Graceful Exits

Use and abuse of the “with” programmatic statement to make your Django template code less mad.

logging.debug(”if only I’d known”) logging.debug(”if only I’d known”) /* is there any way to turn this off? */ logging.debug(”if only I’d known”) ….

As a result of building a website for a Torchbox client, I came up with a Drupal 5.x module to query the Postcode Anywhere and MailBuild webservices (if they look like an unlikely mix, don’t worry: they’re not coupled together generally, so you can use one without the other). I’ve been meaning to make it [...]

Software as a service finally comes of age, with the web’s new-found ability to pipe the sad trombone and instant rimshot directly into your office or home (via b3ta).

Following on from Simon Willison’s recent post about Django’s ORM, I’ve found both the lazy evaluation and chaining properties of Django’s querysets to be really useful quite deep within Django’s own view-layer framework.
Django has its own library for building forms, currently called newforms (to distinguish it from the old library, deprecated but left around for [...]

If it’s really the case that browsers, virtual machines and IDEs will one day converge, then the first steps would be to run Java, Ruby and other languages in a browser using Javascript. (Hat tip to Nick for the timely links.)
[Edit: run Python using Javascript too.]

Steve Yegge on *Emacs, pointing also to the possible future direction of the *browser:
“IDEs are draining users away, but it’s not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It’s the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier [...]

For anyone in west Oxfordshire (or even west Oxford) the Eynsham Society is running an event about climate change, at 8pm on Wednesday 21st May. From what I can gather—publicity hasn’t been great as you can see, but there was a note up in the local Co-Op—it will be about some of the practical measures [...]