Setting up a Django production environment: compiling and configuring nginx

Here is another series of posts: now I’m going to write about setting up a Django production environment using nginx and Green Unicorn in a virtual environment. The subject in this first post is nginx, which is my favorite web server.

This post explains how to install nginx from sources, compiling it (on Linux). You might want to use apt, zif, yum or ports, but I prefer building from sources. So, to build from sources, make sure you have all development dependencies (C headers, including the PCRE library headers, nginx rewrite module uses it). If you want to build nginx with SSL support, keep in mind that you will need the libssl headers too.

Go solution for the Dining philosophers problem

I spent part of the sunday solving the Dining Philosophers using Go. The given solution is based in the description for the problem present in The Little Book of Semaphores:

The Dining Philosophers Problem was proposed by Dijkstra in 1965, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. It appears in a number of variations, but the standard features are a table with five plates, five forks (or chopsticks) and a big bowl of spaghetti.

There are some constraints:

• Only one philosopher can hold a fork at a time
• It must be impossible for a deadlock to occur
• It must be impossible for a philosopher to starve waiting for a fork
• It must be possible for more than one philosopher to eat at the same time

Speaking at PythonBrasil[7]

Next weekend I’ll be talking about scaling Django applications at Python Brasil, the brazilian Python conference. It will be my first time at the conference, which is one of the greatest Python conferences in Latin America.

Some international dudes are also attending to the conference: Wesley Chun is going to talk about Python 3 and Google App Engine; Alan Runyan will talk about free and open source software, and Steve Holden will be talking about the issues involved in trying to build a global Python user group.

Creating HTML 5 slide presentations using landslide

Recently I found landslide, which is a Python tool for creating HTML 5 slide presentations.

It’s based in a famous slide presentation. It’s a simple script that generates HTML from a source file, which can be formatted using reStructuredText, Textile or Markdown.

Let’s make a very simple presentation as a proof of concept: we’re going to create a “Python flow control” presentation, showing some basic structures of the language: if, for and while. We need a cover, a slide for each structure (with some topics and code examples) and the last slide for questions and answers. Here is the RST code for it:

Splinter sprint on FISL

We are going to start tomorrow, on FISL, another splinter sprint. “From June 29 through July 2, 2011, fisl12 will be hosted at the PUC Events Center, in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil” (copied from FISL website). But don’t worry about the location: anyone in anywhere can join us in this sprint. There is an entry in splinter wiki about this sprint, and I’m just replicating the information here...

Testing jQuery plugins with Jasmine

Since I started working at Globo.com, I developed some jQuery plugins (for internal use) with my team, and we are starting to test these plugins using Jasmine, “a behavior-driven development framework for testing your JavaScript code”. In this post, I will show how to develop a very simple jQuery plugin (based on an example that I learned with Ricard D. Worth): zebrafy. This plugin “zebrafies” a table, applying different classes to odd and even lines. Let’s start setting up a Jasmine environment...

Splinter: Python tool for acceptance tests on web applications

Capybara and Webrat are great Ruby tools for acceptance tests. A few months ago, we started a great tool for acceptance tests in Python web applications, called Splinter. There are many acceptance test tools on Python world: Selenium, Alfajor, Windmill, Mechanize, zope.testbrowser, etc. Splinter was not created to be another acceptance tool, but an abstract layer over other tools, its goal is provide a unique API that make acceptance testing easier and funnier.