March 2011
1 post
November 2010
3 posts
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Domino’s Pizza and the USDA: The Bailout You... →
I really really hate corporate welfare… if we’re gonna cut the Federal Deficit, lets please start with corporate subsidies and corporate tax loopholes first. Then later on, we can consider cutting social programs, etc.
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Big Cheese vs. Real Cheese →
Wonder how the food industry will handle news that their very industry of refining and processing food may be what’s causing major health problems.
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Notes on the Pylons & repoze.bfg Merger
Some folks might not have time to follow the Pylons-discuss mail list, so this might be news to them, but I’m thrilled to announce that the Pylons and repoze.bfg web frameworks are merging. If this is the first you’ve heard about it, don’t worry, it was only announced a week ago now on the Pylons mail list.
In the time since the announcement, I’ve heard a lot of varying...
October 2010
3 posts
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Why Extending Through Subclassing (a framework's...
Ok, I’ll admit it, overly ambitious blog post. So I’ll refine it a little now, this is intended mainly as my thoughts on why as a tool developer (one who makes tools/frameworks that other programmers then use), its a bad idea to implement extensible objects via developer subclassing. This is actually how the web framework I wrote - Pylons - provides its extensibility to developers and...
“Converting a movie from 2D to 3D is not a technical process. It is a creative...”
– Jon Landau, producer of Avatar and Titanic, regarding films that convert to 3D rather than get filmed in it
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May 2010
1 post
Pylons 1.0 Released! →
March 2010
1 post
1 tag
The Big Picture » Why a Consumer Protection Agency... →
Another consumer protection measure killed by the banks. A great analogy to how useful Nutritional information is, and how we need something similar for loans and mortgages to cut through the bull-shit of banks that want people to buy stuff they can’t afford.
February 2010
9 posts
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Ocean bacteria act as 'superorganism' - New... →
Guess it didn’t take long for the movie parallels to start up. Pretty cool if it turns out to be true, then it’d just be a matter of figuring out how to communicate with it.
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The Big Picture » Deficit Hawks Want New (or... →
Why now is not the time to all of a sudden try and eliminate the deficit.
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Tempting Fate at the Winter Games - NY Times →
Seems we’re on track to have the most dangerous Winter Olympics yet. Especially as news of an Olympic luger dying from injuries sustained in a luge crash just came out.
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The Case Against Layoffs: They Often Backfire -... →
I’ve seen some things in the past indicating layoff’s don’t actually help, interesting that other countries are starting to pickup the layoff practice despite any evidence indicating it helps company performance. Something seems broken with capitalism such that most companies now seem obsessed with short-term profit instead of long-term shareholder value. Maybe its linked to the...
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Food Stamps – The Great Recession’s Soup Lines →
For those thinking this isn’t as bad as the Great Depression since we don’t have soup lines… we just have different ways to keep the lines off the streets, and unemployment insurance keeps people at home watching TV rather than rioting on the streets.
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Deploying a Pylons App to Production, Step-by-Step →
One of the many ways to deploy a Pylons application. Hopefully with tools like toppcloud, the Python web world as a whole can start to come to a ‘best practices’ type methodology to ease deployment pains. So far, whether you’re deploying a Pylons, Django, repoze.bfg, Zope, or TurboGears app, many of the same deployment pains will crop up. Since all of them can be deployed as WSGI...
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Pylons 0.10 and 1.0 Beta 1 Released
Without further ado,
I’m pleased to announced that Pylons 0.10b1 and 1.0b1 are now out. I have not put them on Cheeseshop to ensure they’re not downloaded accidentally.
Upgrading / Installing
I have updated upgrading instructions here:
http://pylonshq.com/docs/en/1.0/upgrading/
The instructions to install from scratch on Pylons...
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“The big banks, the lobbyists say, have become increasingly alarmed that the...”
– Obama Added a New Twist to Financial Reform Talk - NYTimes.com
Why are you so terribly disappointing? →
January 2010
27 posts
2 tags
“Facts Plain to Any Dispassionate Eye” →
This goes out to all the folks that read NRO and DailyKos for their daily news. Partisanship is bad, let’s not get sucked into websites that specialize in it.
Hulu's most popular shows could end up behind... →
If I could easily watch it within XBMC, I’d happily pay, and prolly even consider dropping my Sat. TV.
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“Isn’t it funny when you walk into a investment firm, and you see all of the...”
– Senior portfolio manager, UBS
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Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits →
Yet another crappy outcome of the horribly bad decision that corporations are human beings. Definitely time to end this bizarre status.
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FDA on BPA: Our hands are tied →
Gotta love all the various ways we find to poison ourselves. Looks like the FDA can’t stop BPA now that its on the loose, hopefully Congress passes a bill to halt it.
