I’ve been working lately with migrating my application to Rails 3 + MongoDB, which led me to use Devise instead of Authlogic. I ran into several issues while using Devise for a REST web service. In the case of an authentication error, Devise redirects requests to the login page instead of issuing a 401 unauthenticated.

The workaround is to use a custom failure app, and simply override the respond method as following:

class CustomFailure < Devise::FailureApp
  include ActionController::Head
  include ActionController::MimeResponds

  def respond
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html {
        super
      }
      format.any { head :status => 401}
    end
  end
end

And add the following in config/initializers/devise.rb:

Devise.setup do |config|
  config.warden do |manager|
    manager.failure_app = CustomFailure
  end
end

Aura BioSciences is one of those companies that attract lots of startups to CIC. As Tim joked maybe because Aura founder Elisabet de los Pinos is a beautiful women

GDP per capita, 2007, in percentage of Russia=100

It reminds me of Volkswagen placing a industrial park in Kaluga, only to realize later that they could not find enough workforce at the wage VW was willing to pay. The locals preferred to drive three hours each day to Moscow in order to earn three times as much

(Actually he used almost the same slides at the OnDC ’09)

At the top of every company, there’s at least one person who really cares and really wants the product and the customer experience to be great. That’s you, and me, and Ryan. Below that person, there are layers of people, many of whom are equally dedicated and equally talented.

But at some point as you work your way through an organization, you find pockets of people who don’t care that much. For them, it’s a job. They just want to get through the day and don’t find it upsetting that the video switching is slow and the Wi-Fi went down and the geeks couldn’t get to their Twitters. 
If you’re lucky, none of those people are employed by your company. But the minute you begin to rely on outside vendors, you expose yourself to their people, some of whom inevitably just won’t care enough or know enough or have the right skills to deliver the awesome experience you’re trying to deliver.

Meanwhile, the Somali pirates have begun to put all of that ransomed lucre — tens of millions of dollars in recent years — to work for them, setting up a stock exchange “that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations,” according to a startling Reuters dispatch from Somalia published Tuesday.

The bandits’ bourse is a small building in the once-small fishing village of Haradheere, about 250 miles northeast of Mogadishu. “Now it is a bustling town where luxury 4×4 cars owned by the pirates and those who bankroll them create honking traffic jams along its pot-holed, dusty streets,” the wire service reports. Somalia is considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world for Western journalists.

“Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,” Reuters quotes a “wealthy former pirate named Mohammed” as saying.

“The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials … we’ve made piracy a community activity.”

Also quoted is “piracy investor” Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, who was lined up with others waiting “for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.“”I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,” she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. “I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the ‘company’.”

It reminds me the story of the Dutch East India Company during the 17th century . The difference is that the Dutch East India Company waged war and pillaged outposts, while four centuries later the Somali are hijacking US oil tankers.

A few words about the methodology:

The index is calculated as the simple average of a city’s percentile ranking on each of the 4 topics covered in the study (starting a business, getting a construction permit, registering property & trading abroad). The ranking on each topic is in turn the simple average of the percentile ranking on its component indicators. [The percentile rank is the percentage of values below (<) OR less or equal  (<=) to a  given value, depending on the definition]

For example it takes in Moscow 9 procedures, 30 days and 2.7% of annual income per capita to open a business.  The minimum capital requirement amounts to 2.2% of annual income per capita. It means that on the 4 component indicators, Moscow ranks in the 0th (best), 67th, 100th (worst) and 0th percentile. On average, Moscow ranks in the 53th percentile. It ranks in the 96th percentile on dealing with construction permits, 44th percentile on registering property and 67th percentile on trading across borders. The average of Moscow’s percentile rankings is 62%. If you now order all cities by their (ascending) average percentile rank, Moscow gets the last (and 10th) place.

However, percentiles are totally meaningless in small samples, especially when the observations are about the same and you get “tied ranks” while ordering the data. When you have ten values, of which eight are the same, you might have to assign the 0th or 100th percentile to the highest respectively the lowest value (some statisticians argues that the 0th and 100th percentile cannot be determined in a finite sample). And the remaining ones could lie in a range from 20th to 80th percentile (depending on HOW you define the percentile rank).

Now comes the problem: my calculations and the World Bank report’s result do not match, despite using exactly the same data and method. Let’s assume (out of goodwill) that the WB used a different method for calculating percentiles. I will post an update as soon as I get an answer from them.

Swine flu death toll as of 17. November 2009

While the CDC is brainwashing everyone to get swine flu vaccine (death toll < 9’000), over 48 millions people died of other causes during the same time. And no one (at least in the press) seem to care about them.

The most interesting part is that MacDonald’s is very fond of its McDrive service, which apparently accounts for a huge chunck of its revenue in Russia. Taking the example of Kazan on this map, McDrives are even being opened in the very city centre (as opposed to the one/two floor counter service in most European cities).