Celebrity Fantasy Game in Django

Monday, August 18 2008 9:53 p.m.

If you've played fantasy football or any fantasy sport you know what I'm takling about. If you're new to the concept, you pick a roster of celebrities and if they show up in the news, you get points.

The site was written using Django (trunk as of the 13th!) and Postgres 8.2. We've built a fantasy games package on top of the Django core which we would probably open-source if the community showed some interest in it.

This is our 2nd major site in Django and we really love it. To begin with, Python is a great language. When we built our fantasy engine, it was originally coded on MySQL. We encountered quite a few problems porting it over to Postgres. There are lots of little things where MySQL does type conversions for you automatically and Postgres (correctly in my opinion) does not. I definitely feel the conversion was worth it so that now we're on an enterprise level database.

HollywoodDraft.com Launched Today! Got Game?

Sunday, August 17 2008 8:43 p.m.

The concept is simple, celebrity media meets fantasy sports. You pick a roster of celebrities that will be all over the blogs and magazines and you get points when they appear. Getting the cover of People magazine is like getting a touchdown in fantasy football. Your celebrity got arrested? You lose points.

For those of you that think I disappeared... This is what I've been working on the last few months. Check it out!

MySQL Connection Pooling with Django and SQLAlchemy

Friday, July 25 2008 12:41 p.m.

Here's a quick and dirty recipe to get connection caching from SQLAlchemy. This is really not connection pooling as that would require a separate process to only handle connections. All this does is prevent the connection from closing after you finish a query. We're also not replacing the Django ORM.

To give a little more background, normally when you use Django to get to your database, Django will automatically disconnect from the database when the thread is done with that query.

You're Being Controlled, and You Like It!

Wednesday, July 16 2008 11:03 p.m.

This post is a follow-up to my earlier post about celebrating your personal freedom.

If you're on your way to being free, congrats. If you're not on your way and you think you're free, you probably don't know how controlled you are. Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone out there. But chances are, it applies to you.

Launching a High Performance Django Site

Sunday, July 6 2008 3:29 p.m.

Are the brakes on your Django app?

When building an application using an application framework like Django... the priority is often to get the application working first and optimize it later. The trade off is between getting it done and getting it done for 1 million users. Here's a check list of things you can do to make sure your application can be optimized quickly when you put on your optimization hat. Note, most applications don't need all of this since most applications do not get anywhere near enough traffic to justify even bothering. But if you're lucky enough to need to optimize your Django app, I hope this post can help you.

Happy Independence Day! Are you Independent?

Thursday, July 3 2008 11:01 a.m.

With the country celebrating its independence, it's a perfect time to talk about about freedom and independence. As you may have overheard in school... America declared independence from tyranny over 200 years ago on July 4th. That was the short-term action. However, America wasn't free on July 4th. Just like in weight-loss, it takes time to reach the goal. It took long term commitment and determination to actually make a free society. A society where personal responsibility is of utmost importance and freedoms for everyone are the ideal goal that we hope to never fall short of.

It's been over 200 years that that long-term commitment to freedom has been declared. How free and independent are you? There's probably an easy way to measure this. Freedom is directly related to responsibility, just as light is related to visibility. The more light there is the more you can see, and so it is with responsibility.

Beautiful Clouds

Monday, June 30 2008 10:04 p.m.

The above sample is looking east, north east out the window from downtown Minneapolis.

Someone recently sent me this link with example of rare cloud formations with small explanations of the atmospheric events required to create the clouds. The geek factor is in the explanation of course.

Castro Doesn't Let His People Own Guns. Will Obama?

Monday, June 23 2008 6:17 p.m.

The likely next president of the United States has very interesting answers when asked about guns.

For all of those that think owning a gun is ridiculous and no one should have the right to have one... Here's an open letter.

The average American outsources so much, that they can't even change a tire without calling AAA. Should we outsource a basic need like security? Shouldn't we be allowed to provide our own security with appropriate tools?

Last.fm Rocks

Monday, May 19 2008 7:56 a.m.

Check out these cool stats I was able to produce by crunching my last.fm listening habits via this program.

Python Timezone Conversion Example Using pytz

Tuesday, May 13 2008 12:11 a.m.

Here's an example showing how to convert from one timezone to another in Python. Note that you won't be able to save the full date/time in MySQL without stripping out the timezone info.

MySQL, Dates and Time zones, Postgres and Mindshare

Saturday, May 10 2008 12:27 a.m.

A database can’t be all things to everyone. Each one has its sweet spot. MySQL happens to be the Wal-Mart of the database world. A large market sweet spot with lots of really cheap stuff, questionably good for you and serving a basic need.

Occasionally, MySQL will let you down with some basic things… like time zones.

New Site. Now With 80% More Blog

Thursday, May 1 2008 11:56 p.m.

Hope everyone likes the new updated blog format. Been trying to get this online for several months, but never had enough time to get it just right. It's still not, but it's good enough.

Complete change in technology for the new version. Using Django app framework on top of Python. Python is the most fun coding since SQLWindows (another OOP language with forced language formatting).

Features coming soon... RSS feeds and tagging.

The 5,318 Mile Road Trip

Sunday, December 2 2007 9:15 p.m.

Leaving Minneapolis early on Friday, November 9th watching the sun rise. Weather is a bit cold in town but I don't care very much since weather.com is predicting nice weather in the Black Hills. We drive through I-90 as quickly as we can without getting caught by The Man and exited Minnesota into South Dakota. A flat landscape changes into a few hills here and there then into gently rolling hills and finally into some serious hills. We detour into Badlands National Park. If you ever need to get away and disappear from it all, this is the place to do it. The hills seem to go on forever. After, we visit the wonderful tourist trap known as Wall Drug and eat dinner there. We reach our modest first day goal of getting as far as possible from Minneapolis. We spend the night in Rapid City.