I’ve had a Treo Pro for a couple of weeks now so I thought I’d write a post about what I think of it.
If you’re the sort who likes to skip to the end of stories, let me save you a little time. I’m loving it. It’s awesome.
I’ll try and explain why in this post.
This one has been bugging me for a few days, and with help from a very helpful Google engineer I’ve finally got this working, so I thought I’d share my code where the next poor soul to try and do it might find it!
The problem:
I’ve written a small web service which I am hosting on Google App Engine.
By adding “login: required” to specific services in the app’s app.yaml file, I can make sure that you need to login to access a service.
If you’re accessing the service from a web browser, this is fine – you get redirected to a Google login page, and after entering your username and password and hitting ‘submit’, you get sent on to the web service you wanted.
But how do you do that programmatically? I wanted to do it from a Python application on my desktop, without being able to navigate the HTML login form.
It’s been a very geeky week – only a couple of days after BathCamp, I was in London yesterday for Google Developer Day.
I was saying only a couple of days ago that I really need to get my head around some of the options out there for web developers, so this was well timed.
I learnt about web development tools and online APIs, talked a lot about where mobile development is going, and got to wander around Wembley Stadium. All in all, it was a good day. 🙂
The underlying theme for the talks throughout the day was showing how Google are trying to make the web ‘better’.
The messages were grouped into four key areas:
I made a ton of notes throughout the day. Rather than write the world’s longest blog post, I’ve picked out a few interesting bits.
Warning: If you’re squeamish or easily offended, this post is probably not for you!
If you are reading this on dalelane.co.uk rather than an RSS reader, the header and photos on the right are probably a small clue that I have two small girls: a nearly-four-year-old whirling dervish of gobby bossiness, and a six-month old monster determined to be the loudest thing within miles.
I am an insufferable bore when it comes to my girls. They are awesome, and barely a conversation or a twitter goes past without me mentioning them (sorry about that, by the way).
But as much as I love them both to bits, two is enough, thanks 🙂
The plan was always to have two kids. Not sure exactly why.
I guess it’s partly because it’s what we are used to – both my wife and I each have a single sibling, so that’s what feels right.
It’s partly financial – kids are not cheap. Even with economies of scale and all, the amount of stuff you need to get for a kid is staggering, and we couldn’t afford another! And that’s just the day to day stuff – with bills like monthly day care fees for Grace that were higher than our mortgage for a long while, I can only wonder how people with big families afford it.
The difference from two kids to three kids feels bigger than the difference from one to two. For example, it’d mean needing a new car (I couldn’t fit three kids in the back of my little Fiesta). It’d probably mean a bigger house (would be difficult to squeeze a bigger family into our mid-terrace).
It’s partly time, energy and a desperate need for sleep. One child is exhausting. A second makes exhaustion a dim, fond memory. A third? There just isn’t enough caffeine in the world.
In short, a third kid would be a game-changer, and not one that we’re ready for.
This, combined with knowing that you can’t rely 100% on contraception, is all a roundabout way of explaining why we decided for me to go for a vasectomy.
Weird choice of topic for a blog post? Perhaps. But going on the philosophy of sharing experiences that might be new or interesting to others, I figured “why not?” So if you are curious to find out how you go about getting yourself neutered, read on 😉
I’m playing with having one tab in the CurrentCost app show information in a non-graph way.
But I’m a little stumped for ideas.
Ignoring the styling for the moment, what would people be interested to see displayed?
I’ve been talking about it for a while, but I finally got around to spending some time working on a CurrentCost app.
The original code was written in C# using .NET 3.5, and I used WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) to draw the graphs. For a number of reasons this proved unpopular and I got a ton of emails saying how this was no good for them. So I decided to start again.
The new app is written in Python – using wxPython and matplotlib to create the graphs.
Using py2exe, I’ve been able to compile the whole thing (combining my script with a Python interpreter and a copy of all of the third-party libraries I’ve used) into a Windows executable that will (hopefully!) run on any Windows computer, without needing installing or requiring any pre-requisites.
I can also make the Python script itself available, making it something that Linux users could run as well. This means I get the low-overhead Windows experience I wanted, together with the ability to make it cross-platform. Neat!
I’ve been able to produce some more interactive graphs – the graphs in the new app can be zoomed in and out, panned, moved around, printed, and exported to images. As the amount of data in the app builds up, I can see this becoming very useful.