Niall's Weblog

I run OpenBSD on all my machines. I think its a great operating system with excellent range of features and all the components fit together nicely. One of my favourite things about OpenBSD is the highly aggressive release schedule. While a stable release is cut every 6 months, Theo is producing complete, full builds of [...]

This article is a followup to my previous post, Facebook apps in Python and Pylons part 1. I’m going to talk a little more about what is interesting about Facebook apps and how they work in practice. At the end, I provide a little code sample and a convenience decorator to save you some hassle. [...]

Recently I have been working on a pretty simple Facebook application. I’ve found that the tough thing about writing a Facebook app is not the app per se, but figuring out what a Facebook app actually is, and how it is supposed to work! Anyway, I’m hoping to shed some light on the subject as [...]

Pylons ships with Beaker, which provides some very useful caching functionality. While there are a bunch of ways to use it, I like the handy decorator, @beaker_cache. To use it, simply wrap up your response-generating function call like so: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 from pylons.decorators.cache import beaker_cache class MyController(BaseController): [...]

SQLite is an extremely useful little database. It has a nifty bunch of features and is super simple to set up. Using SQLite reduces the cost of developing and maintaining a powerful SQL database even more than traditional free RDBMS’ like PostgreSQL and MySQL. Your database is simply an on-disk file – no need to [...]