Hello again everyone! Soooo much has happened since I last posted on my blog. I figured it was about time to check in and actually be active on my own site again. What follows is just a summary of what has happened in our lives since the beginning of February this year.

Enough About Work

Aside from all of the excitement in my career decisions, things are going very well with the family. We live about 3 hours away from my mom, and we've been out there to visit a few times already. It's really fun to see the kids playing with their grandma! The last time we were out for a visit, for my grandmother's 80th birthday, my son and I took my dad's Rhino for a spin. We got stuck, and it was sooo much fun!

The twins are growing so well too. They're crawling and getting around very well now. Jane has started to stand up on her own, and she tries to take a step every once in a while. Claire prefers to sit, but she loves to wave, clap, and repeat noises that she hears.

My wife is planning on starting up a new website soon, and she keeps taunting me with the possibility of having me build it for her. Yes, taunting.

Okay, Back to Hobbies

My wife also picked up a Dremel Trio for Dad's Day. To get used to it, I made some little wooden signs with the kids' names on them. Being the quasi-perfectionist that I am, I'm not completely satisfied with how they all turned out. I suppose they'll do for a "first attempt" sort of result though!

I've still got various projects in the works with my Arduino and whatnot. A couple of months ago, I finished a project that helps me see where I'm walking when I go down to my mancave at night. The light switches for the basement are all at the stairs, and my setup is on the opposite side of the basement. I typically prefer to have the lights off when I'm on my computer, and it was annoying and horribly inefficient to turn the lights on when entering the basement, go to my computer, then go back to turn the lights off.

To solve that problem, I re-purposed one of my PIR motion sensors and picked up a LED strip from eBay. I have the motion sensor pointing at the entrance to the basement, and the LED strip strung across the ceiling along the path that I take to get to my desk. When the motion sensor detects movement, it fades the LED strip on, continues to power it for a few seconds, and gradually fades them out when it no longer detects movement. It's all very sexy, if I do say so myself.

I've tried to capture videos of the setup, but my cameras all have poor light sensors or something, so it's difficult to really show what it's like. The LED strip illuminates the basement perfectly just long enough for me to get to my desk, but the videos just show a faint outline of my body lurking in the dark. :(

One project that is in the works right now is a desk fan that automatically turns on when the ambient temperature reaches a certain level. The fan's speed will vary depending on the temperature, and there will be an LCD screen to allow simple reporting and configuration of thresholds and whatnot. I'm pretty excited about it, but I want to order a few things off of eBay before I go much further with it.

Obviously, much more had happened in the past months, but this post is long enough already. Things are calming down quite a bit now that we're settled in, so I hope to resume activity on my open source projects as well as this blog.

Today I have another Django goodie to share with you. For the past few days, I've been struggling to come up with a way to only load certain Django template tag libraries when a particular Django application is installed. There may well be other, more elegant solutions for this particular problem, but it can't hurt to add my findings to the pile.

We have several templates which need to display certain information only when a particular application (Satchmo, in this case) is installed in the site. A lot of these templates are global for our 100+ Django-powered sites, such as customized admin templates and the like. It's much easier for us to maintain our code this way, as opposed to overriding templates on a per-site basis.

from django import template
from django.core.exceptions import ImproperlyConfigured
from django.db.models import get_app
from django.template.loader_tags import ConstantIncludeNode, IncludeNode

register = template.Library()

def do_include_ifapp(parser, token):
    """
    Loads a template and renders it with the current context if the specified
    application is in settings.INSTALLED_APPS.

    Example::

        {% includeifapp app_label "foo/some_include" %}
    """
    bits = token.split_contents()
    if len(bits) != 3:
        raise TemplateSyntaxError, "%r tag takes two argument: the application label and the name of the template to be included" % bits[0]

    app_name, path = bits[1:]
    app_name = app_name.strip('"\'')
    try:
        models = get_app(app_name)
    except ImproperlyConfigured:
        return template.Node()

    if path[0] in ('"', "'") and path[-1] == path[0]:
        return ConstantIncludeNode(path[1:-1])
    return IncludeNode(path)
register.tag('includeifapp', do_include_ifapp)

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load our_global_tags %}

{% block content %}
<h2>Global Content Header</h2>
Bla bla

{% includeifapp foo 'foo_specific_junk.html' %}
{% endblock %}

Pretty much anyone who's been doing any Web development in the last few years probably prefers to use Firefox because of the incredibly powerful extensions it offers. Among the extensions I hear most Web developers complain about not having in other browsers are Web Developer and Firebug. Several people feel that they could get by with another browser (such as Google Chrome) if it only had Firebug.

