Our family went on a 10-day trip to Beijing at the beginning of October. I won’t give a blow-by-blow account, just note some of my impressions. We were invited by Astrid’s parents, and stayed with them. Her father is a guest professor at the Beijing Forestry University for a few months each year. While we …

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I had an interesting issue a few months ago. I was doing some work where I needed to create a pdf from a template. This was a numbered legal document with optional clauses. The problem is this: How do you make some clauses conditional, but then autonumber the rest? Normally, you would hardcode clause numbers into the …

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I just found a post in my drafts folder, summing up my thoughts about CM (Configuration Management) tools from a little under a year ago. Since then, I’ve started using Ansible to set up servers. I’m still not fully converted, but I find Ansible a very useful tool. I have 7 active machines at home, and …

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On many websites, there is a need for sending mail from the webserver. While testing, it’s sometimes painful to get a working smtp server to test this. I’ve used this script for a while now, since it’s the simplest way to get a mailserver running. It will accept any smtp connection and print the mail …

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I went to the Plone Conf 2012 in October. This was my first Plone conference, although I’ve been working on Plone since 2006. The conference was from Wednesday 10 to Friday 12 October in Arnhem in the Netherlands. I also stayed for the coding sprint on the 13th and 14th. TL;DR: The conference was awesome. I had …

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100 words each day. That’s the goal. I have almost started a blog for a few years now. I get going with a post, and then the impetus to finish just kind of peters out. So I’ve decided to take another tack: Just write consistently each day. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, …

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I’m using Fabric very successfully to manage deployments of projects on my servers. Fabric is simple enough that it does not add extra layers of complexity to the setup, and easy enough to use that it makes deployments easy and much less error-prone. This blogpost is an updated and expanded version of a …

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I recently got my hands on some polycaprolactone, and I’m really enjoying playing with it. It is one of the most useful materials I’ve seen in a long time. This is a summary of a talk I gave at #HackSTB on 21 August. So, what is it? Basically, it’s plastic that you can heat up to just over 60 degrees …

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