2mur

George R.R. Martin writes on WordStar.

http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1220865-talking-a...

This is really, really fantastic. Been a huge sf/f reader my whole life (collect 1sts of lots of favorite authors... hovering around 6000 now). I basically used to do this manually: end of the year check Locus, check SF Site lists, check Hugos... read them all.

Trust. FMG (foreign medical graduates) have an extremely low reputation in the US. It's a component of defensive medicine.

How's the battery life compared to OSX?

Yeah but can you play the Xbox standing up? I always find that I need to rest my forearms on my thighs / chair-arms for optimal fragging comfort.

Nice article.

I use virtualenv heavily and still do the symlinking dance. I keep my django trunk in a ~/libraries folder and symlink the django folder to the /path/to/virtualenv/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages folder. I'm not sure that I have a compelling reason for doing so.

Very cool. This could be really handy!

Yeah it's an awesome little device. I love mine (CM7, market, etc).

Yep. The docs are top-notch. Definitely the best documented open-source project that I work with/on.

It's python and everybody knows python > ruby (also vim > emacs).

The only real wart for me is django.contrib.auth.models.User -- we should be able to easily replace the main auth model and not extend it. It feels like a real anti-pattern sometimes.

I'd definitely like to know, since the WaPo guys use a lot of django. If (big if, I don't acutally know) the jobs site was built on django, and if they could figure out how it was compromised it would be beneficial for the wider django community to know. I hope they share when the dust settles.

Yeah my oldest kid was slow to talk (fine now) so his pediatrician wanted to make sure there wasn't anything wrong, so his chromosomes were done (as well as Fragile X and all the other usual suspects). The report came back as normal chromosomes, so I can only assume he got my normal 5 and 16 (or that my wife was stepping out!!).

Pretty interesting.

Incidentally, I discovered that I actually have a balanced whole arm translocation of chromosomes 5 and 16. That is I have one normal 5, one normal 16, and two abnormal chromosomes one with a 5p/16q and one with a 5q/16p. I only found it out when I rotated through a cytogenetics lab and we dropped our own chromosomes for grins. It's not a Robertsonian translocation (doesn't involved acrocentric chromosomes) but it's right through the centromeres of 5 and 16. Pretty weird, but as far as I can tell, totally asymptomatic. I'm a physician (and hobby-python guy) and have 4 completely normal kids.

I don't know for puppet but Eric Holscher has a nice tutorial/walkthrough[1] with Chef with a repo of examples.

[1]http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-...

Yeah I knew a lot of these tricks. But I've been considering learning chef and I didn't know about Vagrant. Now I know what I'm doing this weekend!

Would love one too: Awesome Thanks!

Here's[1] a nice multi-part graduated walk-through of deploying Django with chef. I'm working using it as a guidepost on deploying my Django stuff (currently hitting a VM on my macbook so I can rollback to a snapshot and make sure it works right).

[1]http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-...

Agree about Xbox live. I cannot play with the general public on there any longer. We've got a pretty nice crew over at http://www.adultgamingenthusiasts.com/. Mostly console gamers and the only rule is 'don't be a dick'.

Thanks for the clarification.

Great write up Patrick!

I know that you are a rails guy and they use an MS stack. Any friction there? Were they able to use your A/B framework or did they have something on their own stack?

Edit: Nevermind: http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-do-ab-testing-using-google-w...

You can do the same thing in Android too. You have an application specific uri that you register in your manifest.

I really love Compass. I'm a django/python guy and it still fits in nicely to my dev flow. You still have to know css to use it, but it removes a lot of the pain of actually writing css.

Django + nginx + uwsgi

It's pretty easy to deploy, but I haven't really benchmarked anything or hit it under stress.

Thanks for this!

That's a good point. I actually had sleep working really well on 9.04 then upgraded to 10.04 and it broke. It's that type of pattern and the frustration that is worth the premium Apple tax I guess.

I'm not going back to linux on the desktop until it can sleep my laptop reliably. OSX is so nice for that. Just close the lid and go... I can't imagine working any other way now.

Yes. Obviously, specifics will be dependent upon your exact situation, but it would be nice to have a small road-map for backups. I occasionally take my database dumps and fire up postgres on the home server and make sure I can restore the database. That's about as far as I take it usually. Probably not a robust failsafe, but it's what I do now.

I'm learning it now too. My primary use case, at least initially, is going to try to extend python with C. Not really because I have a need, but mostly because I can't really imagine needing C for any other task than speeding up some of my poorly optimized python at some point down the road.

There are apparently at least 3 books in the works:

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/a...

I think that this SO thread is helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3629784/how-is-node-js-in...

I'm a physician also (pathologist). I would encourage you to learn how to code. I decided to learn python about 3 years ago. It took me about 6 months before I really understood a lot of things (object oriented programming, in particular took a long time to grok). I mostly started with the goal of being able to knock together some little gui fronted databases and other things that would make my life a little easier. Now I mostly fart around with Django, javascript and Java (Android). I'm also learning C because I realize that I have a lot of holes in my fundamentals.

I don't want to discourage you, but I think that there are a huge number of roadblocks to creating a disruptive start-up that we usually see on HN in the medical world. Firstly, doctors are not the folks who are making the decisions about health care IT. The hospital IT depts are running that show, and in my limited experience they have no interest in supporting open-source or services that don't come with a big support contract. They would like to be able to point the finger to an outside company if things go south. Secondly, HIPAA and HITECH are going to be a big problem for small medical startups. A single breach or unauthorized disclosure or security hole is going to potentially sink your business.

I would encourage you to learn to code. It's definitely accessible for tech-oriented physicians and the wealth of community resources in the open source world makes it pretty easy to ask questions if you get into a bind.