Well, my friends, the trusty folks who built Firebug actually offer their amazing product for other browsers! It goes by the name of "Firebug Lite." I'm not sure exactly how long this has been around, but the earliest date I can find suggests that it was released to the public in July of 2008.

I happened upon this utility while perusing Django Snippets the other day. A member by the username of jfw posted a middleware which injects the Firebug Lite utility into a response when you're not using Firefox and when your site is in debug mode. I've found it to be quite useful. I hope you all do too!!

I don't know how many of you have noticed this, but I just published a new design for Code Koala. Hooray!!

Along with the change in design came several improvements to the site, including a contact me form and some code optimizations.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate the difference:

Version 1.0

Version 2.0

I stumbled across this article in my daily RSS feeding ritual. The article itself it quite short and to the point--only 9 brief paragraphs. The author brings up some valid points and uses the metaphor of programmers being "tiny" gods. Here's my favorite paragraph.

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

"...be ye therefore wise..."....

The article: http://powazek.com/posts/1655

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 the same thing, I thought I'd document my findings in a thorough article for how to add syntax highlighting to an existing Django- and reStructuredText-powered Web site.

The power behind the syntax highlighting is:

• Python
• reStructuredText
• Pygments
• Cascading Stylesheets
• Django

Python is a huge player in this feature because reStructuredText (ReST) was built for Python, Pygments is the source highlighter (written in Python), and Django is written in Python (and my site is powered by Django). Some of you may recall that I converted all of my articles to ReST not too long ago because it suited my needs better than Textile, my previous markup processor. At the time, I was not aware that the conversion to ReST would make it all the easier for me to implement the syntax highlighting, but last night I figured out that that conversion probably saved me a lot of frustration. Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) are responsible for making the source code actually look good, while Pygments takes care of assigning classes to various parts of the designated source code and generating the CSS.

So, the first set of requirements, which I will not document in this article, are that you already have a Django site up and running and that you're familiar with ReST syntax. If you have the django.contrib.flatpages application installed already, you can type up some ReST documents there and apply the concepts discussed in this article.

Next, you should ensure that you have Pygments installed. There are a variety of ways to install this. Perhaps the easiest and most platform-independent method is to use easy_install:

$ easy_install pygments

This command should work essentially the same on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh computers. If you don't have it installed, you can get it from its website. If you're using a Debian-based distribution of Linux, such as Ubuntu, you could do something like this:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pygments

...and it should take care of downloading and installing Pygments. Alternatively, you can download it straight from the PyPI page and install it manually.

Now we need to install the Pygments ReST directive. A ReST directive is basically like a special command to the ReST processor. I think this part was the most difficult aspect of the implementation, simply because I didn't know where to find the Pygments directive or how to write my own. Eventually, I ended up downloading the Pygments-1.0.tar.gz file from PyPI, opening the Pygments-1.0/external/rst-directive.py file from the archive, and copying the stuff in there into a new file within my site.

For my own purposes, I made some small adjustments to the directive over what come with the Pygments distribution. I think it would save us all a lot of hassle if I just copied and pasted the directive, as I currently have it, so you can see it first-hand.

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"""
    The Pygments reStructuredText directive
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    This fragment is a Docutils_ 0.4 directive that renders source code
    (to HTML only, currently) via Pygments.

    To use it, adjust the options below and copy the code into a module
    that you import on initialization.  The code then automatically
    registers a ``code-block`` directive that you can use instead of
    normal code blocks like this::

    .. code:: python

            My code goes here.

    If you want to have different code styles, e.g. one with line numbers
    and one without, add formatters with their names in the VARIANTS dict
    below.  You can invoke them instead of the DEFAULT one by using a
    directive option::

    .. code:: python
       :number-lines:

            My code goes here.

