A couple of projects to talk about today, one more urgent than the other:
First up, our oven suffered a burned out heating element:
After a little research I found out this isn’t unheard of, and replacing the element is very simple. The big news here is just that Heather was standing right there when it happened and could shut the oven down before anything too drastic happened. Even then there was more molten metal involved than I like to have in my house.
The next item up I won’t go into much detail about just yet, but I am working up a simple database driven web app to solve a problem for Heather. It will be interesting to see if I can produce something fully featured enough for her to consider using it, but if nothing else it’s an interesting project and I don’t feel like I am reinventing the wheel.
How interesting? Well, it’s build on a Django, Python and MySQL. I have experience in none of those, so step one was just to get them working. My initial plan had been to run my dev environment inside a VMWare player, but I wasted a week trying to get a VM I was happy with and then decided to just run the whole dev environment on my PC. Fun fact, Python guys aren’t that into Windows. I wound up having to manually compile a few things… and then ran smack into the error in this post.
Hopefully I will have an actual demo site up in a few more weeks now that I have the tech stack configured and running.
-Jordan
Nelsons 