About

General

This site was developed by me as a public code repository for my open source projects. The projects are licensed under the GPL or LGPL license in the hope that they will be of use to other people.

I first started writing this website in 2008. Its requirements are that it has to be easily localizable, standards compliant, blazingly fast and easy to maintain. Back then I thought it would be wise to do the project in PHP, in which I never wrote anything until then. The reason behind this is that I saw that most web developers use it, so I can't be that bad, right? Well, turns out that PHP is a terrible language, and that comes from someone who programs in C++ for a living and likes it. In fact the last iteration of Bastart Code, which ran for 5 years from 2005 until 2010, is coded in C++ with the help of cgicc, wxWidgets and MySQL++. Anyway, after all this and a rewrite in PHP I decided to go for something else. First, I did some language research, and came to the conclusion that I really love Python and its libraries. So I went searching for some libraries, which is when I came accross CherryPy. I combined it with Genshi, Babel and SQLAlchemy. While I really loved every single component (especially SQLAlchemy) it was tough to update and extend the site. Also it wasn't really fast enough for me. I had some really cool features in the site, and it was almost finished, but I scrapped it before going live to start over. The current site is almost perfect for me, except that I'm still tuning the performance a bit and really miss SQLAlchemy. I hope that there will be a good Django and SQLAlchemy integration in the future.

Hosting

The site is currently hosted at Hetzners RZ12 in Falkenstein, Germany. The host is an EQ 4 dedicated server running a number of KVM virtual machines.

Software

Operating system:

• Gentoo Linux
• GNU/Linux 3.0.0 x86_64

Runtime:

• CPython (2.7.1, )
• LLVM 2.7

Server:

• Apache HTTP Server 2.2
• Green Unicorn 0.12.2
• PostgreSQL

Libraries:

• Django 1.4.0 alpha 0
• Psycopg 2.4
• gevent
• greenlet
• Docutils 0.9 repository
• Markdown 2.1.0
• matplotlib
• NumPy
• Pygments 1.4
• Python Imaging Library 1.1.7
• Python Daemon 1.5.5
• IPy 0.63

Django apps:

• Django Debug Toolbar HEAD
• Django Nani HEAD
• Django Registration tip
• sorl-thumbnail tip
• django-compress HEAD

Javascript libraries:

• jQuery
  • jQuery Lazy Load Plugin 1.5.0

Other things:

• Undecapped Vinyl
• Admonition icons from Gnome Yelp

Content created with:

• GNU Emacs
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• IcoFX
• OptiPNG