Acorn is a basic image editing software of MacOS. It is not a Photoshop - but who needs a photoshop all time.
What I loved about it was their brilliant documentation with lots of video tutorials.
Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code · Bart de Goede
This is pretty interesting post. It uses lots of small algorithms and provide simple code-snippets for them:
- tokenzing
- stemming
- boolean search
- term frequency
- inverse document frequency
All in just 150 lines of code.
In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu | CSS-Tricks
The article suggests that the modern trend in menus is to use click menus instead of hover menus.
- Click menus behave same on mobiles and desktop.
- They don't create flicker when the mouse moves a few pixels
- Click menus are based on "intent"
- Must use dropdown cursor when using click menus.
Interesting.
Tax Calculator for Resident Individuals
While most tax calculators ask lots of questions, this one provides a very simple quick calculation of tax based on slab rates.
Comes handy in these days of March.
Uberspace - Shared web hosting
I love Uberspace for hosting websites on a shared server.
While I use VPS (AWS, Linode or DigitalOcean) for larger projects, I still love shared hosting because they are batteries included. They are pre-configured with firewalls, databases, nginx, apache, memcache and SSL.
Shared servers also have much more (shared) CPU resources than a fixed CPU capacity in a VPS. My earlier websites on Webfaction.com (1GB ram - shared cpu - $5/month) performed much better than on DigitalOcean (2GB ram - 2CPU - $10/month). Primary reason was that though the CPU on Webfaction was shared with neighbours, it was of much much larger capacity.
Thus it all boils down to how a shared hosting provider allocates the neighbours. UberSpace rocks at this.
I didn't find the resource allocation part on UberSpace website. Here are the details of that: https://uberspace.de/en/
Disk space: 10 GB (can be expanded)
RAM: 1.5 GB
CPU: Shared as available. But restricted to 6 (https://manual.uberspace.de/changelog/#v7-10-0-short)
On pricing: they provide a pay what you want model :)
I love to write functions instead of classes. However, Django does not allow us to call functions inside templates.
Sometimes we want to postpone the function calls in templates because they might be expensive. Thus we might want to call them inside the template’s cache fragment or inside an if statement.
My way around them is to use a lazy_cache function to postpone and cache a function's result.
Thus the whole usage is something like this:
import datetime as dt
from utilities.functional import lazy_cached
def expensive_computation(result_date, page_number=1):
# do some expensive stuff
return results
def latest_results(request):
result_date = dt.datetime.today()
page_number = request.GET.get('page')
results = lazy_cached(
expensive_computation,
result_date,
page_number=request.GET,
)
return render(
request,
"latest-results.html",
{
"results": results,
"page_number": page_number,
},
)
In templates we can now do:
{% load cache %}
{% block content %}
{% cache 30000 results_page page_number %}
{% for result in results %}
<div>{ { result.name }}</div>
{% endfor %}
{% endcache %}
My recipe for lazy_cached function is:
def lazy_cached(func, *args, **kwargs):
state = {"value": None, "realized?": False}
def wrap():
if state["realized?"]:
return state["value"]
state["value"] = func(*args, **kwargs)
state["realized?"] = True
return state["value"]
return wrap
Showing sender image (logo) in transactional emails - BIMI Implementation
We usually see a sender's photo in Gmail. Those sender avatars are shown not only for our friends and known contacts, but also for transactional emails.
I often wondered how they are shown. They look good and provide a better clue about the sender.
Turns out there is a "BIMI" (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) spec for that. It requires DMARC compliance and then a DNS record pointing to the SVG image.
Cool!