1. Install Homebrew
2. Install bash-completion with this command: brew install bash-completion  (optionally rails-completion too)
3. Activate it by following the instructions from the previous command, which entails adding these lines to ~/.bash_profile:

if [ -f `brew --prefix`/etc/bash_completion ]; then
  . `brew --prefix`/etc/bash_completion
fi

A Gentle Introduction to Mock for Python (part 1 of 3 – 13min)

Why use Mock? (part 2 of 3 – 3.5min)

Mock and Django (part 3 of 3 – 38min)

Do you remember some time ago when a highly inflammatory story hit the news about the Chinese “Tiger Mom” method of parenting? It got people very upset but it was a carefully crafted piece designed to do exactly one thing: sell a book.

I don’t doubt the data in the article about conservatives. As a conservative, I can admit that it does echo my own sentiment. I love science and empirical research but I feel that many leading scientific institutions are driven not be a desire to inform and expand their knowledge but in many cases some other agenda, often times personal greed.

But I laughed out loud as I read down the article and came to this part: (emphasis mine)

Gauchat took on this project to assess the claims made by science journalist Chris Mooney in his 2005 book, “The Republican War on Science” — and Mooney, who reviewed the paper before publication, said the findings confirmed those claims.

Now Mooney is coming out with another book, titled “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science.”

What a coincidence! The author has a new book ready to hit the shelves, just at the exact time a study was released that announces exactly the same thing, and, look at this, it uses almost the exact wording as the title of the book!

If you want to learn more about this method of PR, please read the excellent article “The Submarine” by Paul Graham.

Here is a two-part video series that I recorded to help you understand SST and begin using it for your projects.

Selenium Simple Test quick demo (5 min)

Interview with SST creator Corey Goldburg (23 min)

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.

Also keep in mind that now, as ever, the media is in the business of selling advertisements and therefore needs to pull out all the stops in order to get your eye-balls on their ads. The aforementioned unrest gives them a lot of opportunities to write tantalizing and alarmist headlines.

This can be quite discouraging to the general public. It will take effort on the part of readers to discern between real news and parading. It will require great self control not to fall into the trap of forwarding the latest ghastly headline or being outraged at the audacity of such events.

Definitely keep up on what’s happening, speak out against what is wrong, but remember to keep a cool head and don’t get too upset. If you find yourself getting a little discouraged, remember to always look at the bright side.

Unfortunately, to understand the flaw you have to decide where you stand. There are three responses to the claims,

1. You don’t really care
2. You believe that God cannot lie and everything he says is true
3. You think that it is possible for there to be encoded, hidden messages in the text of the Bible

Points 2 and 3 don’t sound like opposites but God says in Isaiah 45:19 “I publicly proclaim bold promises, I don’t whisper obscurities in some dark corner.” Therefore if you believe option #2 then you can safely assume that God’s word is plain and there are no hidden obscurities.

In Hebrews 6:18 it says that “it is impossible for God to lie.” Therefore I feel safe in the confidence that when Jesus said of God in Matthew 24:36 that “Regarding the [date and time] … only the Father knows,” and in Acts 1:7, regarding the date and time the world would end “…it is not for you to know,” he was speaking the plain and simple truth: there is no encoded message about the date the world would end.

The surest way to identify a cult is by the leader proclaiming to have some special, secret knowledge that is not easily found in the Bible. Again, referring back to Isaiah 45:19 “I would not have told [them] to seek me if I could not be found.” Again in Psalm 119:104-105 “Your commandments give understanding… your word is a lamp to guide my feet.” I could go on and on, you don’t need special revelation to comprehend God’s word.

Anytime someone says there’s a secret hidden in the bible that only a super-smart person (or a person with a special angel or revelation) can locate, they are lying.

So there’s nothing to fear, right?

The end of the world could be today or next week or next century. God has said there will be an end (cf Revelation 21:1) and no one but Him knows when it is. Or you very likely could die before the end of the world. In either case, when the time comes you will fall into one of two camps:

1. Those that know Jesus as the son of God
2. Those that don’t

There is no division for people who were really nice or had good intentions or didn’t commit any horrible crimes. There’s not even a special category for people who don’t believe in God. Either you will stand in front of the throne of glory and be declared righteous because of the great thing that Jesus did, able to offer your good deeds as a gift to lay at God’s feet, or you will stand in front of the throne of judgement and will be shown unworthy to be in the presence of God.

When your life has ended there is no more that can be done for you, either by yourself or others on your behalf. Follow the example of the thief on the cross next to Jesus. He realized who Jesus was, felt shame for living a life in opposition to God and asked Jesus to remember him. Jesus assured him that he would join Jesus in heaven. That is all it takes. Don’t wait until the day of your death though.

class Pet(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    animal = models.ForeignKey(Animal)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=40)

class Animal(models.Model):
    legs = models.IntegerField()
    fur = models.BoolField()
    name = models.CharField(max_length=40)

animals = Animal.objects.annotate(popularity=Count('pet')).order_by('-popularity')

You see here that Animal is not related to Pet directly, so you need to do a reverse lookup. Whenever I see Django do this I think it must be magic. Notice that there is no field named “popularity.” Instead, we define it with our annotation. Then we can sort by it with our order_by.

Remember basic electricity concepts? You can dim a light bulb by adding some additional resistance. This is of course the worst way to dim a bulb because it doesn’t actually use any less energy. The power that would have gone to make the bulb bright is instead going to the resistance and being turned into heat. There’s a much better way.

Imagine that you could switch the bulb on and off very fast. If you turned it on for 1/100′th of a second and then back off for 1/100th of a second constantly then it would effectively be on half the time and off half the time. Therefore it would only receive half as much power and would be half as bright. If you turned it on for 1/100th of a second and off for 3/100th’s of a second it would only get 25% of the power and would be 1/4th as bright.

This is called pulse width modulation and is in fact how dimmers work (basically). This is also the proper way to slow down motors.

So this is my principle. If you work just 6 seconds out of every minute for 8 hours a day over the course of a 40 hour week you’ll work the equivalent of only 4 hours per week. (6 out of 60 seconds is 10% duty cycle and 10% of 40 hours is 4) Maybe you can get 10 jobs at once using this technique and retire in only 3.5 years.

I’ve not actually tried this yet, since I believe I should actually be working the full time I’m getting paid to work. Therefore I’m tossing this idea out into the public domain. Feel free to use it to get rich and famous.