http://www.karlstanley.net/blog Discoveries, opinions and ideas about building applications for the web. Sun, 23 May 2010 18:37:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The previous post shows how to display a wireframe model using canvas and javascript. One problem with the example is that the spaceship appears to be transparent. This is because we're drawing all the faces that make up the shape, instead of just the faces that are pointing towards the ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=32 Further to my previous post, I decided to upgrade my 3d wireframe code to use some more interesting shapes. I got the data for the ships from elite from Neil Wallis's site. Check out the rotating cobra mk III canvas demo. The previous version of the code was very simple - ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=31 I have been doing a bit of playing around with the <canvas> element lately. When I was a kid I was a big fan of elite on the spectrum. I remember being blown away by the wireframe 3d graphics. In homage to the old-skool world of 3d wireframe graphics (and ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=30 I posted something here at the start of my last agile project. I meant to follow it up but didn't get around to it. Bad me. Anyway, it was a 10-iteration project that had the following velocities: As you can see, there was a big spike around iterations 5 and 6 ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=28 This information is lifted from RESTful Web Services, which is well worth the read if you build web applications. See chapter 12, page 354 onwards to find out about using django RESTfully. Django users will know that it's possible to use callable objects instead of strings in URLconfs. One great use ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=26 While setting up a WSGI-hosted django app on Fedora 10, I could not get apache to serve any files that weren't stored under /var/www/. I tried changing the DocumentRoot using the Alias Directive using symbolic links from /var/www to the required location chmod -R go=rx path/to/my/files chown -R apache path/to/my/files Changing the User and Group apache ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=25 The Leitrim Design House web site went down the other day because it had exceeded its bandwidth allocation. This caught me by surprise - it's a relatively small site for a niche audience and I was quite sure I had put it on a hosting plan with enough available resources. ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=24 Here at ticket-text we have just embarked on a new software project. I'm not going to get into the specifics of what it's supposed to do*, but suffice to say it's a large-ish django app. We've spent the last couple of months figuring out what it's supposed to do and ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=22 I have been using django of late and am very impressed with most of it. Here's just 1 little gem. Suppose you have 3 models like this: class Owner:     name = models.CharField("name", max_length=100) class Pet:     name = models.CharField("name", max_length=100)     owner = models.ForeignKey(Owner, verbose_name=_(u"owner")) class Toy:     name = models.CharField("name", max_length=100)     owner = models.ForeignKey(Pet, verbose_name=_(u"owner")) This represents pet owners, each of ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=21 I recently wrote some python scripts that pull information from a SQL Server 2005 database. The scripts are hosted on a redhat machine, so I installed freetds and pymssql to help wire things up. I then started python and typed: >import _mssql >mssql=_mssql.connect('123.123.123.123:1433', 'user', 'pass') which gave me this rather cryptic error: Traceback ... http://www.karlstanley.net/blog/?p=20