About a year ago, I built a new personal server box from scratch. The storage in this machine consisted of three 500GB drives put together in RAID5 using Linux software RAID. This has worked perfectly since installation. Lately, I've noticed that I'm approaching my 1TB limit and have begun looking for an upgrade path.
Posted by Sean Stoops on December 12, 2008 | 0 comments
Ever since I learned regular expressions, they have been one of my most beloved features of any language, especially Python. I know lots of people just cringe at the thought of having to sit down for 30 minutes to hash out a 40 character pattern, but it's too powerful to pass up. Up until recently, my process was just to think the problem through and slowly work up the pattern until I got something that worked. Debugging consisted of merely pulling pieces out and trying them individually. That was until I discovered the hidden Python regex debugging feature a couple weeks ago on Stack Overflow, thanks to BatchyX.
Posted by Sean Stoops on October 28, 2008 | 0 comments
I just wanted to make a quick post because I couldn't immediately find any information about this problem out there anywhere. This problem arises if you have both KVM and VirtualBox installed at the same time, VirtualBox refuses to start.
Posted by Sean Stoops on October 28, 2008 | 1 comment
After the new iGoogle launched, there was a lot of commotion in various forums about how much space is wasted by the sidebar. At this point I had been using the "new" iGoogle for a month or two through the developer sandbox, but really didn't notice it being that bad since most of my time on the internet is on a 1920x1200 monitor. I did notice it a little bit on my laptop, but didn't care enough to look into the issue.
Posted by Sean Stoops on October 26, 2008 | 0 comments
For the past couple years, I've switched back and forth between TextMate and VIM as my primary editor. Lately, I've been on a huge TextMate kick and decided to see what all I could do to customize it. Python, being my primary language, is what I wanted to write my scripts in. However, most of the TextMate bundles are written in Ruby (a language I don't at all understand -- it looks crazy to me). After much digging around in the source of some of these bundles and pecking through Ruby to see how it's interacting with TextMate, I was able come up with a little script.
Posted by Sean Stoops on March 20, 2008 | 0 comments
On several occasions, I (and the templaters on my team) have needed a way to do datetime comparisons from within a template. The first example is testing if the pub_date on an object is today. Usually, I just end up writing a helper method on the model to do this; something like is_today. However, we've run into several instances where this wasn't possible or it would have just been too much of a mess to write these helper methods on every model. I then decided to create a little templatetag to take care of this for me.
Posted by Sean Stoops on March 8, 2008 | 0 comments
A few days ago, I was generating some XML to feed a video player. I would grab a list of the last 20 uploaded videos, then grab the categories associated with each video to create a set of "tabs" for the player. For instance, five of the videos may belong to the "high_school_football" category, so we would have a "High School Football" tab containing five videos. I then needed the categories to be ranked by the number of videos in each.
Posted by Sean Stoops on October 6, 2007 | 2 comments
A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of querying a MSSQL 2000 database from Solaris using python. It was a bit of a hassle to get it all setup so it finally worked like I needed. I spent a couple days researching before I was finally successful. I thought I would try to remember my experience and share it here.
Posted by Sean Stoops on October 5, 2007 | 0 comments
thesigb.com finally lives again! Around early August, I had a drive fail pretty completely. I was across the state at the time, so I just had to wait to get home to see just exactly what the issue was. I could still authenticate through ssh, but it would boot me immediately. I had a friend tell me that it may be a dead drive.
Posted by Sean Stoops on September 10, 2007 | 0 comments
One day after my first tagging post, I complete my tagging section. Like I mentioned in the previous post, if you up in the little orange box to the top left, you can see a list of tags that I've used on my weblog entries.
Posted by Sean Stoops on July 26, 2007 | 7 comments
I'm currently in the process of adding blog entry tagging. To the top left you can see a "tag cloud". This will eventually be a set of links what you can click to see all stores tagged with a particular label.
Posted by Sean Stoops on July 25, 2007 | 0 comments
I've decided to finally get around to detailing what I've created in this site so far and what is yet to come. Right now it's very simple -- just some simple django on the back and simple CSS + HTML + JavaScript on the front.
Posted by Sean Stoops on July 23, 2007 | 23 comments
The other day a friend and coworker, Jesse, started toying around with a little Javascript library called 'Mootools'. I had heard of it before a long time ago, but no one had ever told me just how cool it really was. It adds some really slick methods of working with your HTML dom and also includes some really simple implementations of some animations, etc.
Posted by Sean Stoops on July 22, 2007 | 1 comment
thesigb.com has been my site for web development experimentation for the past few years. The first iteration of the site began when I was a Sophomore in college. I really had no talent at all then. I pretty much just stole someone's style, modified the heck out of it, threw my content in there, and no one ever saw it.
The second iteration was when I started doing quite a bit of CSS work and incorporating some graphics work, but it was all still simple HTML and very little JavaScript...
Posted by Sean Stoops on July 17, 2007 | 2 comments
