Friday, September 23, 2005

In my previous post I complained about annoying flickering. Well, I've upgraded to TinyMCE 2.0 RC2 and it doesn't flicker anymore! Run, don't walk, and upgrade immediatelly!

Finally I bit the bullet and decided to implement OpenWrt web-based user interface using Felix Fietkau's code. Well, MIPS processors used by OpenWrt units are not race horses and GUI is slow to my taste. Yes, I know that stock firmware is not faster. "Slow" is absolute category for me.

How do we combat latencies and slow network speed? Exactly. We can apply the same for OpenWrt, where "slow network speed" is replaced with "slow processor on local network". So I decided to do The Right Thing^(tm) and implement it using AJAX approach. I will use Dojo.

Stay tuned for more updates and upcoming beta.

Update: this is the list of all my post detailing OpenWrt GUI development.

Update: see screencast and screenshots, download and try it.

Hurricane Rita was donwgraded to Category 3 storm (125mph/200kph winds). Here in Dallas we expect heavy rains for 2+ days.

Sunset was very colorful today. I tried to capture it in this picture:

You can find bigger picture on Flickr.

I was asked several times to explain how I did RSS for my site. Django has RSS framework, which is not documented. Most probably I am not the right guy to explain it but I'll try.

There are three ways to implement RSS with Django:

1. The Simple: using Django's RSS framework.
2. The Smart: using django.utils.feedgenerator.
3. The Hard: write a view and output XML manually or using standard xml.sax.saxutils.

If you want Django to do everything for you, then you should use "The Simple Way". If you want some custom object selection, you should use "The Smart Way". For obsessed workaholics, S&M adepts, and guys-with-really-convoluted-needs the only way is "The Hard Way". Being lazy I prefer #1 and #2.