    Look at the `directive documentation`_ to get all the gory details.

    .. _Docutils: http://docutils.sf.net/
    .. _directive documentation:
       http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/howto/rst-directives.html

    :copyright: 2007 by Georg Brandl.
    :license: BSD, see LICENSE for more details.
"""

# Options
# ~~~~~~~

# Set to True if you want inline CSS styles instead of classes
INLINESTYLES = False

from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter

# The default formatter
DEFAULT = HtmlFormatter(noclasses=INLINESTYLES)

# Add name -> formatter pairs for every variant you want to use
VARIANTS = {
    'linenos': HtmlFormatter(noclasses=INLINESTYLES, linenos=True),
}


from docutils import nodes
from docutils.parsers.rst import directives

from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import get_lexer_by_name, TextLexer

def pygments_directive(name, arguments, options, content, lineno,
                       content_offset, block_text, state, state_machine):
    try:
        lexer = get_lexer_by_name(arguments[0])
    except ValueError:
        # no lexer found - use the text one instead of an exception
        lexer = TextLexer()
    # take an arbitrary option if more than one is given
    formatter = options and VARIANTS[options.keys()[0]] or DEFAULT
    parsed = highlight(u'\n'.join(content), lexer, formatter)
    parsed = '<div class="codeblock">%s</div>' % parsed
    return [nodes.raw('', parsed, format='html')]

pygments_directive.arguments = (1, 0, 1)
pygments_directive.content = 1
pygments_directive.options = dict([(key, directives.flag) for key in VARIANTS])

directives.register_directive('code-block', pygments_directive)

I won't explain what that code means, because, quite frankly, I'm still a little hazy on the inner workings of ReST directives myself. Suffice it to say that this snippet allows you to easily highlight blocks of code on ReST-powered pages.

The question now is: where do I put this snippet? As far as I'm aware, this code can be located anywhere so long as it is loaded at one point or another before you start your ReST processing. For the sake of simplicity, I just stuffed it in the __init__.py file of my Django site. This is the __init__.py file that lives in the same directory as manage.py and settings.py. Putting it in that file just makes sure it's loaded each time you start your Django site.

To make Pygments highlight a block of code, all you need to do is something like this:

.. code:: python

    print 'Hello world!'

...which would look like...

print 'Hello world!'

If you have a longer block of code and would like line numbers, use the :number-lines: option:

.. code:: python
    :number-lines:

    for i in range(100):
        print i

...which should look like this...

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for i in range(100):
    print i

That's all fine and dandy, but it probably doesn't look like the code is highlighted at all just yet (on your site, not mine). It's just been marked up by Pygments to have some pretty CSS styles applied to it. But how do you know which styles mean what?

Luckily enough, Pygments takes care of generating the CSS files for you as well. There are several attractive styles that come with Pygments. I would recommend going to the Pygments demo to see which one suits you best. You can also roll your own styles, but I haven't braved that yet so I'll leave that for another day.

Once you choose a style (I chose native for Code Koala), you can run the following commands:

$ pygmentize -S native -f html > native.css
$ cp native.css /path/to/site/media/css

(obviously, you'd want to replace native with the name of the style you like the most) Finally, add a line to your HTML templates to load the newly created CSS file. In my case, it's something like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/static/styles/native.css" />

Now you should be able to see nicely-formatted source code on your Web pages (assuming you've already got ReST processing your content).

If you haven't been using ReST to generate nicely-formatted pages, you should make sure a couple of things are in place. First, you must have the django.contrib.markup application installed. Second, your templates should be setup to process ReST markup into HTML. Here's a sample templates/flatpages/default.html:

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{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load markup %}

{% block title %}{{ flatpage.title }}{% endblock %}

{% block content %}
<h2>{{ flatpage.title }}</h2>

{{ flatpage.content|restructuredtext }}
{% endblock %}

So that short template should allow you to use ReST markup for your flatpages, and it should also take care of the magic behind the .. code:: python directive.

I should also note that Pygments can handle a TON of languages. Check out the Pygments demo for a list of languages it knows how to highlight.

