Apple has grown larger than Microsoft. This is old news. Steve Jobs (RIP) never became a philanthropist like Bill Gates. So why do the technorati hold Jobs in such high regard will still harboring resentment for Gates?

I think the differentiation is in the context under which we use their products.

I find myself with other options in every arena in which I use Apple's products. I choose to use them because I want to.

Let's compare this with Microsoft. I often find myself using Microsoft products because I have no other choices.

I use Excel because Google docs wasn't able to open a complex spreadsheet created with Excel.

I use Word because Open Office couldn't display the track changes recorded in Word.

I use Windows to test my websites in Internet Explorer because IE isn't available anywhere else.

The one notable exception is Xbox; I love my Xbox. I chose it over playstation.

I wasn't strong-armed into using Xbox through anti-competitive practices, it's a good product that I wanted to use.

I don't think profit, or good vs. evil has anything to do with it. We simply like companies when we choose to use their products -- over and over -- because they're better.

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I am sick of the 960.gs webpage I have shit to get done and I don't want to be sold on 960 -- just remind me what the damn css classes are.

Here is my own personal 960.gs documentation :)

note: In the list below XX is used to denote a number of columns

Quick reference:

• container_XX
• grid_XX
• prefix_XX
• suffix_XX
• push_XX
• pull_XX
• alpha
• omega
• clear

container_XX

All elements in the page should be inside one of these -- it tells the grid system how many columns your layout should be.

grid_XX

Makes the element XX columns wide

prefix_XX

Shift the element XX columns to the right (take up XX more columns on the left)

suffix_XX

Push the next element XX columns to the right (take up XX more columns on the right)

push_XX

Shift this element XX columns to the right without affecting any other elements

pull_XX

Shift this element XX columns to the left without affecting any other elements

alpha / omega

When using grid_XX inside another grid_XX element. use alpha and omega on the first and last element respectively to avoid doubling the gutter padding.

clear

clears floated elements in a way that doesn't suck

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I'm going to assume that since you're reading this, you're a technophile and you're already in the Google+ beta. I'm not going to talk about why Google+ is good, or how google finally "got social right", or why I love it more than life itself or any such nonsense. I'm going to talk about facebook.

Please don't misunderstand the title, I think you should try google+ out. If you like it (I do) then great! keep using it to your hearts content.

It's still about search

I'm pretty sure the primary reason for google+ is the +1 button. All this +1 action is going to give Google's search team a HUGE dataset to mine; no more scraping twitter for "social data". Facebook talked about doing this years ago.

It's good to understand Google's motivation before we pass judgement. 

Now about switching: don't.

Google is a very powerful company and they've (finally) created a good social network with some profound insights. One that I personally enjoy using more than facebook and twitter. Facebook is also a powerful company, let's not kid ourselves but they are *much* smaller than google.

Competition works

If everyone switches away from facebook and uses google+ instead, what we will have is facebook again, except owned by google (remember myspace). That isn't great.

Remember when Firefox started getting traction and over time started getting slow and bloated? And then Google released their own web browser, and all of a sudden Firefox was getting HUGE speed improvements? Right now we have 4 browsers with significant marketshare (sorry opera) all competing to be fast. That was great.

Well right now facebook has lost focus. They're the biggest by a lot and, frankly, they've got a bad case of slow-and-bloated syndrome (and a case of doing evil as well, but the degree to which they are doing it on purpose has been debated).

I'd like to see facebook have a change of heart on their crazy policies, and I hope Google+ is the catalyst. But it'd be a day when google controls our search, email, phones, photos, AND social graph.

Let's keep the Social Web competitive: let's force them not to be evil (and I don't just mean Google).

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In python:

import base64 def signed_request_to_json(s):     sig, encoded_json = s.split(".",2)     encoded_json += (len(encoded_json) % 4) * "="     return {         'sig': sig,         'json': base64.b64decode(encoded_json)     }  

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So... I was tasked with setting up https for a website recently. I was setting up Nginx with an ssl certificate from thawte.

Pretty normal. Pretty standard. Pretty aweful.

Here's to helping the next guy get through the process quicker than I did.

Testing

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Been writing a lot of javascript and I thought this was neat:

class JsObject(dict):     def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):         super(JsObject, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)         self.__dict__ = self 

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This is going to be short; I just want to point out how bad a user
experience this is on OSX.

On windows (and linux) there is ONE default hotkey for cycling through tabs in any UI: Ctrl + Tab

So why does OSX have so many? Here are just a few:

Adium:
Cmd + left/right arrows

Firefox, Chrome:
Cmd + Option + left/right arrows

Safari, Skype, Terminal:
Cmd + Shift + left/right arrows

The worst part about this is that it confuses the text editing options...

If I want Cmd + arrow to go to the beginning or end of the current
line of text and be able to hold shift to select then the Apple
endorsed default (via safari and terminal - e.g. Cmd + Shift + arrows) is already accounted for.

