Entries in "October, 2007"

Let Osama Go?!?

Ahhh, fresh from a weekend in Las Vegas, I had a whole lot of articles to read in my Google Reader... One of my favorite blogs, Donklephant, had an interesting post related to a Fox News story by Colonel David Hunt.

Apparently we had Osama Bin Laden in our lap and we let him and his convoy ride away. This was just 2 months ago! Now, I am not that political and don't pretend to know all the issues, etc. But can someone please explain this to me? Why was it smart to let him go? I have to believe, no matter how much I despise our current administration, that they didn't let him go without a very good strategic reason. Unfortunately, I am afraid that the exact opposite is the reason. They simply didn't pull the trigger. Oi...

Technorati Tags: fox news, osama bin laden, george w bush

AhCabron.com - Now Powered By Django!

AhCabron is a very NSFW website that I have worked on and off on for years. The name "Ah Cabron" (spanish) basically translates into "You Ass!". I know the owner and am more than happy to help him out when I can. I have helped with engineering and development in the past and am sort of the "go to guy" when technical issues arise. Certainly I present a bill for my services; after all... we are not Communists. <insert laughter here> (Sorry, Godfather moment..)

Little history... The site started so people can upload images of their boyfriends/girlfriends and get feedback on their looks. It was originally run using the open source coppermine gallery software. It quickly turned into people uploading adult natured images and soon it was 99% adult only content being submitted. Not one to turn away perfectly good images, the owner kept up with it.

Soon he realized that coppermine was too limited for the changes he wanted to make. That's when I entered the picture. I originally wrote a brand new system from scratch using Python and Mod Python. It was a basic system using the mod_python.publisher, mod_python.psp system for templates and my own sql wrapper for database access. For about 2 years this software has been running the site and doing a great job. It has been a bit of a hit, as it pulls in over 8M page views per month which is respectable traffic.

The time had come how ever to take the site to the next level. For that, I knew I had to rebuild this thing from scratch. Since I am now a Django groupie, I of course rebuilt the software using it. In all I would say it took me about 13 hours total to rebuild this site or about 2 weeks giving time when I had it. Most of those 13 hours was spent writing data migration scripts from the old schema to the new Django model schema. With heavy use of generic views the site was put together extremely fast. I should mention that a lot of the back end code I reused from other projects I have worked on (ex: image processing, watermarks, Amazon S3 integration, etc).

As of now the new code is basically a replication of the old site. All the old features are there and I wanted to cut that over now and flush out any bugs before I continue with the list of new features that are coming down the pipe. Video, RSS Feeds on just about anything, full user profiles and slide shows are just a few of the features on my ToDo list.

Check out the site, and pass me some feedback!

Technorati Tags: ahcabron, development, django, nsfw, python