Custom ASP.NET MVC ActionResult classes

April 21, 2011

ASP.NET MVC provides a way for developers to extend and create custom ActionResults for controllers. Normally you return a view from a controller and the runtime goes off and hunts down the appropriate view based on the name of your action. This make sense for normal web pages but sometimes you need to build something [...]

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Introduction to Google App Engine with Python

April 10, 2011

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk. I hope it was useful! If you haven’t done so already please complete an evaluation form. I’ve uploaded the presentation to SlideShare and you can download a PDF from my site too. The code sample I used during the presentation is available on BitBucket, and I’m going to [...]

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Installing Python Imaging on Windows 64-bit (AMD64) Python

March 26, 2011

If you want need a 64-bit version of this module for Google App Engine, or another project, you can run into a couple of issues. Sticking to 32-bit versions of Python and PIL avoids these issues so that may be the best direction for newbies. The downloads on the PIL site are for 32-bit versions [...]

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Getting the most out of PyCon

March 8, 2011

Van Lindberg recently tweeted a link to some tips on how to attend a conference. The advice in that article is pretty sound for a business person looking to build up their network to find sales opportunities, but it doesn’t cover any PyCon-specifics. After a little thinking I’ve come up with my own list of [...]

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Using the WTL CListBox class

February 4, 2011

Working with Win32 listbox controls is fairly simple but the code can be quite convoluted and get tedious after a while. I decided to use the WTL library to simplify some listbox handling code but it wasn’t initially obvious how to do this. Hopefully this blog post will help someone else understand the basics. Manual [...]

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Installing VMware ESX 4.1 from a USB flash drive on unsupported hardware

January 23, 2011

I recently replaced my aging Dell PowerEdge 830 server with a newer custom desktop and needed to migrate a number of old virtual machines. For the last few years I’ve been a happy user of VMware Server running atop Ubuntu Server and I figured it would be easiest to stick with that configuration. So off [...]

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