Anyway, I thought I would give myself a challenge and run wordpress behind nginx. The formula is to proxy nginx to php-cgi. This worked fine but was horribly unstable as the php-cgi process goes down quite often. The problem was running spawn-fcgi from init.d. It needed to be run from a proper process manager. As luck would have it, I had supervisord already running to monitor uwsgi.

I wish I would have stumbled across this post from Grig Gheorghiu, as it would have saved me a lot of effort. Funny how he is also a python guy.

Anyway without further ado, click through to see all locations in BC where a marijuana grow operation was found by the police in the last year. And here is the raw data.

The visualization shows a circle at the location and the size is proportional to how many plants were seized. A scaling factor was applied to the circles so that they are still visible, and proportional, at all zoom levels.

Also, don’t be surprised if the whole thing comes crashing down because this was thrown together as an experiment.

The root cause of this error is the python-meld3 library and the following import statement:

from xml.etree.ElementTree import fixtag

The problem has been fixed in version 0.6.7 of python-meld3. Therefore, before you install supervisor, do the following on the command line as root:

aptitude install python-meld3
pip install meld3==0.6.7

The above will install version 0.6.5 of python-meld3 and then pip will upgrade it to the latest. You can then install supervisor without any problems.

If you want you can read the gory details of the problem in python-meld3.

I recently implemented such a feature using jQuery’s hover event handler and pulled my hair out trying to test the functionality with Selenium. I went down a complete rat hole trying trigger the event within selenium using the getEval method and passing in custom javascript code. What a nightmare. That is, until I really sat down and thought about it.

Remember that Selenium doesn’t actually control the pointer in the browser but drives the browser through javascript. Therefore, unlike a true mouse event that may trigger a number of events, Selenium’s mouseOver just triggers mouseover on the element. Now, if you have used jQuery’s hover then you are binding your functionality to mouseenter and mouseleave not mouseover and mouseout.

Therefore, if you wish to test with Selenium, do not use jQuery’s hover method and bind your functionality to mouseover and mouseout.

Note that many older browsers do not support mouseenter and mouseleave as this was introduced by Microsoft and was not immediately adopted by the others. There is also a big difference in their behaviour and propagation in the event model. mouseover and mouseout bubble up whereas mouseenter and mouseleave do not bubble up.

I loved this quote from one of Microsoft’s weasels councils:

Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action to defend our innovations and fulfill our responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year to bring great software products and services to market.

I took the liberty to translate the double-speak into English:

Their refusals to be extorted into buying meaningless licenses leaves us no choice but to use our ill gotten gains from years of monopoly rule to financially punish them by dragging out meaningless legal claims in the courts until such time that they relent into paying us for nothing or we bankrupt them. We must defend our lack of innovation so that we can continue to stifle technological advances and continue to sell our shitty software under long-since-dead per-seat pricing models to the unsuspecting corporate yes-men and slack-jawed middle managers that are our life’s blood.

Firstly, you will need to fun plug your DNS 323.  Excellent instructions are found at the DNS323 Wiki site which is an excellent resource for all your DNS 323 hackery needs.

Secondly, you need to add AFP support.

Lastly, do the following command on the command line to get TimeMachine to recognize network drives which it does not do by default (really Apple?  Why?!?):


defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1


That’s it.  You should be able to point TimeMachine at your DNS 323 and you are good to go!

Note that you used to have to trick the Mac into using the SAN as a backup drive but I did not find this to be the case with my latest setup, but if you are having trouble, read A Poor Man’s Apple Time Capsule.

label:funny

Instead just create an URL as follows:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#label/funny

bookmark it and TADA, you now have a saved search!

I haven’t experimented with other types of searches but all keywords could conceivably  be prepended with the hash symbol and work similarly.

The methodology described in the documentation is still correct but there is a new parameter, base_domain, that throws people for a loop. As well, a number of the parameters have changed names. Anyway, here are the parameters that you should be able to retrieve from the cookie fbs_[your API key] if you set the cookie option to true in your call to FB.init or they can be retrieved off of the object returned from a call to FB.getSession():

base_domain=somedomain.com
expires=1221157773
secret=HUvxPvYA_7Hvt2gZ3ndw_T__
session_key=2.s_eeketB6Ed9m5qgz64hYw__.3600.1238553600-327212630
uid=2901279


Concatenate all of the above, append your application secret, which you can retrieve from http://www.facebook.com/developers, and take the md5 of the string. The result should match the sig parameter.  (Note: that the values of the parameters above are made up but should resemble your values.)

This really ties in nicely to my previous blog post about Patterns of Organization when mixing MVC frameworks with javascript. If you are using your own RESTful API when creating a new object in your domain (a.k.a. POSTing some form to create a new foobar) what is the best pattern to follow?

Let’s first assume that you are POSTing your form via AJAX because you just popped up a lightbox that contained the form rather than doing a whole round trip to render a whole new page with the form. Therefore you have some code that looks like this:

$("form#foobar").submit(function() {
    $.ajax({type: 'POST',
            url: '/foobar',
            data: $(this).serializeArray(),
            success: function(data) {
                // do something with data;
            }
    });
});

Under the old MVC pattern you probably re-rendered the form if the user gave you bad data or forgot to fill out a field and then on success, you either re-directed them to the new page showing them their new data or immediately rendered that new page in the POST controller. However, in the javascript example above it becomes quite cumbersome to expect multiple possible returns. We do not want to be parsing the returned HTML to figure out if it is a re-rendered form because of a validation failure or if it is the HTML of our new item. The obvious solution is to return JSON which is easy to inspect. But I really like the idea of sending back an error HTTP response code if validation fails.

Firstly, if I am within my own application and retrieving data I do not want to write code to turn JSON into HTML. I know how I want my data to look on the page so why not just return it straight away into HTML. This allows me to keep my markup in templates where it should be. By returning validation failures as, well, failures, it allows me to instantly handle two different return types – JSON for an error code return, and HTML for a new item return. If JSON is returned I can easily pick out the error message and update the DOM of the form to display the erred fields. But if my POST was successful, I then kill the form and slide in my new HTML to update my existing list of data all nicely formatted.

Now my javascript looks something like this:

$("form#foobar").submit(function() {
    $.ajax({type: 'POST',
            url: '/foobar',
            data: $(this).serializeArray(),
            dataType: 'html',
            success: function(html) {
                $("div#data").append(html);
            },
            error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {
                var errorObject = JSON.parse(XMLHttpRequest.responseText);
                // update form with stuff in errorObject
            }
    });
});