Here’s the deal: I believe it is pronounced with a short “i”, a la “sift”.  Some of my coworkers believe it is pronounced with a long “i”, a la “site”.  Phonetically, they’re saying “cipher”. Obviously, I am correct.  My reasoning: the “I” in sIFR stands for Inman (soft “i”), as in scalable Inman Flash Replacement, because Shaun Inman initially developed the technology. Also, I believe the pronunciation of the first letter of each word in an acronym should be maintained, if it results in an easily spoken acronym.  For example – NASA arguably rolls off the tongue a little more easily than nay-say.  You can see my point.  Their sole reason: “cipher” sounds cooler.  Shenanigans, I say.

So now it’s time to hopefully get a collective opinion on the matter.  What say you, fellow geeks?

The site itself, which was obviously designed by the same folks responsible for his campaign site, is quite captivating as well.  It admirably meets all the goals one would expect from such a site: visual unity, a sense of regality, tasteful typography, and readability.  Quite a bit of information is presented on the home page, yet spacing and color are used judiciously to lead the eye through the visual hierarchy.

The way our next President is handling every aspect of his upcoming office already is a sign of what we have to look forward to in the next four years: responsibility, intelligence, thoughtfulness, and dedication. It’s about time.

In related news, I’m finally getting to the point where I’m actually redesigning my other blog, so stay tuned for posts on the entire process of re-creating that site.

Cheers.

This doesn’t mean I’m leaving PHP in the dust – I still use it extensively at work, with no plans of stopping anytime soon – but I just have a feeling this is a language I would like to work in. Python’s syntax is similar to Ruby’s (at least at first glance), and from what I’ve read it outperforms Rails by quite a bit.

The project that I’m going to cut my Django teeth on is my wife and I’s blog: www.rustyandben.com. I talked briefly about overhauling the site a few months ago, but some other higher priority projects came up. I’m getting to the point now, however, where I can start working on it again. I’ll be re-designing and developing from scratch (obviously maintaining all data), so it makes the perfect opportunity to try out Django. I’ll be upgrading my Media Temple hosting to a virtual dedicated server so that I can have root-level access in order to install whatever software I want. This, in turn, will allow me to try out a couple other technologies I’ve been wanting to check out: SQLite (a lightweight flat-file database system) and Lighttpd (a lightweight and fast HTTP server). More on those as I assess their feasibility.

I’ll be posting about all this again soon, as I’m planning on writing a series of posts about the creation of the site.