Matt

  • App Control Demo

    App Control is a Django App that I have been evolving over the last year for a backend service to support my (and my friends) iOS apps. It allows you to update them, push new content to them, and provide some central storage for building things like a commenting engine and to tie everyone who…

  • The singularity

    In the last few days I read two books. I don’t read very many fiction books but these got me thinking. The singularity is a term taken from physics. In the world of physics a singularity is an object or event in space where the laws of normal physics break and thing behave in wild…

  • iTunes Download Stats

    Recently I’ve been building out my iPhone App server to provide a business dashboard with all the relevant services and numbers that I care about available at a glance. It avoids me having to sign in and out of many different sites to get the information and makes it easier to push things together –…

  • django-linkshare

    One of the ways to make money on the itunes store is to sign up for the itunes affiliate program. Linkshare runs the program in the USA and they will give you a 5% commission on all sales that you refer. It works through cookie based tracking that is valid for 72 hours… Meaning that…

  • Fabric For Development

    Fabric is a pretty awesome tool for deploying projects. But it turns out that it’s also pretty awesome for lots of other stuff. At PyCon 2012 there was a talk given by Ricardo Kirkner (which you can watch here) that inspired me to play around with fabric in some new ways. It’s possible to use…

  • Python is like a Secret Weapon

    I am continually in awe of the power of Python code. The readability of the language combined with the lack of magic, and the massive number of easily obtainable libraries out there make getting things done insanely fast. It is the only language where I consistently experience writing code that works the first time. Last…

  • Peculiar Puzzle – Missing GET Parameters

    over the last week I have been seeing an odd error usually just once or twice per day out of the 10,000+ requests per day that hit my django web app backend for the iPhone apps. It appears as though the GET parameters get dropped and I can’t explain why. Hoping someone out there has…

  • Geolocation of Client with Django

    My first thoughts yesterday when I started trying to add a lookup for a user’s country based on IP address was that this was going to be tricky. I figured I would have to create some models, fill them with data fixtures and do some manual queries against the database. Turns out it was fairly…

  • Cross Promotion Analytics

    Earlier this week I was on a webinar. I wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. But figured there might be one or two nuggets in there to help out with my iPhone business. Turns out I had a eye opening experience and got several ideas for how to take my business to the…

  • Setting up a Mac for Django Development

    I usually use Linux for doing python and django development.   However last night my Linux PC choked up yet again due to bad video drivers and I was forced to do a hard reboot. That was the final straw that made me switch over to using my Mac for most of my development work…