Recently I've been working on a new project in django, Squirt Blurt. It's been taking up a large majority of my time, so I haven't had much time to create new posts or work on other projects, but I just thought I would give a few impressions of things I learned/did along the way.
I recently bought a Lenovo S10-3T convertible tablet/netbook PC on a great deal through best buy.com. Its primary purpose was as a reading/programming tool on my commute. It has the Intel ATOM 1.66 GHz processor, 1GB RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. Read more for impressions.
Lately I've been playing with what seems like a multitude of NoSQL databases. Three in particular (MongoDB, CouchDB, and Riak) have caught my eye, though there are many more that have interesting concepts. Features such as ease of use and scalability typically impress me, so these three stand out because of their ease of use, ingenuity, and python/erlang compatibility.
We just released the first version of Johnny Cache. It's very exciting to see it done and available to the public. Jason wrote a great write up about the path Johnny has taken recently, so I won't re-hash what he said. Instead, I thought I would give an overview of query cache-ability using the framework.
In a language like Python, not many things are lazy evaluated by nature, as opposed to a language like Haskell where everything is lazy by nature. Python does have generators that provide lazy iterations, but it is easy to also create lazy dictionaries and other data structures.
The Auth Server I've been working on is finally available on github at http://github.com/finder/erl_auth
Stay tuned for more community tools such as comments, feedback, and user forums. I realize that the site is still bare, but the framework is now at a place that I can begin much faster development.
I spent the majority of my weekend writing a generic caching server for Erlang to be used with my authentication/authorization lib. Originally I had created an auth lib (it still exists, but will be dead) at Google Code but decided to translate it from Python to Erlang, and hopefully make it better. One of the requirements was a limited in memory caching server. I could use memcached, but I couldn't think of a better first project to write in erlang to get my feet wet before starting the big authentication library.
So how many times have I relaunched this site? It has to be at least 35 times? Of course I've had it quite a while. But I guess I finally have a purpose for it...ultimately, I want to catalog my adventures in programing and computing, and once again hopefully help others program.
I seriously doubt any of my old readers or members are still around, but the most successful time of this site was when I was writing articles. I am going to start again, only focusing on my own programming ventures rather than a general purpose teaching of programming that almost every programming book covers.