The Current state of things is not good :(

Edit: Things that should be reserved for consistant text editing:

Cmd + Arrow: (go to beginning/end of the current line)

Cmd + Shift + Arrow: (go to beginning/end of current line while selecting)

Opt + Arrow: move one word to the left or right

Opt + Shift + Arrow: move one word to the left or right while selecting

Shift + Arrow: move cursor one char while selecting

As far as I can tell, you can't edit the Safari or terminal hot keys either :(

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So you had all kinds of stuff on drop.io, eh? Well my friend, lend me your ear. A few of my buddies and I are in a band. We make music. We hassle our friends to come see us play shows on facebook, and try to get our music out there any way we can.

We're not beholden to some evil company, peddling our records, desperately trying to stop fans from downloading the music we make. But sometimes it's just not ready yet. During the process of creation we like to send each other different mixes and ideas, and we used to use a vanilla FTP server to do it.

At some point I got tired of explaining how to use FTP to all my friends and put together a file uploading service (very similar to drop.io ;)) so we could exchange files.

Anyway I guess what I'm getting at is this, it's in alpha right now. It's free to use, and the files are stored on amazon s3, so they're not at risk of getting lost.

The idea is to provide more and more collaboration features as the site grows, and eventually become something like a github for everyone else (if you're unfamiliar with github, it is a site that facilitates collaboration on software projects).

For anyone interested, you can email me (jiaaro on gmail) and I'll personally help you migrate your files to esploded (and give you 6 months of service for free once we do start charging)

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I think it would be a neat project to make an html5 internet radio (like mixest.com which I love) that automatically time syncs all the clients.

That way you could have everyone in an office go to a certain url and all the computer's speakers combined become the house sound system.

Not especially useful, but it would make a fun little node.js project.

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Let's start with first principles. I want to know things; I want to know almost everything I can. In all but a select few scenarios I'll put in the time to learn something vs not.

I'm not sure how this all got started, but it feels like nobody wants to explain anything anymore. I see it among friends, strangers, between parents and their children, all over.

Let's take a ride in the wayback machine.... *whirrrrrrr*

Way back in the day, when I was a wee little high school student, I played the guitar. We all did. If you want to get laid in high school, you join the football team or you play guitar. I played guitar.

There's actually one more step: you have to play for somebody.

So there I was.

Some kind soul had agreed to let us, a rowdy group of suburban teens, make loud, awesome noise for a few hours. And the guitar slingers among us were getting ready to melt faces.

I doubt this particular individual understood the complex set of motives for our playing guitars (scene cred, getting laid, or both), but that's a story for another time.

One particular guy, let's call him Jake, was sitting alone with his guitar doing something I'd never seen before, tuning with harmonics. It's really nothing special, but I was young and stupid and my motives were more than a little misplaced.

Even despite that, I like to know things. I asked about it.

"It's just a dumb trick," Jake tells me.

We went back and forth for a while, him telling me it's nothing and trying to get me to leave, and my pressing for more information.

I eventually got him to tell me it was the 5th and 7th fret harmonics, and you can use them to tune a guitar (in so many words). At the risk of being a huge hypocrite, I'm going to skip over that for now as it's not relevant to my story, but you can learn how on youtube.

That isn't a particularly uncommon occurence. Some people just don't want to explain anything.

I have a couple ideas why.

Maybe Jake is impatient and he doesn't want to waste his time teaching whenever he knows anything.

Maybe he's shy, and embarrassed by suddenly becoming the authority on this one infinitesimally small topic.

Whatever it is, he'd have saved us both some time by just spitting out the one sentence explanation. If it's the former he's doing a disservice to the world, and in the case of the latter, to himself.

Google is great, but half the battle is knowing what to search for in the first place. It's usually the hardest step and presents a pretty big barrier to entry when you're first learning about anything.

Until google can read minds, we still need other people to help us along the way. So don't dumb it down for me. Give it to me straight.

(In other news, it turns out communication skills are useful for all kinds of things)

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So I discovered an interesting way to run some code AFTER your return statement... get this (same idea works in both python and javascript)

(function x() {   try {     var x = 7;     throw "run catch block";   }   catch (err) {     x += 1;     return x;   }   finally {     // if you return here it will override the return     // value from the catch block if it was run     x += 1;     alert(x); // 9   } })(); // returns 8, but x === 9 !

or in python...

class FakeError(Exception): pass def my_func():     try:         x = 7         raise FakeError     except FakeError:         x += 1         return x     finally:         # if you return here it will override any value         # returned by the except block if it was run.         x += 1         print x my_func() # prints "9" and THEN returns 8

pretty neat... kind of hard to read though

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Fizzbuzz seemed like fun... My 5 min attempt in python:

for i in range(1, 101):     fizz = "Fizz" if not (i%3) else ""     buzz = "Buzz" if not (i%5) else ""     print (fizz + buzz) or i

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Jiaaro (twitter): oh boy... the datacenter where all my websites are hosted is down :(

mikegoldense (twitter): @Jiaaro Sorry, Jim. I tripped over the extension cord the datacenter was plugged into this morning. #mybad

jiaaro (twitter): @mikegoldense damn... I knew we should've used more duct tape on that extension cord

mikegoldense (twitter): @Jiaaro Next time, PLEASE DO. You know how clumsy I am. And you've got all these dang blasted datacenters just lying around. YOUKIDSTODAY!

