January 2009
World, meet django-flatblocks →
Horst has attempted to contact me many times over the past month but I’ve simply been too busy to get anything started with him. It looks like he’s put together some good stuff here!
A couple of months ago I found out about Clint Ecker’s excellent django app django-chunks, which basically does one thing and that very well: It takes the idea of a django.contrib.flatpages and...
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act →
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which states that the 180-day statute of limitations for pay discrimination resets with each new discriminatory paycheck, was signed into U.S. law on January 29, 2009, by U.S. President Barack Obama.
The law was enacted in response to Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 550 U.S. 618 (2007), a U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that the statute of...
The "P" in "HTTP" stands for "protocol" →
So Phusion Passenger is cool because it restarts your Rails instances when they die? I’m wondering why they die so often?
It’s not like FastCGI is infinitely easier to parse or extremely more compact. Indeed, FastCGI is hard enough to parse that someone has invented: SCGI (Simple CGI). If you notice, the headers and message body in SCGI are still sent in their original encoding -...
“As my children pointed out, in Chicago, school is never cancelled. In fact, my...”
– Barack Obama — Telling people in Washington, D.C. to suck it up like Chicagoans :)
Obama on Al Arabiya →
Obama respects me. The Bush family scarcely believes I hang on to my citizenship by a loophole and if they had their way I would be stripped of my birthright.
Obama: And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I’ve come to understand is that regardless of your faith — and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians,...
Welcome to Ars Technica v5.0! →
A big post on Ars Technica’s big redesign. Two or three of my coworkers and I have been working on this for about the last four months, which is pretty exceptional when you think about it.
We basically rebuilt the whole site, 10 years and somehere around 40,000 articles of content, from the ground up.
New servers/configuration, new CMS (Movable Type), and a new design. And we did all...
Jacqui in The Guardian →
Jacqui Cheng: Steve Jobs’s departure from Apple doesn’t spell doom for the company
This isn’t an article I would normally write, but I was approached by The Guardian to write about whether Apple is doomed without Jobs at the helm, and I was flattered enough by the request that I decided to write it. Everyone who has seen it so far has been really excited that I’ve been published in such...
"Get is front-end for wget command, a download... →
via Alex Payne’s Minima
jk: Apple 24-inch Cinema Display on the way, again →
Cool story about how Apple stores are different:
The rep listened to my tale, really listened, and then asked if my MacBook was in my backpack. Of course it was, I take my gear everywhere so once he confirmed that he told me to take it out and hook it up to the display. This is what sets Apple apart from other companies when it comes to their stores. If the customer needs to see how their...
WatchI hear that John Gruber and John Siracusa agree on 99% of everything :)
merlin:
‘John Gruber’ at Macworld Expo by gruber
Watchstaff:
Introducing: Tumblr v5
Django now has fast tests →
Not that we have a horrible complex set of tests on our projects, but this will definitely speed em up:
Ellington’s test suite, which was taking around 1.5-2 hours to run on Postgres, has been reduced to 10 minutes. I tested changing some of our more expensive doctests to unit tests (and thus getting transaction support), and it looks like we can get our suite to run in 3-4 MINUTES....
How ill is Steve Jobs? →
I say he ill as a mothafucka. That mothfucka be illin’ with da iPod and da iPhone.
Scoble: What real-time keynotes need →
Unfortunately, it costs us several thousands of dollars to send four people to San Francisco from Chicago, rent equipment to take those awesome photos, put people up in hotels, buy their food, et cetera.
All that needs to be recouped to make the coverage worthwhile. I know it might sound weird to see this stuff put into business terms, but that’s how the world works :)
Posting a keynote...
4G war, Obama-team's conflicts of interest loom... →
Sad to hear this about the Obama team. I know its hard to find knowledgeable people in certain areas, but how blatant does the conflict of interest need to be before its inappropriate?
Last week, President-elect Barack Obama’s call for a delay in the Digital TV transition, long scheduled for February, sent tech and telecom firms into a tizzy. Both Verizon and the Consumer Electronics...
jQuery 1.3 released, jQuery Foundation announced →
The new live() stuff is really cool.
Django migrations: South 0.4 released
→
The latest release of South is bristling with new features and database support, and plenty of bugfixes, of which most are (perhaps somewhat ironically) for the new features.
Major changes include:
Column type alteration with the new db.alter_column API request; just pass in the names, and a new Field instance.
A new —add-field Model.field option to startmigration, that...
