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I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a usability expert and, in general, I think that there is too much talk about usability with little real benefit. However, as a good computer scientist, I believe that it is an important part of software engineering. There are people who know a hell of [...]

A little while ago I wrote a post about getting Django unittests to work on DreamHost. The particular problem with the DreamHost setup is that they don’t allow you to programmatically create and drop databases and the default Django unittest behaviour is to do just that: create a brand new test db, use it and [...]

Today at VendAsta we had our first full day of planning for the MyFrontSteps Sprint #2. We did some high level planning yesterday as well as demoing and a post mortem for the first Sprint. Having had a chance to relax this evening watching a few episodes of Long Way Round with my wife, there [...]

The default test behaviour for a Django site creates and then destroys a whole test database on each test run. Normally this is not a problem, but the way Dreamhost has their MySQL setup running, the commands to create and drop databases are not available outside of their administration panel. What follows is the solution I have come up with and am currently using to run Django unittests with my Dreamhost MySQL databases.

I have been a long time fan of open source software. Over the years I have utilized countless open source projects to accomplish large tasks with ease for both my day job and my consulting work. Using these projects has always saved me a lot of reinventing the wheel and has made work on projects [...]

Well, I have been working and living with a MacBook Pro for a few weeks now and I have to say I’m liking it a lot more than I had thought I would. I am starting to get the hang of how everything works and I am very happy about just how similar things are [...]

As any experienced programmer knows, using existing, well proven code for new applications can greatly reduce development time. It can also remove some of the uncertainty in a project by reusing code that is a known quantity. In addition to reusing code you or a teammate has used already in a current or past project, [...]