Be sure to check out the comments where someone notes that Trader Joe’s canned food has always used and still uses BPA.
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Haiti: The Aid Masquerade →
An interesting look at how our past ‘aid’ efforts have actually made things worse, which also applies to various African countries. There’s a link near the bottom on organizations to donate to as well along with information about how they’ll help, because Haiti definitely needs aid now more than ever.
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Record Bank Bonuses Based On Record Bank Fraud →
It’s easy to claim you should get a bonus when you can avoid claiming the massive losses due to mark-to-make-believe. Ugh.
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restler - RESTful controller for Pylons →
For those looking for a RESTful setup for Pylons that is similar to Django-Piston.
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WatchHulu - The Colbert Report: Roxxxy the Sex Robot
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For Wall St., Question on Top Bonuses Is 7 Figures... →
For some reason this makes me extremely angry…
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Study: 48 Percent Of Fountain Sodas Contaminated... →
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After Attack on Danish Cartoonist: The West Is... →
Well written article defending the freedom to offend, hat tip to Des for the find.
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Walk Away From Your Mortgage! - NYTimes.com →
Why should only businesses act in their best financial interest? Some great points on why strategic defaults should be more heavily considered by homeowners in bad financial situations.
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You won't find consciousness in the brain -... →
An interesting musing on the correlation, or lack therof, of observed neural activity with respect to the experience of consciousness. Part neuroscience, part philosophy, something to think about.
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Deploying Python web apps with toppcloud
Ian Bicking recently released a rather interesting package called toppcloud that aims to tackle what I see as a growing need for those of us deploying Python webapps.
I was actually interested in easing my own deployment woes before I saw Ian’s announcement about his package, and was halfway through a rather hefty amount of research on automating server deployments with tools like Chef and...
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Netflix, Warner Bros. Reach New Deal - WSJ.com →
Meh, pretty lame. Warner’s answer to people not wanting to pony up the cash for DVD’s? Make them wait a little longer after it comes out on DVD. I doubt this applies to Blockbuster or other rental solutions which makes it even lamer.
Come on Warner, get with it, people are tired of buying physical discs (which you then make obsolete several years later in the hopes we all re-buy them...
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Very Simple Theming in Pylons | Planetary... →
A neat approach to theming in Pylons. I personally haven’t actually needed to have themes for anything yet, so I never got around to making such a utility.
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Body Scanners Might Violate U.K. Child-Protection... →
Body scanner are rather retarded to begin with, here’s another great reason why.
I saw a post recently in a newspaper that made another great point. That we actually already have a bomb sniffing device that works amazingly well, and would cost just a fraction of the price of these ‘body scanners’. We call them bomb-sniffing dogs, and I bet for the price of just a few scanners,...
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Nothing to celebrate on Public Domain Day 2010 in... →
Just imagine how crappy our lives would be if these kind of extensions had happened to patents…ugh.
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DVD sales tank in 2009 as Americans head to the... →
I’ve been telling friends for awhile now that I think physical media for movies is dead, seems the recent numbers from DVD/Blu-Ray sales back that up. I don’t think its a temporary recession drop either, its permanent as services like iTunes, Amazon VOD, Netflix streaming, etc. make people wonder what the point is in having tons of plastic discs all over their house.
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Solution to killer superbug found in Norway -... →
December 2009
3 posts
2 tags
OpenID + DB Authentication in Pylons is easy with... →
Tony gives a great walk through on how to get OpenID auth in a Pylons app with RPX. Nicely done.
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IMF: Riskier Lenders Spent More Lobbying | The Big... →
I wish lobbying would be made illegal and considered the same as bribery, which it mostly is except for the slight chance their purchased Congressman won’t vote the way they are paid to (which seems pretty slim nowadays).
August 2009
1 post
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Advanced Caching with Django and Beaker
After seeing more than a few blog posts and packages attempt to provide more advanced caching capability for Django, it occurs to me I should actually just blog how to use Beaker in Django, rather than just keep mumbling about how “Beaker already does that”. So, if you’ve needed caching in Django that goes beyond using just one backend at a time, or maybe can actually cope with the Dog-Pile...
July 2009
1 post
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Beaker 1.4 Released
Beaker 1.4 has now been released, and addresses several fairly important bugs. First, the full changelog:
Fix bug with hmac on Python 2.4. Patch from toshio, closes ticket #2133 from the TurboGears2 Trac.
Fix bug with occasional ValueError from FileNamespaceManager.do_open. Fixes #10.
Fixed bug with session files being saved despite being new and not saved.
Fixed bug with...