in AngularJS’ - Great for getting the appropriate mindset. egghead.io’s AngularJS series by John Lindquist - Excellently cut up into discrete segments to cover fundamentals. Introduction to AngularJS - First in a series of developing an Angular app. Then watch [End to End](End to End with Angular JS), Security, Frontend Workflows, Testing

As I was transitioning from SublimeText2 to SublimeText3, it became apparent that I should keep a copy of my favorite text editor’s plugins and settings.

I’ve been experimenting with Python’s Natural Language Toolkit, following along with Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper’s book “Natural Language Processing with Python — Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit” (pdf version). So far, the book’s been great. As I’m going through the book, I’ve been writing down notes relating to the book’s examples. I’ve made a Github repo to store these notes and experiments that I may be doing using the NLTK here.

Becoming tired of typing paths repeatedly in the terminal, I realized that I should be using pushd and popd to be navigating directory structures. For those uninitiated, pushd changes your current directory in a similar fashion to cd but additionally adds the former directory to a stack. You can later return to the former directory by executing popd, popping it from the directory history. Unfortunately, the commands pushd and popd both require at least twice as many characters to type as cd and additionally come with the overhead of having to learnt o use a new command instead of something that is nearly instinctual. Then it came to me: pushd all the time. ...

The other week I found myself up at 2am in Canada setting up a VPN between my home computer (running Ubuntu) in Seattle and my laptop <partyhard.jpg>. I had enabled SSH access on my home computer and had set up port forwarding on my router to allow for access from the outside world ahead of time, but had forgotten that I would need to have a port forwarded for the VPN server as well. I tried to SSH into my home box and access the router’s admin interface from the commandline browser (using Lynx and w3m). This was a bad idea and didn’t work, as the browser’s admin page required JavaScript for some odd reason. ...

I’m just getting things set up with this new blog. I’ve been hearing about this movement towards static-generated blogs for a while now, ever since reading this article about the Obama Campaign’s fundraising platform. The idea of stepping away from databases and convulated CMS’s and PHP attracted me. This site is built with Jekyll. After seeing how simple the template syntax was (based on LiquidMarkup, not unlike Django or Jinja2’s syntax), I was sold. Furthermore, learning that Github would post the site for free made it a no-brainer. ...