Recent Posts

Unit testing Django with doctest

There are two main ways to write tests in Django; doctests and unit tests. Units tests will be familiar to you if you're coming from Java. You basically wri...

Django - Externalize settings.py

In Django, settings.py is where you store configuration such as database connection strings, directory paths for static and media resources, as well as cach...

Python/Django: First Impressions

I've started a brand-new codebase at work. With new code comes the possibility of a new language/platorm. What we really needed was speed; we don't know exa...

Name resolution failure caching in SMB

If you have a production file server failing, you have serious problems. Client requests are failing. But they may not be failing quickly. If your product i...

Numeric Range Searches in Lucene

One of the reasons Lucene is awesomely fast is that it treats all data as strings. This is a perfect optimisation for most searching tasks. However, it does...

Setting the title on a Gnome terminal

I usually have several terminals open running various daemon processes in tabs. To make the tabs more identifiable, you can set the tab title from your BASH...

Subversion mergeinfo

Subversion 1.5 added a feature called mergeinfo, which is just a property that can be set on any resource that tracks merges made to the resource. When you ...