I’ve been thinking about deployment for my app these last few days and one of the things I needed to be able to do is automatically load initial data to one of the tables. If you’re already using South (which you should be unless you have a very, very simple project), you can easily include this in a data migration by loading in a fixture.

You can accomplish this in a few simple steps:

1. …

I finally decided to redo an old Django project of mine, GlucoseTracker, a web application for tracking blood sugar levels mainly for people with diabetes (I’ve been Type 1 diabetic since I was 13), using the latest version of Django and Twitter Bootstrap. I originally started this project to teach myself Django but I lost interest at some point and pretty much abandoned it.

That was over 2 years ago. Now, with more …

I’ve been running this WordPress blog on a Rackspace VPS for a few years now and at one point over 2 years ago, my server running Ubuntu 10.04 would crash from time to time, usually after I publish a new post. The server would run out of memory, which would then use the swap. The swap would run out as well, causing the server to be unresponsive. I had to do a hard reboot of …

I almost skipped Portugal as I wanted to go straight to Spain because I was getting pretty tired of moving around. But while in Amsterdam, I met someone who was also traveling around Europe and told me Lisbon was one of his favorite cities. So I decided to might as well check it out and booked a last minute flight from Amsterdam to Lisbon.

I arrived late in the afternoon and as the plane …

I was staying at an apartment last night that didn’t have its own Wi-Fi so I had to borrow from a neighbor. However, the signal was very weak and I had to find just the right spot in my apartment to get a decent connection.

Ubuntu has a utility called iwconfig that lets you view your wireless connection’s signal strength. Typing in‘iwconfig wlan0’ (where ‘wlan0’ is the interface name) in a shell would return …