Blogs

Often I find that I need to include administration views in my site, such as statistics, management, etc etc. When these are more than just model CRUD views, a good idea is to extend the builtin Django admin site, as it’s the easiest to do.

While looking at the docs, however, I realised they were a bit cryptic and lacked good examples.

One of the most often requested features for historious is del.icio.us link importing, so I researched how it would be possible to add that feature.

Some of you might remember the great MongoDB saga, which ended with me migrating from MongoDB to SQLite after losing my data more often than not. After the Nth time I lost my data, I decided I had enough and decided to migrate to SQLite. I also decided not to use MongoDB for historious, as I had originally planned.

For a while now I’ve been working on my new, ultra-secret web app, and now it’s time for me to reveal it. It’s looking to address the following scenario:

Imagine that you read an article, and it’s mildly interesting. It’s not interesting enough to bother with bookmarking it (because you likely won’t read it again, and bookmarks tend to get too cluttered and linger unread), but you definitely think that the content is worth remembering.

A month later, you remember it and search for it, but with keywords such as, e.g.

As you may remember, some months ago I had decided to use MongoDB for my masters project, and had a few rather large problems with it.

These past few days I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to get Windows 7 to run in a virtual machine.

Shortly after my post about speeding up Python with Cython, I was contacted by Mark Dufour, creator of ShedSkin, a Python-to-C++ compiler, who wanted to try my code with his compiler. I had heard of ShedSkin before, but I chalked it up as something to try later, or something too hard to try (C++ is not my forte).

After Mark contacted me, I decided to give it a go on the code of the post, and, to my great, surprise, it performed a bit better than Cython with no changes to my code.

For a bit of introduction, last year I enrolled in the Machine Learning course of the University College London, and it is now time for me to start my MSc project. The topic is analysis of social networks, so I have to get a large amount of data from a well-known website and analyse it.

To this end, I wrote a small script to use the site’s API to retrieve the data (after getting the necessary permission and everything), and store it in a SQLite database.

Introduction to SSL

So, say you want to buy a book on Amazon. You go on the website, pick the book you want, add it to your cart and proceed to check out. While checking out, Amazon asks you for your credit card information, you enter it and they tell you your item will be shipped soon.

You really really want to be sure that only Amazon got your data, though, because you trust them.

In the last few days, I get an increasing number of people coming up to me in the street and saying “But Stavros, how will I know if I have found the perfect man/woman/cyborg for me?”.

Worry not, gentle reader, for our science department is here to give you the answer to that question.

Imagine for a moment that, on a night out at the bar, you meet a girl/guy. You feel like you’ve never felt before the past week, and, whether it’s the alcohol thinking or not, you feel like you could really spend your life with them!

Not so fast, though.