Muffin Research Labs

Python

FAIL of the week: uTidyLib unicode error

This week I’ve been having fun using uTidyLib, a python wrapper for HTML tidy. All was working swimmingly until I hooked it up to a custom form validation function in Django. The Python process on my mac kept crashing and I was wondering what the cause was since it

ubuntu

Ubuntu Hardy: Setting up VMWare-tools from the CLI

First you need the vmware tools tar from the cd image. This is found at /media/cdrom once you've run "install vmware tools" from the server console. When I did this the CD didn't seem to be available even though it looked like it

vmware

Vmware: "SIOCSIFADDR: No such device eth0" after cloning

After cloning a vmware image to copy to my local machine I had an issue with eth0 not coming up on an Ubuntu VM. After a bit of googling I found a solution that required editing /etc/ftab to remove an incorrect generated mac address. Hardy Heron doesn't

DjangoCon

DjangoCon 2008 Announced

Rob [http://www.siudesign.co.uk/]'s just announced on Twitter that the DjangoCon 2008 will be held at the GooglePlex on 6-7th September. More details will be announced on http://djangoproject.com in due course. Also the DjangoCon Site will be up this coming Friday. via EvilRob'

greasemonkey

Search Django Snippets with GreaseMonkey

I was looking around DjangoSnippets.org [http://djangosnippets.org] last night and had been using the "site: djangosnippets.org" in google to be able to search the site. To make life easier I've knocked up a noddy greasemonkey script to provide a basic Google powered search

Music

The Troggs Tapes

It's been a while since I heard this legendary recording of the Troggs arguing in the studio control room. The recording is said to have inspired some of the scenes in Spinal Tap. Download the .mp3 at the web archive. [http://web.archive.org/web/20070311224019/http://website.

Apple

FAIL of the week: Apple Mighty Mouse

The Apple Mighty mouse is an expensive piece of trash. To be fair I do appreciate Apple's kit, especially when the majority of their hardware is, on the whole, a good blend of form and function. Now I'm pretty sure everyone remembers the ball mice of

CSS

CSS Sprite Generator Version 2.0

Ed [http://www.ejeliot.com] and I have been busy updating the CSS Sprite Generator [http://spritegen.website-performance.org/] to improve it's output quality by using the Imagick library instead of GD and as a result this allows a much tighter control over the output. In the process

Apple

iSync "No Device Found" Error on OSX 10.5 Leopard

On the weekend I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of the awesome mobile Python book [http://tinyurl.com/64bc6l] by my brother for my birthday. After hitting an issue with updating my PyS60 [http://sourceforge.net/projects/pys60] install I thought it would be a plan to

Bazaar

MySQL Moves to Bazaar for Source Control

Great news that MySQL [http://www.mysql.com/] has migrated it's source code from BitKeeper over to Bazaar [http://bazaar-vcs.org]. Interestingly the featureset and openness are cited as the main reasons for the switch to bazaar over several alternatives (which weren't listed). In addition to

Growl

Use Growl for Entourage Notifications

I really don't like the Entourage notification widget so I looked into using Growl notification instead and found this: Use Growl for Entourage Notifications [http://www.entourage.mvps.org/rules/example/rule013.html] Having tried it, it works really nicely and is much better than the built-in notifier.

OSX

No Interfaces Available Using Wireshark on Mac OSX

On my previous Macbook Pro I'd used Ethereal and I don't remember having many issues with it as I was able to run it as sudo so that I had privileges for sniffing packets. Since then Ethereal has become Wireshark [http://www.wireshark.org/] and it&

Facebook

De-activating my Facebook profile

Facebook got to the point a few months back of being more annoying than useful. Friends had started to use Facebook as a way to contact me instead of using plain old-fashioned email and I was starting to find the time I spent on there never actually achieved anything worthwhile.

iTerm

Fixing the display of history in terminal.app

Once I started using leopard's new shiny terminal I noticed some problems with the terminal whenever I was using the cursor keys to access items in the memory. What happens is the lines of history appear to start halfway through a previous line of history like so: For

Python

Titlecase.py: Titlecase in python

John Gruber recently published a perl script to convert strings into title case [http://daringfireball.net/2008/05/title_case] avoiding capitalizing small words based on rules from the New York Times Manual of style as well as catering for several special cases. Before porting the perl script I tried

OSX

Standalone mac battery charger

Got a spare mac battery? I've often wondered why up until now no-one's produced a standalone charger so that you can charge batteries without having to plug them into the mac. Fortunately Fastmac.com have produced a standalone charger that allows you to do just that.

Django

Django Admin Ominigraffle Stencil

Colleague Alex Lee has created a nice stencil for omingraffle with the Django Admin UI components, perfect for wireframing customised admin screens. For more details and to download the stencil see Alex's Blog csensedesign.co.uk [http://csensedesign.co.uk/blog/?p=132]

Django

DJUGL: Django User Group London

The first DJUGL (Django Users Group London) Meetup is happening on the 19th May at GCAP HQ in Leicester square at 7pm. I'll be presenting "Django from a developers point of view" where I'll be talking about my thoughts on what makes Django a

keyboard

Sweet Keyboard

The only issue with this is deciding who gets the space-bar! By Michael Sholk Design [http://www.sholk.com/pd_02.html] via I love typography [http://ilovetypography.com/2008/05/05/sunday-type-mirror-type/]

OSX

Scrolling issue in Leopard cured with PRAM reset

Having got a shiny new MacBook Pro to work on at my new workplace I've had a couple of strange problems with Leopard. The main issue was that when scrolling the graphics was suffering what appeared to be a strange redraw problem when scrolling. After googling I found

vmware

VMWare Importer for converting Parallels images

VMWare now has a nice utility called Vmware importer (beta 2) [http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/importer_tool.html] which takes Parallels image files (and Virtual PC image) and converts them to VMWare Fusion image files directly. The app is dead easy to use and from my own test

Python

Python: Debugging with PDB

Debugging anything can be a real pain in the backside. However with the right tools (think firebug) it actually can become enjoyable. The other day Rob [http://www.siudesign.co.uk/], showed me the pdb module [http://docs.python.org/lib/module-pdb.html] and after using it for two secs

Arduino

Best use of Arduino ever

More info and details here: http://growdown.blogspot.com/2008/04/arduino-and-silvia-two-italians-one.html Via James Hoffman [http://www.jimseven.com/]

OSX

mac tip: Lock screen and pause iTunes

In the past I've used a specific app that allowed configuration of a keystroke to lock my screen but in setting up a new machine I thought I really want to add the ability to pause iTunes as well as locking the screen. The locking part is caused

Work

Starting a new job

Tomorrow I start my new job at GCAP Media as a software developer working with Django and Python on a daily basis. I'm looking forward to learning a lot from the great team assembled there as well as working with some old [http://intranation.com/] friends [http://ejeliot.