JJinuxLand

Django has had a long-standing missing feature that made it impossible to give your apps friendly names. See #3591 and #14251. Thankfully, this will be fixed in Django 1.7, but switching to the latest version of Django is not an option for me right now. This was making my admin look really ugly because I have app names such as "mps" and "budget_cost_data". Those would show up in random places in the admin as "Mps", "Budget_cost_data", "Budget cost data", etc. What I wanted was "MPS" and "Budget Cost Data".There are many ways to try to solve this problem. You may be able to switch to Django Suit or Grappelli and then use localization to fix it. However, when I tried that approach with Django Suit, the breadcrumbs were still broken.I finally found this snippet which got me started down a viable path. I grabbed a copy of the Django egg I was using, unzipped it, and copied django/contrib/admin/templates/admin to my proj…

Using Excel is like driving a 4x4. Writing custom software is like building an interstate freeway.With a modest amount of training, you can do amazing things with a 4x4. You can go to places where there are no roads. If you don't like where you are, you can just as easily drive somewhere new. The downside is that when you're driving off-road, you generally have to drive pretty slowly, and you have to bring your own gas.You do have to be a specialist to build an interstate freeway. In fact, it requires an amazing amount of work from a large number of people. Yet, once it's built, a 100,000 people a day can fly by at 70mph. It offers them tremendous convenience; they don't even need to bring their own gas! On the other hand, a freeway is only useful if it goes in the direction you need to go.Hence, Excel offers tremendous flexibility, whereas custom software offers tremendous convenience. Excel is easy to get started with, but grows unwieldy as you scale the size of your…