The Blog of Xangis

Back Into Audio Software?

Xangis — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:22:39 +0000

I haven’t written a single line of audio-related code since I stopped using C++ two years ago.

It’s not that you can’t write audio software with C#. It’s more that doing so would be more than unpleasant.

Since I’ve switched to Python as my primary language, I’m going to see what I can do with it audio-wise. It seems well-suited to the projects I want to tackle, but only time and effort will tell.

Technorati

Xangis — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:34:52 +0000

I know I’m the only one who reads this blog, but it’s now on Technorati if you want to follow it:

Forgot One

Xangis — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:29:09 +0000

I forgot to list a domain yesterday, but it’s now up on eBay:

veygoth.com

Go ahead and bid, you’ll probably get it for 99 cents.

Domains For Sale

Xangis — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:06:43 +0000

It’s time to do some domain cleaning again. This time I’ve listed the following domains on eBay:

allpossibleworlds.net
investor-advocate.com
vlacis.com
forexsavant.com
equitysavant.com
fmycompany.com + fuckmycompany.com
poll-vote.net
champion-analytics.com

If any of them sound interesting, you might as well bid because they’ll probably sell at 99 cents (since the domain market is kind of crap on eBay).

Redirect Madness

Xangis — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:55:13 +0000

Don’t ever set a redirect from www.example.com to example.com when your Wordpress site is set to use www.example.com as the “siteurl” and “home”. You can get into an endless redirect loop that will require you to edit your SQL database to change those settings. That happened here and the blog was down for a couple days. Yuck.

Clearing Drupal Logs Without Running SQL

Xangis — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:24:38 +0000

Drupal 6 stores access log info in the ‘watchdog’ and ‘access’ tables. Although you can clear those with an SQL query, there’s an easier way:

1. Go to admin/settings/error-reporting and set “discard log entries older than” to 1 hour.
2. Run cron.
3. Go back to admin/settings/error-reporting and set “discard log entries older than” back to something normal, like 1 week.

This isn’t a full clear, but it will purge most of the search and error message spam.

Getting Django Figured Out

Xangis — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:28:43 +0000

My current project is figuring out how to build sites with Django. It’s a bit tough to get a handle on because it’s a moving target. I have a book based on a pre-1.0 version. There are plenty of tutorials and videos on pre-1.0, 1.0, and the current development version (1.1). In many cases, the method of getting something done has changed enough that an older/newer tutorial or HOWTO doesn’t work.

Despite that frustration, I seem to be wrapping my head around Django 1.0.2 (the current production version) fairly well. I can create models and sync them with a database, configure the admin interface, etc. Now I need to focus on the views and templates so I can turn the data models into something useful.

Engine X (nginx)

Xangis — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:12:36 +0000

I’ve spent the past couple days setting up an Ubuntu Server on VMWare. I’m building a development environment that I can use somewhere like Slicehost or Linode, and I want to get it set up so that it can run the 20 or so domains I have without chewing up all available resources.

There’s a lot I want to be able to run on this VPS –

Drupal (PHP + MySQL)
Django (Python + PostgreSQL)
Rails (Ruby + MySQL)
ASP.NET Apps (C# + PostgreSQL)
A MUD (C#)
Silverlight/Moonlight Apps (C#)

Since the biggest bottleneck in a VPS is usually RAM and Apache is a gluttonous pig when it comes to memory, I’ve been working with nginx, which is fast and has a very small memory footprint. That comes at a cost, though — pretty much everything has to be configured manually.

Part of the configuration involves manually creating fastcgi entries for scripting languages that I’m using. So far I have PHP and Python working (so I can use Drupal and Django). I’m halfway there — I just need to get Ruby and C# going.

Random Character Name Generator

Xangis — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:30:43 +0000

I wrote a random character name generator in Python today. It’s HERE at Xangis.com.

First ASP.NET MVC Application

Xangis — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:04:44 +0000

I spent a couple days learning how to use the ASP.Net MVC framework and built a DMOZ-like link directory site as my first project. It’s online here:

VLACIS.com

The acronym is actually a backronym — I originally bought the domain for a large number of years when Yahoo was having a 99-cent domain sale. It was the name of an RPG character I was playing at the time and I was just going to use the site for PvP kill screenshots. So I made up the phrase “Virtual Link and Category Information System” to go with the domain name.