It’s called “work.” It’s good for you.

I just want to remind everyone in the USA that this is a special time in our political process. Election season is beginning soon, and furthermore, there is an incumbent in office. Therefore the opposing party’s #1 goal is to show that the existing president is doing a poor job. It is their only chance.

What this means is that every little mistake and unpopular decision, and believe me, everyone in authority makes mistakes and/or unpopular decisions, will be magnified as much as possible.

As an experimental work project, my team is evaluating the yubikey as a 2 factor authentication device for login.ubuntu.com. The user interface suggested by Yubico leaves me wishing for something better. Here is an idea I have, please let me know your thoughts.

Here in America and likely abroad you may have seen billboards or heard news that the world is ending May 21st. The scale of the advertising campaign proclaiming this event lends a little bit of credibility to it. A website erected for this event contains detailed arguments and expositions explaining how this man, Harold Camping, came to the date. Unfortunately Harold’s arguments have a very simple flaw that completely ruin this entire premise.

Imagine you have a list of categories and you want to sort them by popularity, so that the most used categories are first. Django’s documentation left me scratching my head a bit. It took some time and fiddling to work out a good way to do it, I hope this is helpful and clear to you.

There was a book that made a lot of ruckus a while back called “The four hour workweek” by Timothy Ferriss. The premise was that you could do some clever stuff and live comfortably now instead of waiting until you retire. I recently had an idea on a different way to enjoy the four hour work week, but first we need to revisit some basic principles of high school physics.

Last week my Grandmother died and we had her funeral today. The pastor suggested that we discuss the things about her life that shaped us. During the reception I really didn’t get a chance to do that but I have put some thought into it and I’ve come up with 3 things I’ve learned because of her.

PHP is a programming language for web applications but Django is a full-fledged framework that provides database abstraction, caching, authentication and a host of other services. Comparing the performance of the two is not a fair, apples to apples comparison. However I want to do it in order to better decide what I should use for an application.

I created a light-weight HTML page, a “hello world” php app (no db or sessions) and a light weight “hello world” django app using mostly default values (sessions are enabled). I then ran the apache benchmark (ab) on the three using a small VPS w/ 512 MB of RAM from localhost (so no latency is involved giving ideal conditions).

I sent this e-mail to my colleagues back on August 13th, 2010, on the subject of Google Wave (which had just announced it would end):

I found a great article on using mod_rewrite to send mobile browsers to a special page or site. I modified it to do the inverse as well. You can use the rules demonstrated in there to send mobile browsers to your mobile site and you can use the rules below as an inverse to send desktop browsers from your mobile site to your normal site.