It seems that when i upgraded to django v1.0 it broke the captcha as all template variables are now auto-escaped, whereas previously escaping had to be done explicitly this meant that you would see the html, the field is now marked as safe and so fixed! :)

This really does prove to me the value of testing as its been weeks since I upgraded, I never noticed because as a site admin I dont see it. Doh!

On a side note, i'm wondering what peoples opinion on captcha is? personally I see it as essential, and that re-captcha is the best, second only to googles own.

Heres a new theme and header image, what do you think?

For those of you who dont follow Jeff Atwoods blog, he and Joel Spoolsky are creating a question and answer site for programmers called Stack Overflow.

Its in late beta now, and its great, to make it more than just your basic Q&A site theres a reputation score (based on how many people have up-voted your questions/answers) and badges, which were inspired by Xbox Online. The community is also top-notch.

[Continued...]

I have a Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 (Part number SB0570), which is an OEM part i picked up from Ebuyer on the cheap.

The only problem with OEM parts and creative is that they dont support them (not even the drivers!), so here they are for anyone who needs them.

Audigy SE Drivers.rar [7.45MB]
Audigy SE Drivers.zip [8.75MB]

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Here is a script that adds your SSH public key to a remote hosts authorized_keys file. Thus enabling you to login without a password.

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Moved to xenEurope

I was using a westhost VPS, and although this was fine and the support was brilliant, with the server being in Utah, USA, the latency was poor (~250ms), The server also seemed fairly loaded.

So I'm now with xenEurope, which so far is great, a proper VPS server instead of the cut-down redhat one that westhost provides (with no root access), I now have root access and so have the ability to set it up how i like :D I've have setup a Debian 5 (Lenny) server, running apache2, postfix+dovecot (mail), bind9 (dns), MySQL and webmin (web-based server administration). And all in 128Megs of ram :)

The latency for me is just 30ms, and the server is very snappy (as you may notice). But the best part is the price, at 10Euros/month its far cheaper than most UK VPS hosts while being as good.

(Rant about drupal not django btw)
Since creating this website (in django) ive been interested in how it uses the database, dajango doesnt provide an easy way to show this on a per page basis, so instead i chose to use the log feature in MYSQL.

To enable it add log=/var/log/mysqld.log to your my.cnf file in the [mysqld] section and then restart the database.
You may not want to leave this on indefinably, as it spits out every database query (leading to a large logfile)

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This is in conclusion to Part 1

The example soap service that i will build for demonstration purposes will be a simple schedule service, that can be queried to find out what meeting is next and todays meeting schedule.

Sorry for taking so long to put this out, but better late than never, eh?

All the code/wsdl/xml is available here
And the demo client (Source Code) and server (Source Code)

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Welcome to the new sam.xnet.tk, running on my new blogging sotware using python+django!

Basic but fully functional.

Ill release more info soon

EDIT: when i say fully functional i mean missing trackbacks and rss... ;)

EDIT2: The RSS is now up and working at http://sam.xnet.tk/rss/

EDIT3: Now with a full rss feed for rss readers http://sam.xnet.tk/rss/full/

In this multi-part blog im going to talk through how to set up a php soap (Simple Object Access Protocol) server that can be added as a web-reference through visual studio. Im mainly doing this because it took me along time to figure out the finer details of wsdl and soap, and i'd like to try and save other people the same hassle.

The example soap service that i will build for demonstration purposes will be a simple schedule service, that can be queried to find out what meeting is next and todays meeting schedule.

All the code/wsdl/xml is available here
And the demo client and server

PHP Soap Server, Part 2: PHP Server and Client

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