WORD ON THE TWEET: Jacqui was on the news
This is a pretty campy news segment, but Jacqui and a lot of my friends are in it (yo Leah!). The back of my head is even in there:
Here it is:
Jacqui Was on the News, click here to play
var so = new...
Lebedev's pyramid →
This applies in nearly every part of life:
The proportion shown is true of any company, organization or community. —> Art. Lebedev
“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no...”
– John C. Dvorak, 19 Feb 1984 - Technovia: Sniggering at John Dvorak is harsh, but fun
Google Chrome set to release for Mac this summer →
“Ask anyone over 25 what digit they use to ring a doorbell and most people will...”
– We have no doorbell. We just ask that people call up and we go let them in. — Texting a signal of wider trends - BBC NEWS (via superamit)
Shot out
The tendency of an audience to become bored or tired of something that’s hyper-saturated a particular part of your life. Porn producers and stars use it often I guess. Relates to the effect where you must indefinitely “up the ante” and make, perhaps superficial, change to still be perceived as fresh.
“Reality TV and American Idol are shot out”
It also has the...
Why we are eating your lunch →
Usually Matthew’s feed is teetering on a the brink of getting removed from my reader and then he posts something I’m interested in.
The newspaper is in real danger of becoming—in porn parlance—shot out. Digital news is, of course, going to get “shot out” as well someday and replaced by something else. The people who can efficiently see the writing and alter their...
The economy went through the roof
A very inspirational and interesting article in this week’s New Yorker by Elizibeth Kolbert titled “Greening the Ghetto.” It’s about an environmental and social activist, Van Jones, who believe that the solution to our country’s biggest problems—crime, poverty, unemployment, and the environment—can be solved by converting impoverished, blue collar, mostly minority...
Heading back from Macworld and CES 2009
Well the busiest week of my whole year is behind me. It’s kind of nice that this happens right at Jan 4 and we can get it right out of the way. I had a blast but I’m also physically, mentally, and socially drained. You could go so far to say that I am “shot out.”
However, I am especially proud to say that it was the best conference coverage I think we’ve ever...
A Web site cannot set a cookie if the Domain... →
A Web site cannot set a cookie if the Domain attribute is in uppercase characters and has an odd number of characters in Internet Explorer 7
Announcing the Django Book, second edition →
Good for Adrian and good for the Django community:
I’m excited to announce that I’m working on a second edition of the Django Book. The first edition, which I cowrote with Jacob Kaplan-Moss, was published in print by Apress more than a year ago, and, sadly, it’s become out of date. It covers Django version 0.96, and many of the examples don’t work with the current...
Boing Boing Gadgets at CES Video: Palm Pre... →
(Flash video above, downloadable MP4 here.)
Hello from CES in Las Vegas! Boing Boing Gadgets’ Joel and Brownlee got a hands-on demo with the new Palm Pre here, and Boing Boing’s…
Short documentary about urban foragers in Chicago →
Interesting documentary about a couple of Chicagoans who find and eat edible weeds, wild berries, nettles, purslane, apples, and other goodies free for the taking in the urban landscape.
…
Watch“It remains to be seen if the Macbook Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers to do real work and not just dicking around.” — Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source via Colin
Gaza and Israel conflict →
Please note that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world:
Phosphorus burns are almost always second or third-degree because the particles do not stop burning on contact with skin until they have entirely disappeared — it is not unknown for them to reach the bone
The weapon is illegal under the Geneva Treaty—as a weapon of war—but many countries...
“I support it [gay marriage] because we’re asking for the same thing. If I...”
– Eartha Kitt
Mars rovers celebrate 5 years on Mars →
A nice little recap of what these little guys have been up to for the past 5 years. I can’t believe it has been that long already!
It seems like just yesterday that I was live-blogging (kinda) their landing on the surface:
Edit (12:06): Spacecraft is bouncing on the surface!
Edit (12:11): We’ve got at least 2 minutes of data from the lander via the Mars Global Surveyor after...
peafowl - a Python messaging server →
Peafowl is a powerful but simple messaging server that enables reliable distributed queuing with an absolutely minimal overhead by using memcache protocol for maximum cross-platform compatibility.
Sampling Twitter →
Instead of mining data from the public feed, I wrote a short script to query a sample across of all the possible Twitter ids. I first created a a test Twitter account, which was assigned a new user ID of 18496098. Using this id as an upper bound on the population of all Twitter IDs, I selected samples at random from the range (0, 18496098) (exclusive), and queried the Twitter API at a metered...