So there is all sorts of posts out there on how to resize a virtualbox disk when you start getting errors that Windows is running out of disk space. I found most of them to be very confusing. It’s really very fast and easy, so let’s get this done. The first thing to do is open Terminal and switch to the directory that holds you Virtualbox machines. On Mac’s this will usually get you there:…

Upgraded to OSX Mavericks last night, with a little apprehension. Past upgrades have usually broken all sorts of things with my development environment so the next day is spent trying to get my local Django, Python and everything else straightened out. I couldn’t afford to have a bunch of downtime right now though as I have a huge project going on at work that is going to launch in a few weeks.…

Setting up your Mezzanine based site to pull in a feed from Twitter has changed quite a bit over the past few years as the system has evolved. Now its incredibly simple to set up but the documentation is pretty terse and it’s not immediately evident how to do it. All you have to do is follow a few simple steps: Log into your Twitter account or create a new one.…

Recently at work I had a perplexing issue. One of the knowledge workers’ browser suddenly stopped loading the FCKeditor in Magento. It was weird because myself and everyone else who used the administration side of Magento was able to edit pages and products just fine and have the editor load up no problem. At first I though it might be a javascript issue or something but that was working fine everywhere else.…

So I recently spent a good while recording an incredible screen cast for some documentation I need to create. After finally finishing the recording I was dismayed to find that iShowU had recorded nothing but a GREEN SCREEN. That elicited some colorful language, even if it was just in my head. What the heck happened??! Well, it turns out that this fabulous Macbook Pro I have has 2 graphics chips. 1 of them happens to be more power hungry and so if you have taken your laptop into a quiet room away from your wall charger (which is what I did) that it automatically switches to the external, less power hungry processor to save energy, which means you record green.…

A few months back on went on a search for the next best e-commerce framework. Of course only open source will do and while I really like the Cartridge plugin for Mezzanine to say Cartridge is in it’s infancy is an understatement. But other than Satchmo (who’s ship seems to have sailed) there aren’t really any good options from the django side. You’re pretty much left rolling your own. I wanted something pretty complete out of the box.…

Recently I went looking for an alternative to Dropbox. I wanted something that was a little bit more in my control. As I’ve mentioned before I use Webfaction for most of my hosting needs. There are, in a word, awesome. You may think that Owncloud would be the logical setup step here and I did try that for a while. At first I thought it was great, then it would only connect off and on, then all the files in my internal folders were deleted (luckily I have backups via TimeMachine) and then it wouldn’t connect at all.…

For the past few years I’ve been deploying my Django projects to Webfaction with Fabric. Fabric is an amazing tool very similar to Capistrano for Rails that allows you to run a series of shell commands in sequence. While this is going to be a simple example of Fabric usage, it shows how it can save time. Let’s look at a typical Django project that you’ve been developing and its now live in production and you make some changes to your stylesheet.…

I wanted to setup Spree locally on my Macbook but the directions on their site didn’t work. At all. Here is how I got it installed and working. Install RVM + Rails (poor mans rails installer) \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails I found the documentation at https://github.com/spree/spree to be more specific. When I tried to install using the tutorial documentation it failed due to it installing Rails 4 which the Spree it installed was not compatible with.…

Recently I’ve needed to create a development version of our Magento website so I can work on / break things and not break the live site. The phpMyAdmin in MAMP does not like large database imports though, as they will usually fail. This seems to happen especially with Magento databases for me. The simple way to get around this is to not use phpMyAdmin at all for loading the database. Instead, I’ve found loading it directly through mysql works and it’s a LOT faster.…