I think that about does it. Hopefully this article will help some other poor chap who is currently in the same situation as I was last night, and hopefully it will save you a lot more time than it took me to figure out all this junk. If it looks like I've missed something, or maybe that something needs further clarification, please comment and I'll see what I can do.

This morning I've been doing some research for work, and I stumbled upon an article that is very helpful for freelancers like me (relatively new to the freelance arena) and people looking for freelancers/design agencies.

Given the recent freelance opportunities that I have been involved with, I found this article to be particularly beneficial. There are many pieces of advice that, taken into consideration, really do distinguish the good freelancers/design agencies from the bad ones.

If the agency has any clue at all, your company will basically have to "interview for the job" in order to be accepted as a client. Agencies that know what they're doing work hard to take on only those projects and those clients that are a good fit for their skill set, even their personality. They'll want to get to know you a bit and they'll want to learn much about your project, its scope, and your specific expectations before they agree to work with you. If you find that they immediately suggest you work with them and start talking about sending you a contract, you're probably talking to the wrong agency. Hang up the phone.

I know that I am guilty of such behavior. In the past, I have quickly jumped at any opportunity to make some extra cash as a freelancer. It usually doesn't take a long time before I begin regretting my hasty acceptance of a job. This is extremely sound advice.

If anyone other than the designer who did the work presents the designs to you, something's amiss and there is likely more yet to go astray. It is an unfortunate habit among some agencies to ever get between the client and the designer. This is a terrible mistake and a clear sign that the agency, large or small, is not well run. As a result, the work produced by the agency is likely to be flawed for the voids in understanding and effectiveness that result. In short, if your project's design phase does not begin and end with direct contact between yourself and the designer, you're getting short shrift. Find another agency.

I'd like to twist this one around a little. I completely agree with what Andy has said here, but I have also been on the receiving end of this particular type of situation. On one recent project, I was receiving instructions from a person who apparently didn't have the same goals as the "real" client. The end result was a product the "real" client didn't really want. Working directly with the client/agency is critical to a successful project.

There are several other important points in Andy's article, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you read it if you find yourself in such a situation. It will only help. In conclusion, I just want to share another quote from Andy's article:

And if you do notice too many of these telltale signs of incompetence in your current agency — don't walk; run.

Last night I had a buddy of mine ask me how I would approach a particular database design problem. I get similar questions quite often from my peers--suggests there is something important lacking from the database classes out there. Instead of answering him directly, I decided to come up with this tutorial for using Django to design your database schema.

For those of you new to Django, this article might seem a bit advanced. In time I will have more introductory-level Django tutorials, but I hope this one is easy enough.

django-admin.py startproject myproject

cd myproject
./manage.py startapp specialapp

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from django.db import models

class Component(models.Model):
    item_number = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    size = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    quantity = models.IntegerField(default=1)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=8, decimal_places=2)

class Project(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    components = models.ManyToManyField(Component)
    instructions = models.TextField()

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INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
)

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INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'specialapp'
)

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DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
DATABASE_NAME = 'myproject.db'

./manage.py sqlall specialapp

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BEGIN;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_component" (
      "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
      "item_number" varchar(20) NOT NULL,
      "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
      "size" varchar(10) NOT NULL,
      "quantity" integer NOT NULL,
      "price" decimal NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_project" (
      "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
      "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
      "instructions" text NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_project_components" (
      "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
      "project_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_project" ("id"),
      "component_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_component" ("id"),
      UNIQUE ("project_id", "component_id")
)
;
COMMIT;

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from django.db import models

class Component(models.Model):
    item_number = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    size = models.CharField(max_length=10)
    quantity = models.IntegerField(default=1)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=8, decimal_places=2)

class Project(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    components = models.ManyToManyField(Component, through='ProjectComponent')
    instructions = models.TextField()

class ProjectComponent(models.Model):
    project = models.ForeignKey(Project)
    component = models.ForeignKey(Component)
    quantity = models.PositiveIntegerField()

    class Meta:
        unique_together = ['project', 'component']

