Niall's Weblog

This week I bought the Google Nexus One phone. I’ve been very impressed with the device so far. Here are some of my thoughts. Keep in mind that this is a hacker’s perspective and I’m not nearly so interested in eye candy and user experience as many people might be.

On the [...]

Recently I needed to implement my own autocomplete for a project on snagmachine.com. We had a large database of products and wanted to ease data entry by hinting to the user via autocomplete when possible.

In future, we can probably just use Freebase Suggest but right now we needed our own solution.
The Pieces
Autocomplete is not [...]

Pylons makes it super easy to return data to a client. You just return a string from your controller method!

class HelloController(BaseController):
 
def index(self):
return ‘Hello World!’

Very nice. However, what if you want to serve up a potentially quite large file to the client? [...]

As many readers may be aware, the venerable Sendmail has been the default mail daemon in OpenBSD for years. This is largely because it is the only reasonable BSD-licensed mail server around. Personally, I have never trusted Sendmail enough to use it on any of my hosts – despite the fact that it [...]

I just finished my hack of JQuery In Place Editor to work with Freebase Suggest. I call it “JQuery Suggest In Place”. Its pretty much the same as JQuery Edit In Place, except it is stripped down a bit to only give you an input text field with a bound Freebase Suggest. [...]