Niall's Weblog

I read today that Turbo Gears 2.0 has been released – at long last! I used Turbo Gears 1 briefly in 2007 for a small project then switched to Pylons. Pylons is pretty neat because its really a framework for building a framework. You can pick and choose WSGI middleware and slot it all together [...]

I’ve been playing with the recently-released HTTP API for accessing the Best Buy product catalog. While its a little strange to use at first, its actually pretty useful. One of the things I am interested in is online retail, specifically how to make Internet shopping easier. Lets imagine I am looking for information on a [...]

On ORMs It so happens that I end up dealing with the Python ORM SQLObject pretty often. I don’t really like ORMs very much, since in my experience they make those 80% of database things that are already easy to do with plain SQL easier, while making the other 20% of database things which are [...]

Lots of people have a small home network. Usually you have a combo box which acts as a router/firewall/file server. Then you have a couple of other machines hooked up, and you share the Internet using NAT. A private DNS server is helpful in this kind of scenario for two reasons: Recursive resolver cache can [...]

Have you ever tried to run a very network-intensive P2P application on Windows XP SP2 or higher? If so, you may have encountered very strange behaviour with the Windows TCP/IP network stack. Specifically, you won’t be able to open any new TCP/IP connections, so web-browsing, email checking, SSH, etc will all be basically unusable. At [...]