testing facebook apps with ssh reverse tunnels
If you're writing a Facebook app, you may have to jump through hoops to test it out against your local development machine. Facebook requires that you confi...
Recent Posts
waiting while a jQuery UI animation is running
A common pattern for less than instantaneous ajax calls is to show the user a "loading" animation while the ajax response is pending. If your animation is a...
Adding a .first() method to Django’s QuerySet
In my last Django project, we had a set of helper functions that we used a lot. The most used was helpers.first, which takes a query set and returns the fir...
Django aggregation, group by day
This week we had a hackathon to develop a better internal dashboard page that shows things like records added to the system over time. Not having generated ...
Save a screenshot to Dropbox with a keyboard shortcut
It's not uncommon for me to call my product manager over to my desk half a dozen times on a given day to look at what I'm working on. To speed things up, I ...
How to use a cron job to open a web page in a browser
At work, I have a set of long-term goals I'm supposed to be making progress on over the year. As a way to remind myself about them, I have a cron job setup ...
jQuery: remove (script) tags from a string of html
I'm in the middle of writing a bookmarklet to screen scrape web pages. My back-end piece is having trouble parsing pages with lots of script tags. Since I d...
Using Access-Control-Allow-Origin to make cross domain POST requests from javsacript
Making ajax calls from javascript, even without a framework like jQuery, is pretty trivial. However, once you try to make the same request cross-domain, it ...
Python class attributes are evaluated on declaration
In Python, class attributes are evaluated and put into memory when the class is defined (or imported). For example, if you run the following code in an inte...
Django reset database connection
Django handles database connections transparently in almost all cases. It will start a new connection when your request starts up, and commit it at the end ...