I’m working on a Django app which is able to serve content on a number of subdomains. The app has a number of sites, which appear as subdomains of the main domain. There’s some middleware to look things up from the request and do the right routing.

In the wild the subdomains will be done with DNS, but for local development, I’m creating entries in my /etc/hosts such as demosite.local, using .local as my ‘main domain’ locally.  After a colleague integrated some authentication code, I suddenly found I couldn’t log in on my development environment. It didn’t work with either the custom login screen or the Django admin. Very odd.

Came across this when deploying a Django app to a fresh VM, installing with Python PIP from a requirements file.

I have been banging my proverbial head against a brick wall (or my actual head against a proverbial wall) for the best part of a few days, on and off, trying to find the cause of an inconsistency in behaviour between Safari and Chrome in a Facebook canvas app.

In the week after the engine came out, I was left with access to my bilges. These are usually hidden away behind an unmovable wooden wall, with access blocked by the engine. As far as I can tell these had not seen the light of day for two decades (my boat was built in 1993 and there are no signs of the engine having been out since then). It appears that they weren’t even painted, or if they were, there’s no paint left.

I was appalled at the state of them, frankly. The rust was thick, and not in a good way. My boat is my home, as well as my boat, and the sign of that much rust really wasn’t a very comforting thought.

I come from an engineering family. I know no-one who enjoys playing with engines more than my father. Within days of me buying a boat he had opened up the engine and taken the cylinders off to re-fit the piston rings. Admittedly, the reason he did this is that the engine had failed and we were stranded thirty miles outside Oxford with an immobile boat. But I have a feeling it would have happened anyway sooner or later.

I’m developing a Facebook app at work and was stuck on an issue for a bit. This post is just a mental note, and to prevent this happening.

Music in the bandstand in Brighton. Cold wind and rain by turns. We played and danced to keep warm.

I took a couple of audio recordings but this one just seemed perfectly to sum up the day.

The BBC love their esoteric, obscure electronic music. I think it all started with Sigur Rós in Planet Earth and proliferated from there. It’s even started creeping into BBC Radio 4 trailers now. The trailer for Will Self’s ‘A Point of View: In Defence of Obscure Words’ had just such a music bed. I decided that I would very much like to know what that music was.

I’ve had an allotment since November, but I came into possession of it just in time to wind up the year’s efforts and withdraw indoors. I spent some time before Christmas digging over a patch (what turned out to be a small patch in the grand scheme of things) before my next door neighbour turned up with a rotivator.

I am lucky enough to have a friend in Julian Cottee (of OxGrow) who furnished me with six chitting potatoes in six exciting varieties: Edzell Blue, British Queen, Isle of Jura, Salad Blue, Maris Bard, and Arran Victory. Today I cleared a patch, dug a trench and planted them.

A friend asked on Facebook why there were no documents penned by animals. He claimed that ’not a single one was to my knowledge written by an animal other than a human’. I disagree. Here are some notable quotes I have collected on the subject.

‘A cat could no more write a thesis on the plight of man than a man could on the condition of being a cat’

On the Nature of Existence, Jeramiah Bullock, 1808