Graceful Exits

Workflows of Drupal’s user load and save functionality: spot the hooks and win a programmatical prize.

Django’s fusebox sometimes blows one, if you start poking around in it with a template-tag screwdriver.

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

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 [...]

To rename columns in a SQL Server database, you can use sp_rename. The syntax of the command, in Transact-SQL-ese, is:

sp_rename
  [ @objname = ] ‘object_name’ ,
  [ @newname = ] ‘new_name’
  [ , [ @objtype = ] ‘object_type’ ]

So say you have a table called t_est, with a column in it called est_client. You want to rename these [...]

I’ve built something, just in time for me to crowbar it awkwardly into conversations at OKCon.
Matthew Somerville is well known for his accessible takes on rubbish websites: most useful is Traintimes, a layer on top of one of the equally poor commercial British rail sites; most notorious is Accessible Odeon, a fixing of the Odeon [...]

Back from a rather physical near-week of team building with work, I’ve been listening to Last.fm today to recuperate and nurse my tired muscles. But with the music playing on our crusty, trusty old purple iMac in one corner, and me in the other reading, drinking tea or otherwise recuperating, how can I tell at [...]

Simon Willison mentioned a while back a link to help on how to undo a svn commit in subversion (more a kind of internal branching than an actual undo, of course: but that’s subversion). That’s all very well, but how about undoing the log message for a particular commit?
Say you have a codebase that only [...]

Steve Yegge on code’s worst enemy:
… This brings us to the second obviously-bad thing that can go wrong with code bases: copy and paste. It doesn’t take very long for programmers to learn this lesson the hard way. It’s not so much a rule you have to memorize as a scar you’re going to get [...]

In previous posts (part 1, part 2) I established the possibility that there were advantages to making Javascript more functional, to bring it in line with CSS and XSL. I didn’t say what these were, particularly, but I then provided a few bits and pieces on top of jQuery to make Javascript just that: functional [...]