http://www.jpstacey.info/blog Garbage collection, in a very real sense Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:41:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm going to OpenTech 2008. If you haven't already registered, you might just squeak in, but you'd better hurry: last thing I heard they were nearly 90% full. Give it a whirl, though. Entrance is only a fiver and the schedule looks great. Like its predecessors (OT2005 and NotCon2004) OT2008 is ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/07/01/opentech-2008-this-weekend/ Lurking in a dry, legalistic and apparently quite specific page on the Drupal website, is the commendable result of a lot of hard work, both from the the Software Freedom Law Center and from the Drupal community. Drupal.org have produced a Licensing FAQ to explain some of the subtler aspects of ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/30/drupal-licensing-and-the-gpl/ After re-reading my earlier post, which was in general agreement with Pilgrim and Tomayko's minimalism, I decided to practise what I had preached and write a minimalist theme implementing some of the applications of the principles of minimalism. It's called Straight Edge, and I've switched to it today. Once I've ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/30/embracing-minimalism/ Agh. Oxford Geek Night #7 tomorrow, and those usually recording the happy event(s) or giving out Moo cards are either away or giving a talk themselves. And I only have so many hands, and can only be in one place at a time. Step forward, Garrett and Victoria, to the camera ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/24/geek-night-video-and-moo-card-scandal-aversion-horror/ Mark Pilgrim on extreme minimalism: Last week, I was talking with Joe about how certain things have made the leap from content to chrome. (”Chrome” is what Mozilla developers call the browser interface around the content pane — the tabs and menus and location bar and so on.) It used to ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/22/rss-feeds-keep-them-well-hidden/ After having been stuck on version 2.0.1 for over two years, I’ve just upgraded to the most recent version, 2.5.1. The only hiccup was needing to ask my web provider to give me a new MySQL database: since 2.5, Wordpress has required MySQL 4.0 or newer. Otherwise, it all seems ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/16/upgrading-this-blog-to-wordpress-251/ Two or three days ago whenever anyone mentioned the 7th Oxford Geeks Night to me, I winced. By then it was less than two weeks from Wednesday June 25; we only had four microslots out of six; I’d just started filling in existing speakers on the drill; and I was ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/15/ogn7-loads-of-speakers-and-the-return-of-the-book-raffle/ Yesterday Neal, Tom and I wandered to London, where Rob Purdie was hosting the first ever Drupal for NGOs meeting at Amnesty International’s UK headquarters. It was a hot, dry evening, and Neal’s attempts to Brompton it over from Marylebone left him dry-mouthed enough to avoid the copious snacks that ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/11/drupal-for-ngos-first-ever-meet-yesterday/ Recently at Torchbox we’ve been looking into how to build extra functionality on top of Drupal users. The standard Drupal user object is a combination of the contents from the users table, plus any properties provided by the core profile module. This means that the Drupal user is a combination ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/09/user-loading-and-saving-in-drupal-5x/ To the untrained eye, you might think that you can put any old string in as the second element of one of your Django URL dispatcher patterns in urls.py: from django.conf.urls.defaults import * urlpatterns = patterns(”,     (r’^$’, ‘myapp.views.webroot’),     (r’^a_page/$’, ‘myapp.views.another_page’),     (r’^nothing_here_dude/$’, ‘myapp.views.this_view_does_not_exist’), ) You have a fairly basic Django page which works; you add a new tuple ... http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2008/06/08/djangos-viewdoesnotexist-heisenbug/