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BEGIN;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_component" (
    "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "item_number" varchar(20) NOT NULL,
    "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "size" varchar(10) NOT NULL,
    "quantity" integer NOT NULL,
    "price" decimal NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_project" (
    "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "name" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    "instructions" text NOT NULL
)
;
CREATE TABLE "specialapp_projectcomponent" (
    "id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    "project_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_project" ("id"),
    "component_id" integer NOT NULL REFERENCES "specialapp_component" ("id"),
    "quantity" integer unsigned NOT NULL,
    UNIQUE ("project_id", "component_id")
)
;
CREATE INDEX "specialapp_projectcomponent_project_id" ON "specialapp_projectcomponent" ("project_id");
CREATE INDEX "specialapp_projectcomponent_component_id" ON "specialapp_projectcomponent" ("component_id");
COMMIT;

./manage.py syncdb

./manage.py sqlall specialapp > specialapp-ddl-080813.sql

Being the Django and Python zealot that I am, I often find myself trying to convert those around me to this awesome development paradigm. Once I break them, these people often ask me a lot of questions about Django. Over the past few months I've noticed that one of the biggest sticking points for people who are new to Django is actually getting it up and running to begin with. In response, this is the first in a series of articles dedicated to getting Django up and running.

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH

source ~/.bash_rc

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"

sudo ln -s /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin

mkdir ~/bin

export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

source ~/.bash_rc

For the past 8 years or so, I've been very much involved with programming using the PHP scripting language. It is a powerful scripting language that suits building websites very well. PHP has a huge set of useful built-in functions, and more recent versions support object-oriented programming. I first started teaching myself PHP when I got tired of having to build each and every web page on my site manually. I hated having to change dozens of web pages just because I added a new link to my navigation. All sort of reasons like this prompted me to investigate PHP. Little did I know then that this language would occupy so much of my time in the future.

I rapidly learned that PHP offered much more than just allowing me to update one part of my website to change all pages. I started tinkering with all aspects of what PHP offered, and I'm still learning about it. After many years of searching, I finally found a programming language that was easy, fast, and efficient for my needs.

Through the years, I continued to develop various applications using PHP. I attempted to write my own forum/bulletin board software while I was still in high school. If I may say so myself, the forum really had some awesome concepts behind it. But my problem was that I lost interest too fast. I also built a very large application that reduced a 1.2GB MS Access database down to less than 15MB using PHP and MySQL. The new application offered many enhancements over the previous system. For one thing, it was much faster. Second, it allowed multiple simultaneous users to modify the database. Three, so far it has lasted more than 3 years, compared to the 1 year maximum that the MS Access solution always seemed to hit before it crashed.

Using PHP, I helped revolutionize the way one of the companies I work for developed websites. I built a simple in-house web framework that supposedly reduced development time by allowing us to forget about the mundane details involved in virtually every website and just get to the developing. In a matter of two weeks (with a full class load and another job), I managed to write an e-commerce solution for the same company using PHP.

Basically, PHP has treated me well over the years. But this post is not supposed to be about PHP. If that's the case, why have I rambled about PHP this whole time, you ask? Well, it's mostly to demonstrate that I have a lot of experience with the language. I have a pretty good feel for what it's capable of and how I can accomplish most anything I need.

With all of that in mind, I've encountered my frustrations with PHP. They may seem petty and moot to most people, but they have turned out to be the determining factor in what scripting language I prefer. Here is a short list of things I now despise about PHP:

• dollar signs ($) to signify variables -- while this is a useful feature, it becomes quite bothersome when you're programming all day long (at least it does for me). I'll get to why later.
• using an actual arrow (->) to access attributes -- most other modern programming languages simply use a period (.) for this functionality. I'll comment more on this and why it frustrates me later as well.
• lack of true object-oriented constructs -- in other object-oriented languages, like Java, if you have a string and you want to determine its length, you call the length() method of that string. In PHP, you call a function such as strlen($var). This sort of behavior plagues the language.
• too many unnecessary keystrokes -- as I mentioned before, all mutable variables are preceded by a dollar sign ($). That is 2 keystrokes (shift and 4) every time you want to refer to a variable, wheres most languages nowadays have none). Likewise, accessing attributes of objects in PHP uses an arrow (->), which is three keystrokes (minus, shift, and .). Most other object-oriented languages only require a period (one keystroke) for such functionality. The main reason I make such a big deal out of the number of keystrokes is simple. The more keystrokes a program requires, the more likely you are to have bugs. The fewer keystrokes a program requires, the less likely it is that your program will be broken. It boils down to maintainability. Also associated with the number of keystrokes is the pure laziness within me and most other programmers.

