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-James

Green Zone

Posted by james on Aug 13, 2010 12:00 AM

7

IMDB     Apple Trailers

This looked good - from the makers of Bourne Identity. Indeed, from Jason Bourne himself (Matt Damon). It was very suspenseful, and had a nice mix of middle-eastern city warfare action and political intrigue. The political side reminded me of Tom Clancy movies, but not as heavy.

Overall, I liked this one a lot. It's not one of my favorites, and doesn't nearly hold up to the Bourne-series (which have a lot more heart), but still a very good movie.

How to switch from dmigrations to South

Posted by james on Jul 27, 2010 12:00 AM

I used to use dmigrations for django. Dmigrations is a database migrations library that makes keeping DB schemas up-to-date so easy & reliable. When you're a single developer, with only one dev machine and one server, this isn't as much an issue. Once you have teams (or multiple servers), this becomes necessary. But even for the single dev, once you use managed migrations you'll want to use it for everything.

I first started using dmigrations, which was nice but had a few bugs. One of the glaring ones: there's a typo in the codebase (which can only be checked out via SVN) that has existed there for a long, long time, and prevents normal operation. Why hasn't this been fixed? Because dmigrations has been abandoned. Supposedly, even the authors recommend using south instead.

So along comes South. South addresses the same problem, but is much better in just about every way (with the caveat that it's slightly more complicated, but not much). South handles more, better, cleaner, etc.

So here's how I took my dmigrations webapp and converted it to use south instead:

1. Backup your mysql database!


2. Now edit settings.py:


3. Remove 'dmigrations' from INSTALLED_APPS, add 'south'.


4. Remove the DMIGRATIONS_DIR and DISABLE_SYNCDB (if you have that) vars.


5. From the command prompt:


6. > del migrations\*


7. > manage.py schemamigration app_name --initial


8. > manage.py syncdb


9. > manage.py migrate --fake

Canon SDK update - EDSDK 2.8 is out (Windows 7, finally!)

Posted by james on Apr 25, 2010 12:00 AM

For those that are interested (probably not many out there), Canon just released an update to their EDSDK library. This update includes support for Windows 7 and the Rebel 550D/T2i, and hopefully supports live view on DSLRs.

The good - finally, support for Windows 7. What took so long?

The bad - I fully expect to find documentation written by monkeys, and example code littered with typos and calls to non-existent functions. Please surprise me, Canon...

Fill out the application for the Canon SDK.

Teracopy is *really* fast for copying files

Posted by james on Apr 12, 2010 3:10 PM

I saw this listed on Lifehacker, but I was a little skeptical. Teracopy is supposed to speed up file copies, it's freeware, and it's a drop-in replacement for the existing Windows copy mechanism.

Here's my completely unscientific, very-small-sample-size benchmarks:

Copy a folder with tons of small files & .svn folders, 22.7MB big. Made a copy of the folder twice with each method. Alternated methods to make sure FS cache did not influence results unfairly.

Normal copy & paste: 19.21s, 18.32s
Teracopy: 7.83s, 6.12s

Wow. Now, this is on a OCZ Vertex 60GB drive, so admittedly the drive is fast to begin with. But a simple freeware drop-in that speeds things up that much? I'm sold.

Go download Teracopy.

PS. This reminds me of those stupid "gain more memory" freeware apps for Windows 9x. Except that this actually works. Something about dynamically adjusting copy buffers, makes sense to me.