If you have a list of ordered ids and you want to turn them into an ordered result set you can use FIELD() in mysql:

SELECT * FROM addons
ORDER BY FIELD(id, 3, 5, 9, 1);

This is a handy trick if you use an external search engine which gives you an ordered list of ids and you want to pull out entire row sets.

We do this in addons.mozilla.org using the Django ORM like so:

The code in action.

So before I went on trip to Minnesota last month, I decided maybe I would give the Palm Pré another shot. After all, my parents have no internet access, so having the Pré… if I could overcome my issues, might be a welcome distraction.

I went to Add-on-Con some weeks back to represent my employer, the Mozilla Corporation.

So I borrowed a Palm Pré that we had at Mozilla to see what it was like. I was at first very excited, I remember before the Pre was released there was a lot of talk about how awesome-fantastic it was going to be. The stories of awesomeness sort of died, and I had thought nothing of it.

I wanted to find a list of Firefox addons that had smushed text in their title. E.g. FireBug or StumbleUpon. The normal porter stemming algorithm that Sphinx uses does not turn “StumbleUpon” into “stumbl upon” as it would with “Stumble Upon”. I was hoping for, and unfortunately could not find a method to do a regular expression search/replace using mysql. If I could, I could have Sphinx read “StumbleUpon” as “Stumble Upon” and all would be well (although in theory this would backfire).

Despite working on slimming the addons.mozilla.org database through dieting and exercise - I still have to occasionally do long running database tasks. So I finally tried out pipe viewer. As someone who’s impatient this has been awesome. Here’s some quick examples:

I went to DjangoCon this past week for work. Django is one of my favorite frameworks. I dropped PHP and the symfony framework to learn python and Django and I haven’t looked back. I think for Mozilla’s webdev team it would be the framework of choice. We have 100s of sites in many frameworks, but not a lot of resuability. Django apps are built to built to be reusable. If you build correctly you don’t have to refactor, it’s already done.