These frustrations have been bothering me for several years now. I continued using PHP mostly because it's so widely supported, but also because I could not find a suitable replacement for it. I investigated a few others, but they apparently didn't have a great influence on me right now because I don't remember any names.

When the whole Ruby on Rails bandwagon was rolling through town, I decided to hop on to see what all of the hubbub was about. I started studying the Ruby script language, and I found that it had some really neat things about it. It uses a more solid approach to object-oriented programming, which I really liked. I also noticed that it employs some intriguing structures for accomplishing things in ways I've never seen before. Despite these things, Ruby still didn't seem like a viable replacement for my PHP. It didn't come up to snuff in performance in many cases, so I essentially abandoned it.

For at least a year now, I've been interested in learning Python. I've heard a lot about it over the years, but I just never seemed to make the time to actually sit down and study it. That is, not until about the beginning of August of 2007. After I made my decision that Ruby and Ruby on Rails weren't quite up to par for my needs, I stumbled upon the Django Project, which is a web framework similar to Ruby on Rails, only built using Python.

I decided this was my chance to actually sit down and learn a little about this "Python" so I could see what it had to offer. I mostly used Django as my portal to Python. As I started learning Django, I became more and more familiar with the way Python works and how I work with Python.

At some point in time, I decided that I actually liked Python, and my wife let me buy some really cool books to help me learn it. By the beginning of October 2007, I had convinced my supervisor at work to let me start building websites using Django instead of our home-grown PHP framework.

And here comes a story. This is the main reason I blabbered about my experience with PHP so much at the start of this article. Again, after all these years, I feel very confident that I can do just about anything I want efficiently and elegantly with PHP.

Back in October of 2006 (after using PHP for some 7 years), I was asked to write a PHP script to parse some log files and output various bits of information in a certain format. After maybe a week, I had a script that did the job fairly well. Most of the time it worked, but there were occasions when it didn't and I had to fix it. The script turned out to be 365 lines of code with very few comments scattered throughout. It's also a maintenance nightmare, even for me.

In October of 2007, I rewrote that same script in Python. After only a couple days, the script seemed to be perfect. It did its job, and it did it well. With comments for just about every single line of code, the Python version of the script took up a mere 118 lines of code. Take out the comments and it is 56 lines of code. The script is several times more understandable and maintainable than its PHP counterpart. I also believe that it is much more efficient at doing its task. Keep in mind that I had only been using Python for about 2 months at this point in time.

It's been through various experiences like the log parser that I have decided I prefer Python over PHP. Obviously, I'm not quite as comfortable with it as I am with PHP, but I don't feel too far behind. Now, less than 6 months after deciding that we'd use Django at work, I don't think my supervisor could be happier. Building a typical website with our PHP framework takes between 1 week and a couple months. Thanks to Python and Django, most of our websites can be "ready" within just a few hours. That time assumes that the website's design itself is ready for content to be put into it and also that the client does not require custom-designed applications.

Python and Django have helped revolutionize the way we do things at work, and I can hardly stop thinking about it. Python fixes nearly all of the frustrations I had with PHP. The frustrations it doesn't take care of are worth the sacrifice. Python is capable of object-oriented programming. It uses a period (.) to access object attributes. Variables are not preceded by some arbitrary symbol.

Also, the fact that Python code can be compiled to bytecode (like Java) is enormously beneficial. Each and every time a PHP script is executed, the PHP interpreter must parse the code. With Python, the first time a script is executed after an edit, the program is compiled to bytecode and subsequent executions are faster. That is because the bytecode is processed directly by the Python Virtual Machine (as opposed to being compiled to bytecode _each_ time and then executed). Python also offers a vast amount of standard library functions that I would really appreciate having in PHP. But from now on (at least for the foreseeable future), I will try to do all of my scripting in Python and leave PHP for the special cases.