Code Koala

I figured I should probably post something since I haven't done so yet this year. I've been making several changes to the site lately. Most of them are pretty subtle, but I hope they're useful to you. Updates include

• You can now send an article to some friends by clicking on the "envelope" icon in the top-right corner of each article. It's a pretty simple mechanism.

• You can save any of...

I've decided that if I ever want to really understand Linux, I'll have to give as many distributions as possible a chance. In the past, I've tried to use OpenSUSE on my HP Pavilion dv8000 laptop, but it never seemed quite as robust or useful as many other distributions that I've tried on the same machine.

With the recent release of OpenSUSE 11.1, I downloaded the final 32-bit DVD ISO as I normally do for...

With all of the hype that git has been receiving lately, I started playing with it a while back to see if it suited me and my wants/needs. I found it to be an interesting utility. I won't go into any details simply because I'm not really all that knowledgeable about all the ins and outs of version control systems, but I will say that I have decided I like...

Welcome to my second article about installing Slackware on an Asus EeePC. This is a follow-up article to the one I posted in May 2008 soon after Slackware 12.1 was released. In this article, I will assume that you're doing a fresh installation of Slackware 12.2 and that you have access to an external USB CD/DVD ROM drive.

In all honesty, the...

I've released yet another absurdly useless application today. With all of my dirty finals lately, I needed something a little more leisurely to think about. I noticed that I put a lot of those funky smiley codes in my articles and whatnot, so I decided to beautify them a little by replacing the codes with emoticon images a la those silly forum sites I used to be crazy about as a kid.

It was...

So I've completed 4 of my 5 finals for the semester. Three of the courses I'm taking right now are for upper-division accounting. Horrid, horrid stuff folks. Though perhaps this is what school is all about.

Up until this point in my college career, I've felt relatively comfortable with studying for maybe an hour just before a final for most any class. Thankfully, I've managed to do pretty well with that strategy...

I just had to come up with a blog post about these newly released bits of awesomeness!!

• Slackware 12.2 was announced this morning
• Google has launched two new Labs features for Gmail: a simple task list and the ability to send SMS messages within Gmail itself. w00t

I wish I had more time to report other important releases, but I must study!!!

So the other day I wrote up an article that sarcastically compared PHP and Python syntax a little. While I am completely serious when I say that I prefer Python's syntax a heck of a lot more than that of PHP, I thought it might be a good thing for me to demonstrate that the code I posted before could have been more appealing had it been thought out a little...

Some of you regulars out there may have noticed an interesting change in the presentation of some of my articles: source code highlighting. I've been interested in doing this for quite some time, I just never really got around to implementing it until last night.

I found this implementation process to be a bit more complicatd than I had anticipated. For my own benefit as well as for anyone else who wants to do...

Today I was working on a USA ePay payment module for Satchmo. I had access to some work done by another chap, but I wanted to get a better feel for what needed to be happening in the payment module, so I examined some of the stuff that other people had done as well. I studied the "official" PHP version of the payment module...

I've released a new version of django-axes this morning. This project allows you to keep track of failed login attempts on your Django-powered sites quickly and easily. It pays attention to the built-in login functions for the Django administration utility as well as the stock django.contrib.auth.views.login method. If a particular user fails to login successfully after 3 tries (this number is customizable), a record is made...

With the recent release of Python 3.0 final, I've had a crazy itch that needed to be scratched. That itch, my friends, was to do a write-up of how to install Python 3.0 alongside my existing Python 2.5.2 installation without borking things up. The reason I thought it would be useful is that I'm running a Debian-based distribution of Linux called sidux right now, and neither Python...

I've been making several updates to django-watermark during my more boring classes the past couple days. I have just released a new version for your pleasure.

Changes include:

• A lot of code refactoring. There was a lot of logic in the watermark filter itself. I decided this logic should be placed elsewhere so as to make the utils.watermark function easier to use outside the...

I've added a few updates to django-watermark and figured it was time to announce another release. Updates include:

• the ability to place watermarks randomly on the target image
• updated the way relative positioning works. Now, position=50%x50% will center the watermark image on the target image. Previously django-watermark placed the top-left corner of the watermark image in the center of the target image.
• the ability to convert the watermark...