This article describes how to override a view from an external Django app which is a FAQ on StackOverflow and IRC. You should understand that your urls.py is a really central and critical part of your django project. You don’t touch external app code You are not supposed to edit the code from an external app. Unless you fork it first on github. How to override without forking Overriding a template If you want to override templates/userena/activate_fail. Read More

This article describes how to build project dependencies with virtualenv. It is appliable to Pinax. Pinax uses virtualenv by default. It lets the developer have a project-specific python directory, including binaries, packages etc … OpenSuse for example supplies very bad Pinax packages which allows the user to mess with his operating system. It is much better to isolate project dependencies from a project to another for more granular control of the maintenance cost; for example if a package upgrade breaks the user project. Read More

What do you think is the problem when vim starts complaining that it can’t write swap files, postgresql starts complaining that there is no disk space left, when df output is: >>> df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on udev 10240 4 10236 1% /dev run 10240 156 10084 2% /run /dev/md1 10403064 1298596 8580184 14% / shm 8188088 0 8188088 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 8188088 124 8187964 1% /tmp /dev/md2 105366664 62467912 37588548 63% /home This post also credits the awesomeness of Open Source and particularly community driven support Read More

It is common for junior developers and system administrators to be blocked because of permissions. This article describes how to identify and fix a permission issue, as this is a FAQ on StackOverflow. Identifying permission issues Here a self explaining case, probably the easiest, which happens when trying to access something which is directly blocked by the lack permissions: >>> mkdir /mnt/foo mkdir: cannot create directory `/mnt/foo': Permission denied Now a more obscure cases. Read More