Apparently she sends you an email:

From: Josh Ourisman <josh>	Mailed-By: dydxtech.com
To: Josh Ourisman </josh><josh>
Date: Jan 22, 2008 10:18 PM
Subject: d :


--    gcrahfh
Josh Ourisman
dy/dx techn

Tel: +1 857-753-0060
Web: www.dydxtech.com
Blog: www.joshourisman.com</josh>

I really didn't even have to provide any help at all. All I did was (using her fingers) slide the unlock thing, and then help her click on my name after several failed attempts. Everything else is entirely her own input. Unfortunately, she seemed upset that she wasn't able to enter text in the body except as part of the signature due to her lack of hand-eye coordination and started crying, so I had to hit the send button for her.

But still, I'm pretty impressed that she managed to enter an emoticon for the subject.

(No, this wasn't my two month old, I'm currently in Minnesota visiting some friends and their new baby.)

2007 being over, and taxes looming on the horizon, I figured I should probably put together my finances for the year. I should have been keeping track of this on an ongoing basis, but...

Pretty much as soon as I started to delve into my records, I realized something: my hard copy records were fairly abysmal. Fortunately, I keep everything on my computer, and the hard copies are more of a convenience thing; as it is apparently the case that they're not actually all that convenient, I'm going to transition into fully electronic record keeping. Don't worry, I keep everything backed up both locally and remotely. I am in IT after all.

I realized something else almost immediately: things are actually going pretty well, especially when you also take my 2006 numbers into account. My business having started in the summer of 2006, I had pretty low revenues for that year. In fact, both my Q1 and Q4 revenues for 2007 were greater than my total revenues for 2006. The upshot of that is that in 2007 I saw approximately 300% growth in revenue over 2006. Quarter by quarter, I maintained an average growth of slightly over 55%.

One point of interest: on November 1 I changed my business model. In that month I brought on a new partner, and December ended up being my second highest grossing month yet, despite the holiday slowdown. Obviously I don't have the final numbers yet, but I can pretty much guarantee that January will beat it, and February will likely beat January. In fact, I'm currently set for Q1 of 2008 to not only be my highest grossing quarter so far, but to repeat the performance of Q1 2007 and gross higher than the entire previous year.

I think this means that my business model is working. :)

So, a little while ago I got a MediaTemple (dv) server. In general, they seem to be pretty good. The server's been fast and reliable so far, I get a good amount of storage and bandwidth for the price, and I have root access so theoretically I can do pretty much whatever I want. I have run into a bit of a problem however.

For the past several days I've been banging my head against installing Django on my MediaTemple server. In theory this should be pretty easy. The server comes with Apache and mod_python installed, so all that I should need to do is check out the lated django trunk from svn, make a few symlinks, install MySQLdb, change some Apache configurations to tell it to use Django for the appropriate URLs, and go. In practice, it's not working quite so well.

The first few steps were simplicity itself. It wasn't long before I had a successful Django install and was able to 'python manage.py syncdb' to have my projects database tables created. Changing the Apache settings was a little more difficult because you can't actually modify the httpd.conf as Plesk will overwrite it. Of course, there's no documentation telling you this or telling you the appropriate solution (despite, I might add, the insistence of the MediaTemple KnowledgeBase that instructions for installing Django on a (dv) server exist somewhere). A little help from Django's Google Groups community helped me out with that, though, letting me know that I instead need to create a /var/www/vhosts/MYDOMAIN.COM/conf/vhosts.conf file and put the settings in there. So I did that, and it even seems to work, but when I try to actually go to the page I get this:

Mod_python error: "PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython"


Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/mod_python/apache.py", line 299, in HandlerDispatch
    result = object(req)

File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/core/handlers/modpython.py", line 188, in handler
    return ModPythonHandler()(req)

File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/core/handlers/modpython.py", line 161, in __call__
    response = self.get_response(request)

File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 64, in get_response
    response = middleware_method(request)

File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/contrib/sessions/middleware.py", line 15, in process_request
    request.session = engine.SessionStore(session_key)

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SessionStore'

Apparently, for some reason, there's some problem with Django's sessions middleware, although no one else seems to have discovered this problem. If I remove sessions (and therefore the admin app) from my project the page will actually load, but it then fails to actually be able to get anything from the database so gives me errors on any page that requires database calls (most of them). Thus far neither the Google Groups nor the expert aid of Jesse Legg have been able to help me make any progress in solving this issue.

There are people out there running Django on MediaTemple (dv) servers, so I know this is possible, and I'm confident that I'll get it eventually. But in the mean time it's incredibly frustrating and is putting serious delays in the process of transitioning my sites over to MediaTemple (not to mention in the development of some other Django projects I'm working on right now). You can be sure that when I finally get Django working on my (dv) server that I'll be writing a detailed account of exactly how it was done. There really needs to be some documentation on this out there.

There are obviously other topics for me to write about, but I'm quite busy lately and this is one that I both want to keep on top of and want to spread awareness of.

Anyway, just a quick update for now. Now that the new Republic of Lakota website is back up, they've continued to make improvements. The biggest is the addition of a discussion forum. It doesn't have a whole lot of traffic just yet, but it's still relatively new so hopefully that will change. Certainly I think the existence of the forum will help drive traffic to the site and therefore spread awareness, and hopefully some good things will come of it.

For the record, I've registered on the Republic of Lakota forums with the username 'josho'.