Django Model Templates (sans-Denormalisation)

April 27th, 2010 by Rob Golding

I came across an interesting problem recently, while trying to model the structure of a university course in Django.

The model needed to represent the notion of a university module, which can be taught over a number of semesters and/or years, by different people, and with different students each time round. Some information remained common to each of these modules however, such as the code, name, and type of the module (single semester or full-year).

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MyUni and Django 1.2

April 23rd, 2010 by Rob Golding

MyUni is hailed as my "latest venture" on the front page of my website. In fact, it was conceived early last year, when I was in my first year at Nottingham University, by Rob Miles and Ben Jenkinson. We were only just starting to get to grips with this new fad, called Django. Read the rest of this entry →

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“Change is Coming”

April 12th, 2010 by Rob Golding

I'm sure that I am not the only one waiting for the new release of Ubuntu - 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

My netbook has been in need of a reinstall for quite a while now, and this will be the perfect opportunity - if only slightly inconvenient that it falls right in the middle of one of the busiest periods of the year for me!

I first expected that with 10.04 being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, it would be lighter on new features, and heavier on bugfixes and the like. That doesn't seem to be the case, however, with a healthy list of new stuff on the website. I'm most looking forward to the faster boot times, as a slow boot often gets in my way when I'm starting up at the beginning of a lecture.

What's your most anticipated new feature of Ubuntu 10.04?

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New Site Design

March 13th, 2010 by Rob Golding

It dawned upon me quite suddenly recently, that my site has been running this same design (Freshy 2 by Jide) since it was brought online in late 2007. That, my friend, is not acceptable!

So, I have been working on a totally new design, of my own creation this time. The main site has already been changed over, and I'm working on themeing the WordPress install as we speak.

To take a look at the new theme's progress, check it out here. The new theme is now live on the site, I hope you like it!

I'll be sure to update you when it's complete. In the meantime however, feedback, as always, is most welcome.

Update: The new design is now live! I'll still be working on it though, fixing up any little niggles that are bound to crop up.

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Mercurial on University of Nottingham Computer Science Servers

March 1st, 2010 by Rob Golding

For a while now, I've been using Subversion to keep track of personal projects and coursework at university. SVN is installed on the UNIX servers as Computer Science, so it's a relatively trivial process to get up and running with a repository when I start a new assignment.

Recently though, I've been looking in to Mercurial as a more modern alternative. Some things about Subversion are really starting to annoy me, like the inability to ignore files on a repository-wide level easily (I work with Python all the time, so .pyc files can really get on my nerves!). Mercurial seems slicker, and I'm interested in the concept of DVCS, as opposed to the classic client-server way of thinking.

However, Mercurial is not installed on the (rather ancient, now) Solaris servers at university. I really admire the job that the sysadmins do, so I am in no way condemning them for it not being installed. Instead, I set out to get it compiled and working myself.

Installing it on the servers, it seemed, was the easy part. I followed the installation instructions (making sure to include the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable) and all was well.

Cloning from the server, however, wasn't so easy. The problem lies in the fact that Mercurial is now installed for me, and me alone. The hg binary lives in my home directory, not on the server's main path (i.e. the /usr/bin/ directory). Therefore, I needed to tell the client exactly what command to run on the server. If anyone else is having the same trouble, the command that I finally came up with looks like this:

hg --config ui.remotecmd="LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/sfw/lib PYTHONPATH=~/lib/python ~/bin/hg"

I then aliased this command to hgtuck to save my sanity (the server is named tuck, after Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood legends), and I now have a perfectly working Mercurial install!

If anyone else is looking to do something similar, then I hope this little tip saves you some time!

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