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I've found plenty of examples of the Class decorator around the internets, but none of the function decorator I've come to know and love in python, so here it is:

x = function(msg) { alert(msg); return msg; } my_decorator = function(fn) { var that = this; return function() { msg = "Message: " + msg; return fn.apply(that, arguments); } } x = my_decorator(x); x('qwery'); // result: an alert that says, "Message: querty"

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Ever get tired of updating the copyright year on your webpage? Why not update it programmatically? Django templates make it incredibly painless:

© {% now "Y" %} YOUR_NAME_HERE

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David M Beazley, a very talented pythonista is gathering data for his talk at pycon. He's doing a little research on the GIL and has asked the community for some help.

You can see some interesting initial data on his test web page (the one whose server he is asking the community to slam).

import urllib2 from time import time   def slamit(url, seconds):     start = time()     count = 0     while time() < start+seconds:     try:         urllib2.urlopen(url)         count += 1     except:         pass     print count # 6 hours slamit('http://ec2-174-129-96-143.compute-1.amazonaws.com/index.html', 60*60*6)

Forgive my lazy exception handling. On occasion you'll get various networking errors as a result of the massive load his server is under like timeouts, or reset-by-peer type stuff. This isn't exactly mission critical code :)

Can't wait to hear his talk (I'm hoping to get it online since I won't be able to make it to pycon)

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Here is an interesting example of using a python generator to generate prime numbers

>>> def is_prime(num, primes): ... for prime in primes: ... if num % prime == 0: ... return False ... return True >>> def make_primes(): ... current_num = 3 ... primes = [2] ... while True: ... if is_prime(current_num, primes): ... primes.append(current_num) ... yield current_num ... current_num +=1 >>> mp = make_primes() >>> mp.next() ... 3 >>> mp.next() ... 5 >>> mp.next() ... 7

There is still some low hanging fruit as far as speed optimization goes, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

As for performance as is, I was able to calculate all the prime numbers up to 10,000,000 using ~20MB of RAM.

Note that for speed reasons, it is still storing the prime numbers so it WILL eat RAM as you go, but it saves many CPU cycles since there is no need to check against non-prime factors

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So I made a discovery today... I was profiling iterators against their list comprehension counterparts and discovered that iterators are actually slower.

Not always slower though. They're slower if you're evaluating every object in the list.

Here is my test code:

def iters():     x = (x+1 for x in xrange(1,10000))     y = (y/1.5 for y in x)     z = [z**2 for z in y] def listcomps():     x = [x+1 for x in xrange(1,10000)]     y = [y/1.5 for y in x]     z = [z**2 for z in y] >>> %timeit iters() 100 loops, best of 3: 5.38 ms per loop >>> %timeit listcomps() 100 loops, best of 3: 4.06 ms per loop

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. There has to be some overhead to setting up the iterator, and if there were more elements, or if they were bigger (like django ORM objects), it probably wouldn't be as noticable.

I'd be interested to hear about practical applications though, so leave a comment =D

Advantages of the Iterator (even though it's slower)

• Uses less memory, since you don't store those lists in RAM
• May actually be faster if you don't operate on all it's elements (useful if you don't know how many you'll use)

Another note: You can't use those iterators again. Once you've cycled through the elements... that's it. You'll need to re-declare it.

The RAM saving and deferred execution will probably come in handy in my always-RAM-strapped django apps =D

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However...

I don't think I'll be acting on any of this feedback.

The fact of the matter is: song writing workshops are like design by committee. If I put together a song curtailed to the acceptability of all 25 of the people in the room the result is boring, lifeless, and sterile. Universally tolerable, but definately not something I'd want to listen to.

The effects of this type of song writing are hugely prolific though. It's all over top 40 radio stations, and some people even think they like it (those people don't listen to much music).

I'll quote jeff atwood, of coding horror and stack overflow fame,

well, if you're not pissing *someone* off, then you're not very
interesting. C'est la vie.

I'm not saying you shouldn't get feedback, just that you need to get it from the right people. The first people who give feedback from will have the most impact so choose them carefully. They should be...

1. Someone who's writing you think is better than yours - If you want to get better, that is.
   
2. Someone who is at least open to your style/genre - It's preferrable that they have experience writing in the genre too, but most important is that they will respect the choices you've already made and focus on helping you improve the song.
   
3. Someone willing to put in a little time and effort - It takes time get get to know a song. The first impression is very important, but you want to find out how the song holds up to repeated listening as well... which means this 'someone' is going to have to listen to it quite a bit over a period of time.

Finding someone who will do number 3 is gonna take some searching, and it's definitely ok to have a small group of people who you rotate so that you don't have to ask one person to spend so much time on your music.

Get to work on those songs! Good luck!

**edit**: I found this post by derek sivers (of cdbaby) on where people go to get feedback. The comments are the part you care about ;)

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