Links published in April 2007
django-openid
Some people, when they find out how cool OpenID is, sit around and say, “wouldn’t it be nice if I could use it with Django?”. Other people go off and implement it. Simon’s one of the latter group.
The Two Things about Computer Programming
Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
This is why a lot of really good programmers come from liberal-arts backgrounds: critical thinking is one of the necessary skills.
Rails, Twitter and the 800lb Gorilla in the Room…
Why shouldn’t we extend the concept of “no premature optimisation” to language and platform selection? If Twitter had chosen an “enterprise” class platform and tried to architect for 11k reqs/sec, chances are they would still be building…
Amen.
Sprint Users - Focus - Upload Content to your PCS Phone
Finally figured out how to turn an mp3 into a ring tone for my A900:
- Open up GarageBand, start a new podcast episode.
- Import the audio file.
- Trim it down to under 30 seconds.
- Share -> Export Song to Disk (default podcast setting is 64kb AAC, which is perfect for this).
- Head over to the Sprint Users page and message the file to my phone.
How handy.
A Tale of Two Scientific Consensuses
I used to subscribe to Reason, but petty, fallacious drivel like this is one reason why I let it go. If I taught logic classes, I’d use this article as a good example of how not to do it: it starts with a red herring — the global warming issue — and moves on to a straw man; environmentalists typically show concern for the environmental impact of genetically-modified food, not human-health issues (that’s why they’re called environmentalists, after all — there are some groups, mostly in Europe, which prey on the terror of “Frankenfood”, but they can be dismissed). And, amazingly, there’s good reason to be concerned about the environmental impact; GM crops, for example, are largely genetic monocultures and are engineered to outperform “natural” (I use that word lightly, given the thousands of years of selective breeding we’ve done on most domesticated crops) strains, which essentially makes them an agricultural disaster waiting to happen.
Newspaper Wiki: Schematics
Certainly looks interesting, but like Jeff I have some concerns about data storage; a news operations can be bitten, and bitten hard, by storing unstructured blobs of data, and a wiki-style backend feels like it’s just asking for that sort of trouble.
(Via Jeff)
W3 Schools removal script
A Greasemonkey script to strip W3Schools pages out of Google search results; incredibly handy given the way those pages infest most web-design-related searches.
Internet access CAPTCHAS
I propose that Congress enact legislation to require all users to pass these tests before being granted access to the World Wide Intertubes.