Making Rails and Django Play Nice with the Same Data
March 12, 2012 by Eric Richardson
Friday afternoon, KPCC opened up a public beta for our new web site, which finally gives me license to talk about some of what I've been working on over the past few months.
Accept the cookie on that beta page and you'll get a fresh new view of the KPCC site. In the process, you'll get handed off from our old Django site to a new Ruby on Rails application. Share a link with a friend? If they're not opted-in to the beta, they'll see the old site at the same URL.
That back-and-forth happens via some nifty conditional logic in nginx, a handful of carefully-applied MySQL views and custom session and caching backends that allow us to pass data and trigger actions between Django and Rails.
I'll explore those different pieces over a handful of posts, starting today with the MySQL views that enable polymorphic association and generic relations to play nice. — Continue Reading...
Apologies for the mess
March 11, 2012 by Eric Richardson
It's a bit messy around here at the moment as I take big swings at some of the architectures underneath this little site.
This afternoon I moved the site from a pair of Amazon EC2 t1.micro instances to one of the new 64-bit m1.small instances, getting away from the nasty CPU limits that kill performance after a couple page loads. I also rolled in the newly-engined AssetHost, finding and squashing plenty of instances where I hadn't yet namespaced bits of code in there along the way.
Starting tomorrow I'll be doing some write-ups on things that I've been working on for KPCC, so my silent February should transition into a relatively-wordy March.
A Quick Trip to the Sea
January 23, 2012 by Eric Richardson
Kathy's parents are spending a few weeks in Palm Desert right now, so on Saturday we took a drive east on the 10 to go visit.
We arrived to find blistering winds as a front moved through. The Palm Springs area got gusts of 66mph. Trees were knocked down throughout the area.
That made outdoor activities a little less than desirable, so we hopped back in the car and the four of us took an hour's drive east through the Coachella Valley for an all-too-quick visit to the Salton Sea, California's largest lake and one of its oddest stories. We didn't get to see much before the sun set and we headed back, but it was certainly enough to convince us that the area is worth a return visit.
Five Years, One Background
January 20, 2012 by Eric Richardson
Eric Richardson
According to my little "On This Date" widget, it was five years ago today that I set this abstract image of a plant as my laptop background.
It's still there. I'm not sure if that's laziness or just the fact that it really does meet my needs as wallpaper: neutral colors and a little texture that reads well in the corners.
Five years is probably enough, though. It may be time to change things up. I'll have to be on the lookout for something new.
Looking Back at eThreads
January 15, 2012 by Eric Richardson
Eric Richardson
From 1998 to 2006, my history as a programmer can be traced by one application: eThreads. Originally a forum package intended to be a database-backed replacement for HyperNews, I quickly started to work on turning the code into a more generic CMS platform. — Continue Reading...