“groovy mother...”

Chancer

I’ve decided that on my forthcoming trip to Scotland, I’m going to play the British National Lottery.

The plan: Buy one lucky dip ticket for the main Lotto draw, every day that I’m in the UK . None of those scratchcards or EuroMillions bollocks for this punter.

I’m aware that the lottery is a mug’s game, and the statistical odds are crappy, and all that. Don’t care. Pappa wants a HDTV.

Indeed, Joy & I have been quite lucky on previous trips. On our cruise to Alaska, the very first quarter Joy dropped into a slot machine netted her $80. Of course, we pissed that up the wall, and I now have a conspiracy theory that on cruises, the slots are looser at the start of the week to trick passengers to spend more as the week goes on, but luck nonetheless.

It doesn’t hurt that UK lottery winnings are tax-free. And there’s no need for Uncle Sam to find out, right?

What I Did With My Weekend

My IM status, yesterday

I’ve recently been working on a project that exposes a simple web service. When I first wrote the web service last year, the best option to connect Python code to the web had seemed to be mod_python. So I’d knocked up a couple of scripts that parsed URLs and generated POX in a vaguely RESTful manner. Good enough for a prototype.

But now there’s lots of ideas swirling about how this could grow, so I needed something a bit more manageable/scalable/enterprisey.

Earlier this week, I saw the news that there was a new release of Django, a Python webapp framework.

How serendipitous.

So on Tuesday evening I ran through the tutorial, and thought “Oooh!” In much the same way as when I first used the ElementTree XML interface, I had that feeling of “Wow. Finally a framework written by someone whose brain works in the same way as mine.”

I think that’s a good thing.

On Friday, I converted the webservice to use the Django API instead of the mishmash of intertwingled SQL calls it had been. It all worked a treat. Hurrah!

And then over the course of the weekend, I’ve been hacking away, creating a website around my webservice.

Of course, Django’s not perfect. But reassuringly, as I find “holes” and Google for them, I find that there’s plenty of thought being given to them on the Django mailing lists. For example, when I noticed that it wasn’t encoding user-inputs, thereby making it really freaking easy to accidentally expose your site to XSS attacks, I was disappointed. But then I found Simon Willison’s plan for AutoEscaping, along with associated mailing list discussions, and was reassured that this is being thought about, and in a way that will help avoid another magic_quotes-style farrago.

I’m really excited about moving forward with this project, and seeing how far I can stretch Django. If you’re not keen to learn Ruby just to get on Rails, then Django’s a good way to go.