December 2008
November 2008
Bush Aides Rush to Enact a Rule Obama Opposes →
Not that we all didn’t expect this kind of crap. The current administration has had their heads down, working hard to munge up as much shit as they can before they leave:
The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to...
The Forces Driving Women Out of Computer Science →
What’s particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5...
Python Shows Continual Growth in Open Source... →
Fuzebox - Open Source Game Console →
Holy crap this is awesome! A mini 8-bit game system that’s fully programmable in C! The chip is an Atmel AVR which are really nice (I programmed an AT163 chip on a dev board in college and made lots of cool stuff like robots on it).
The Fuzebox is a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console. It is designed specifically for people who know a little bit of programming to expand into...
Genetic A/B Testing with JavaScript →
Genetify provides developers with a JavaScript library for doing any number of A/B tests on a site (tweaking CSS, JavaScript, or HTML elements) all trained over time using a Genetic algorithm backend.
This means that no matter how many different A/B tests you have on a page the genetic algorithm will adapt to the input (users visiting the page and hopefully achieving some pre-defined goal)...
CorePy: Assembly programming in Python →
Some of the most fun I’ve ever had programming was doing ASM stuff on DSP processors in college:
CorePy is designed to give developers direct access to the underlying processor from Python. CorePy provides four main components for interacting with the processor:
ISAs are libraries of instructions for a given instruction set architecture. A physical processor may support multiple ISAs.
...
Chicago home prices fall nearly 10% --... →
Hope you didn’t recently buy a home in Chicago
The sales decline was even more severe within the city of Chicago, where home sales plummeted 21.6 percent, to 1,535 sales of single-family homes and condos. The median price within the city was $260,000, down 9.1 percent from October 2007.
Google: Sorting 1PB with MapReduce →
We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks). To make sure we kept our sorted petabyte safe, we asked the Google File System to write...
What’s the Point of Daylight Time? - Should Obama... →
Recently, however, we were able to conduct a study in Indiana, where daylight time was instituted statewide only in 2006. Before that year, daylight time was in effect in just a handful of counties… daylight time caused a 1 percent overall increase in residential electricity use… the greatest increase occurred in late summer and early fall, when electricity use rose by 2 percent to...
jQuery magicpreview plug-in →
The Opposite of Momentum: Where is Ruby headed? →
Dave Fayram of PowerSet and a guy who seems to know what he’s talking about when it comes to Ruby projects:
Let me start by saying that I’ve been a longtime fan of Ruby. I’ve been a member of the #caboose cabal forever, and I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of ruby over the course the last 6 years. I’ve drank the Ruby kool-aid, helped to start two Rails Startups and integrated...
A Politician to Get Behind: Bike Light Initiative →
Here’s how the initiative works: Police officers will have light sets in their cars while they’re out patrolling in the evenings. When they pull over cyclists who are riding dark, they’ll have the option of giving the cyclists light sets. They may or may not waive the tickets. And if time permits, they may help the cyclists install the lights. During the past two winters of the promotion, officers...
The March of Access Control →
John Resig writes about the W3C’s new Access Control specification. The specification would make requesting remote resources a lot easier (if you’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with the rat’s nest that is cross-domain XMLHttpRequests, you’ll know what the issue is here):
The web is changing. Historically it’s been painfully easy to request resources from...
Wichita, Kansas Preacher Pushes Obama Muslim... →
The Spirit One Christian Center is located about 2 blocks from where I grew up in Wichita. Therefore I have a lot of experience with these folks, and at least around the time I was last living there and visiting regularly (1999-2003), I came to know that most of their congregation is full of people who are just a little “off.”
The whole place is kind of odd. It comes as no...
Hillary Clinton to accept Barack Obama's offer of... →
Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.
“In one classic example, one cat is crying, and another is hugging it and saying,...”
– Lolcats, “I Can Has Cheezburger?” | Salon Life
TSA "behavior detection" is wrong more than 99... →
Lemonade Stand for iPhone →
Amazon CloudFront →
“CBS’s underlying problem… is the arbitrary and largely ineffectual...”
– Nate Silver
Six Apart Journalist Bailout Program →
Poor journalists :(
Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.
Things Caches Do →
There are different kinds of HTTP caches that are useful for different kinds of things. I want to talk about gateway caches — or, “reverse proxy caches” — and consider their effects on modern, dynamic web application design.
Base - SQLite3 application for OS X ($15) →
Found it on Daring Fireball this morning:
Base is an application for creating, designing, editing and browsing SQLite 3 database files. It’s a proper Mac OS X application. Fast to launch, quick to get in to and get the data you need.
New Plan for Official U.S. Bicycle Route System... →
If this comes to fruition, this could be huge! A nationwide biking system! Think of all the people we could employ building this “highway” for efficient transportation. Think of all the people who would be safer on their cross-country trips:
The United States is on a path to creating what could become the largest official bicycle route network in the world, thanks to the...
smorgasboard: transparent support for multiple... →
Smorgasbord is a Django application that provides transparent support for multiple templating languages in Django, even for 3rd party applications that don’t use your choice of template language natively. Using Smorgasbord, you can use templates written in a different language with applications written to Django’s own templating API.
python-iptools: Using IpRangeList to make... →
The iptools.IpRangeList object can help by replacing the standard tuple of addresses recommended by the Django docs with an intelligent object that responds to the membership test operator in. This object can be configured with dotted quad IP addresses like the default INTERNAL_IPS tuple (eg. ‘127.0.0.1’), CIDR block notation (eg. ‘127/8’, ‘192.168/16’) for...
Expect Obama to move fast on FCC transformation →
Lipman has seen a lot of presidential transitions. He has been practicing Telecom, Media, and Technology law for Bingham for 25 years, advocating before the FCC, state regulatory bodies, Congress, and the courts. Lipman’s bottom line: With FCC Chair Kevin Martin moving on and his fellow Republican Deborah Taylor Tate termed out when Congress expires, Obama will appoint two, and maybe even...
On Static Media and Django →
Static media really comes in two flavors. Media that is part of your site like your stylesheets and user generated media or files that are uploaded to the site once it is live. We don’t want to serve all this media from the same place for a couple of reasons
Open Radar →
Radar is Apple’s internal bug tracking system. How Apple views Radar and how external third-party developers view Radar causes a bit of a conflict. Apple heavily uses Radar internally. Thousands of Apple employees’ work-days are defined primarily by what’s in their bug queue. Also factor in how Apple is an incredibly secretive organization.
Debugging Django in Production Environments →
Eric Holscher gives another method for debugging your production Django sites; this time through a Middleware that enables DEBUG based on the authenticated user.
