Bryan Pieper's Blog

Have you been on Facebook recently and posted a topic only to have someone post a reply that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand?

// begin rant

This kind of thing drives me crazy. I will post a topic or status update and out of nowhere, you get a reply from someone looking to have a separate conversation.  

I love the threaded concept of conversations, because it keeps things organized. This is the same reason I prefer Gmail to the other webmail providers. The conversations are organized. With hundreds of new status posts running through your news feed each day, it is hard enough to keep up as it is.

So please, if you must post something off topic, start a new post, post it on my wall, send me a message or ring me on the chat window.  It will make the chaos that is Facebook, well, a little less chaotic.

// end rant

Have you been this person lately?

Do you use Safari and miss the reload button? I certainly did until the other day.

Safari 5 now supports extensions. But I have to say that I find it odd that a browser needs an extension for a normal reload button.

First, you have to enable the “Develop” menu.

Go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced. Turn on “Show Develop Menu” in menu bar. Then select “Enable Extensions” from the Develop menu.

Now that you can install extensions, download the Safari Reload Button extension. Once downloaded, install by opening with Safari or dragging it onto the Safari window. Finally, select “Customize Toolbar” from the View menu to add the new button. Reload button restored!

Django Amazon S3 SVN CommandI recently integrated ThePiepers.net with Amazon CloudFront to serve all the media. This has improved the overall site responsiveness and gives my visitors a closer endpoint.

After I setup a simple push method for publishing changes to Amazon S3, I quickly realized that it was extremely inefficient and adds unnecessary charges to my account. Enter Subversion.

python snow leopardI just finished upgrading to Python 2.6.5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The default python build is 2.6.1. I wanted to compile the latest version. This would normally be a non-event, but the pain involved made it worth noting. The DMG file did not install the 64-bit binaries, so I needed to manually compile it.

Download the latest source tarball from python.org and extract it.