development
2023
TIL - Block OpenAI and Meta's LLM web crawlers
·53 words·1 min
TIL
llm
development
web
Thanks to this post from Adam Johnson, I’ve now updated my configuration to block OpenAI and Meta from crawling this website to feed their LLMs.
Weeknotes for 2023-05-28
·317 words·2 mins
Weeknotes
personal
development
python
explorers wanted
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. The last few work weeks have been so busy that by the end of the Friday work day I’ve been too tired to write a post. But I’m back home after a week overseas and it’s a long weekend, so let’s use this opportunity to catch up.
Quote: Naomi Klein on AI delusions
·90 words·1 min
Quotes
machine learning
llm
development
tech
Because we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists.
Quote: Simon Willison on LLMs
·145 words·1 min
Quotes
machine learning
llm
development
tech
I’m personally skeptical that LLMs provide enough benefit to outweigh their potential harm, and so I deeply appreciate those who are attempting to make them work without relying on pixie dust.
2018
Migrating a Django application from Heroku to AWS Elastic Beanstalk
·3467 words·17 mins
Articles
development
heroku
aws
elastic beanstalk
django
python
Here’s the scenario you find yourself in: you’ve built and deployed a cool little Django app, and successfully deployed it on Heroku. You’ve followed all the great advice out there and are using django-environ to help manage all the various configuration variables you have to retrieve from your Heroku dynos.
2017
Goodnight, Writer's Ledger. Hello, Pacemaker.
·463 words·3 mins
Articles
writing
development
I’ve written here before about one of my side projects, a suite of productivity tools for writers called Writer’s Ledger. The idea began from a desire to convert the spreadsheets I use for tracking manuscripts to a reusable web app.
Now supporting JSON feeds and scheduled posts
··237 words·2 mins
Articles
meta
assorted geekery
development
pelican
I’m happy to report that this site now produces a valid JSON feed for your consumption. If you are using one of the few feedreaders that support them, that is.
Soaring with Pelican
·737 words·4 mins
Articles
personal
development
assorted geekery
meta
python
pelican
Get Pelican: it’s good! There comes a time in every young man’s life when he begins to neglect his digital lawn, and the weeds grow so thick you wouldn’t think there was any home there at all.
2015
Changelog: Scheduled Posts in Jekyll
·691 words·4 mins
Articles
meta
development
jekyll
octopress
I do so love to tinker…
One thing that has annoyed me about using a static site generator for my blog has been the lack of scheduled posts. It’s a feature I relied on quite a bit back when I used Wordpress, and also when I built my custom Django CMS.
Changelog: Improving Discovery and Readability
·780 words·4 mins
Articles
meta
personal
development
lsi
jekyll
octopress
django
xapian
haystack
Iteration is the thing. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. After all, tinkering is easy to do, especially when you are working with a platform as flexible as Jekyll. So as you would expect, I’ve made several changes to the site since the initial relaunch.
2013
Hacking on Octopress
·1111 words·6 mins
Articles
meta
development
ruby
assorted geekery
As previously discussed, I recently switched to Octopress on this site. I’ve been pretty happy with that decision thus far. Performance is good thanks to static files. It’s a joy to compose in Markdown, preview it on my own machine, and then deploy to my site.
Switching To Octopress
·1512 words·8 mins
Articles
assorted geekery
meta
ruby
octopress
django
development
python
jekyll
hyde
This site is now powered by Octopress. The tentacles compell you!
It’s tentacly delicious !
The Search> The Search # As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been looking to try out a new CMS for this site.
2011
Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog)
·98 words·1 min
Articles
scaling
development
Macieg Ceglowski breaks down what happened during the mass exodus from Delicious and how the Pinboard team dealt with the huge influx of users that resulted from that event. It’s a great analysis of how they coped the traffic increase, and what kinds of measures they needed to take in order to scale to meet the new demand.
Bleach: HTML Sanitization
·132 words·1 min
Articles
development
python
html
security
Bleach is a rather clever Python module for sanitizing HTML input and auto-linking URLs. It uses a whitelist for the allowed elements and attributes (thank God), and will avoid trying to “linkify” URLs that are already within an anchor element.
2010
Version 3.0
·1106 words·6 mins
Articles
announcements
django
python
development
After lots of hard work, some swearing, and lots of patience on the part of my wife, Version 3.0 of this site is now live. It’s been a long journey, but getting it done has been very satisfying.
2009
The Go Programming Language
·71 words·1 min
Articles
development
go language
google
open source
programming
Google has released their own programming language, appropriately named Go.
I haven’t had time to dig deeply into this yet, but I’m seeing some interesting stuff that I like such as fast compilation, garbage collection, easy to read syntax, built in support for multicore machines and of course an open source BSD-style license.
October Braindump
·2027 words·10 mins
Articles
braindump
development
django
personal
reviews
I have not been posting here much of late, which is partly due to the amount of stuff I’m working on, and partly due to the fact that I’ve been writing and posting stuff in other places around the web, since it is easier.
2008
Comments Closed Temporarily While I Do Some Plumbing
·79 words·1 min
Articles
akismet
announcements
development
Photo by golfer4life under a Creative Commons license.
I’ve had to shut off commenting functionality for the time being folks. The spammers have been trying hard to get in, and the code that I’ve written to run comments though Akismet for spam checking is occasionally resulting in a spinning process on the server if it gets too many requests.
Django Rosetta
·38 words·1 min
Articles
development
django
programming
python
Via Simon Willison:
This is a real cool Django app that creates an awesome interface to help internationalize your site. Allows the adminstrator, and an optional group of designated translators to read and write your site’s gettext files.
Quick Post: My Pownces, Let Me Show You Them
·154 words·1 min
Articles
api
assorted geekery
development
django
pownce
programming
python
social networking
Heh, I had a little fun this afternoon writing a little Django app for my site that will regularly import my public Pownce notes and allow me to display them in the sidebar.