Friday, December 28, 2018

Patching a Mail Slot

The front door of my condo has an unused mail slot in it (we have a mailbox on the front of the house to actually get mail). In order to avoid a draft during the winter, the previous owner had shoved some insulation in the mail slot and covered it …

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Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Calling Celery from Twisted

Background

I use Twisted and Celery daily at work, both are useful frameworks, both have a lot of great information out there, but a particular use (that I haven’t seen discussed much online, hence this post) is calling Celery tasks from Twisted (and subsequently using the result).

The difference …

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Friday, May 26, 2017

RSS Feeds for Wikipedia Current Events and NHL News

I subscribe to a fair amount of feeds for news, blogs, articles, etc. I’m currently subscribed to 122 feeds, some of which have tens of articles a day (news sites), some of which are dead. [1] Unfortunately there’s still a few sites that I was visiting manually each …

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Friday, May 5, 2017

Google Summer of Code 2017: Matrix protocol for Instantbird and Thunderbird

I’ll be mentoring Pavan Karthik on his project for Google Summer of Code 2017 entitled “Matrix Protocol Support for Instantbird”. Matrix is a new(er) protocol that is an open, decentralized network with some unique features. Initial support for this landed in bug 1315926, but it is not feature …

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Thursday, April 6, 2017

Adding Two-Factor Authentication to Django (with django-allauth)” Lightning Talk

A bit late on this article, but better late than never! Back on October 27th, 2016 I gave a talk at Django Boston entitled “Adding Two-Factor Authentication to Django (with django-allauth)”. It was a ~20 minute talk on integrating the django-allauth-2fa package into a Django project. The package (which I …

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Sunday, July 24, 2016

Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone) and FastMail

I’ve been a big fan of Windows Phone (now Windows Mobile) for a while and have had a few phones across versions 7, 8, and now 10. A while ago I switched to FastMail as my e-mail provider [1], but had been stuck using Google as my calendar provider …

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Friday, May 20, 2016

Google Summer of Code 2016 projects

I’d like to introduce the 13 students that are being mentored by Mozilla this year as part of Google Summer of Code 2016! Currently the “community bonding” period is ongoing, but we are on the cusp of the “coding period” starting.

As part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC …

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Monday, March 7, 2016

Thoughts on Applying to Google Summer of Code

Over the past few years I’ve been involved in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a program that sponsors students to write code for open-source projects, as part of Mozilla. I’ve been both a mentor and administrator, Florian Quèze and I frequently get asked questions about what students should …

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Thursday, February 4, 2016

Combining Disparate QuerySets in Django

Note: This was originally posted on the Strongarm Blog.

While refactoring strongarm.io we ran into a problem: we had different database tables that we needed to query over as if they were a single database table. We use Django as an ORM and needed to stay within the ORM …

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Wednesday, September 23, 2015

IRC Client Usage Share on moznet

Background

The usage share of IRC clients has always been something I’m interested in. This is partially to see how many people are using Instantbird or Mozilla Thunderbird for IRC (as I’ve written much of the IRC code for those clients). Usage share of browsers is quite a …

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