Chris McCormick

This weekend I wrote a Django powered replacement for this blog which was previously running on the text-file based pybloxsom engine. Unfortunately I found the pybloxsom code too time-consuming to understand and modify, and so I've re-written it using the Django framework which I know much better. It still uses a text-file storage backend, but the code is smaller and easier to understand. You can download the source code to 'django-bloxsom' here:

http://mccormick.cx/dev/djangobloxsom-6.zip

Or with bzr:

bzr co http://mccormick.cx/dev/djangobloxsom/

The templates are hardcoded for my site, but are easy enough to modify, and the code is fairly generic. The textfile based blog data is cached so it doesn't get read from disk every time the page is accessed, so you can use something like memcached for lightning fast page loading. I am hoping to add comments, and pagination soon since these are the features I couldn't work out how to add to pybloxsom. Anyway, hopefully this will be useful to someone.

Phones are the new PCs. Android is the new Windows. Google is the new Microsoft.

18 android phones this year.

[ ]  dorkbotlondon #61
/|\  The summer season of dork is here
/ \

When:
   7pm, 4th June 2009
Where:
   The boxing club, Limehouse town hall, E14 7HA
   For directions and instructions for getting in to the building go here:
   http://dorkbotlondon.org/event/dorkbotlondon61/

Featuring presentations from the well-combed and frisky...

* RJDJ  - Chris McCormick
  (Pure data on the iphone)

* sketchPatch - Davide Della Casa
  (an online programming playground based on Processing, somewhere to
  experiment with code, reuse and collaborate on existing code, share
  and learn)

* Orbiter - an interactive sound environment - Vera-Maria Glahn & Marcus Wendt
  (Process of an interactive installation using generative sound and
  visuals and stereo motion tracking - from idea to play)

Plus!  Opendorks.  If you'd like to give a 7 minute ad-hoc
presentation about something then drop us a mail or let us know on the
night.  Or if you'd like to give a longer presentation drop us a mail
and we'll schedule you for a future dork.

http://dorkbotlondon.org/event/dorkbotlondon61/

Here are some programmy things I have been exploring recently.

google-mobwrite is a framework for synchronising human edited text. It all integrates nicely with web pages through Javascript and the HTML textarea element (also other elements too), and also on the server side there are Python and other implementations of the protocol, including a ready-to-launch app-engine version. Very nice. I have implemented a very basic etherpad clone called txtfish using mobwrite.

processingjs.org is a basic Javascript and canvas element port of some of the Java-based proce55ing multimedia language/framework, magically called into being by the ultimate Javascript ninja, John Resig. This is cool because with the speedup in modern Javascript engines, it demonstrates the possible death of flash in the not too distant future, if we're lucky. Another cool and vaguely similar project is Raphael, although I haven't tried it yet myself.