tmcneal

Autotest sounds like a great tool. Is there a Python equivalent?

I don't have any experience with MongoDB, but I am building an application right now using CouchDB and I've found it to be pretty easy to use -- definitely easier to prototype with vs a relational database + ORM framework.

CouchDB supports ad-hoc queries in the form of 'temporary views'. The downside (and I think a difference compared with MongoDB) is that temporary views can't be used in production since they are not indexed and thus are much slower than permanent views.

I'm developing my application in Python, which has great support for CouchDB in the form of CouchDB-Python (http://packages.python.org/CouchDB/) and CouchDBKit (http://couchdbkit.org/). Using CouchDBKit, it was pretty easy to set up CouchDB artifacts (map functions, reduce functions, design documents) into a nice file/folder hierarchy and write the simple Python glue code to deploy updates to CouchDB via a single shell command.

I don't agree with the author's argument. Here's one excerpt:

"In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency. When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could handle the problem on the spot. Now all requests go into a big queue in the sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country."

1) I'm pretty sure a multi-national corporation with 400,000 employees considers hand-carrying paperwork to be an operational deficiency. This is the 21st century, why create an unnecessary paper-trail when your company builds products to specifically handle this type of use-case?

2) Is the author talking about some sort of routine process (Level 1 Support needs to escalate the issue to someone in L2) or some sort of special case (A client is experience a major outage and we need to find an expert who can fix it)? If it's the former, then this should be a documented repeatable process that is done many times a day, and thus why would it matter if the L1 and L2 are in different buildings/countries/whatever.. If it's the latter, then the chances of the right expert working in the same building as person seeking her out is going to be pretty low. Telecommuting does come into play in either of these scenarios.

3) The author seems to be correlating telecommuting with increased bureaucracy. I'd argue that reducing telecommuting will not decrease bureaucracy; it will still take 4-6 approvals to make that purchase, and the tools to expedite the approval process (contacting the right people directly, escalating to managers) will still be the same.

Sometimes when I'm in 'idea mode' I like to just plow ahead and get something running even if the code is crappy. It gives me a chance to see the idea in action. I then go back and re-implement the idea with the appropriate code structure, unit tests, etc.

My first pass is really about proving out the idea, learning about the domain, and finding any gotchas. The second pass is about using my experience from the first pass to create a clean, maintainable base.. something that I can come back to in a month and be able to maintain, enhance, and deploy without having to relearn everything again.

Being able to see delays via a mobile app might be enough to get me to try BoltBus and Megabus again.

In my experience, BoltBus and Megabus have extremely poor customer service. I've had multiple bad experiences with them and as a result I refuse to use their services any more.

Last month I waited an hour and a half in 40 degree weather for the Megabus from NYC to Philadelphia. Throughout that time, none of the staff on site had any idea of what was going on, or if they did no one told us what the problem was and when we could expect the next bus to arrive. We heard later that both buses scheduled during that time had broken down.

#2 reminded me of Directed Edge's generalized recommendations engine (http://directededge.com/).

I saw your site mentioned on HN a few weeks ago and checked it out then.. I think it's great.. the design and user experience is especially well done!

This is a play to compete directly with IBM in the e-commerce space. ATG, along with IBM's e-commerce offering (WebSphere Commerce), have been the top players in this area for some time.

There seems to be a trend towards consolidation for major e-commerce players recently, with IBM purchasing Coremetrics and Sterling, and Adobe purchasing Omniture.

For those of you looking to do some last minute research before voting today, my web app provides candidate information along with information on the positions each candidate supports or opposes: http://elect.io

Not that this wouldn't be a cool idea, but why would a large company expose their real-time inventory data via a public API? At the present I don't see how any ROI could be achieved from the expense of making this inventory information public.

Real-time inventory tracking for as large a company as Best Buy is "fairly trivial"?

For large companies, it is a multi-million dollar investment to build a warehouse management system capable of showing near real-time levels of inventory. Besides the capital costs, companies can have very specific workflows for managing inventory levels. Also things like drop-ship vendors and sourcing items from multiple sources can make it extremely difficult to calculate or predict inventory levels prior to a sale.

Thomas would you mind expounding a bit or posting a link about the 'content-aware neutralization' approach to solving XSS? I know that Rails 3 HTML-encodes all output by default, but how would this approach fix XSS vulnerabilities using pure Javascript payloads rather than the typical approach of embedding JS in a <script> or another HTML tag?

I agree. I'm developing on Google App Engine now and the lack of a true SQL language in the Datastore is my biggest pain point right now.

The expressiveness of SQL and performance of a mature DBMS beats the pants off of the GAE Datastore at the moment. Obviously scalability is the major benefit of App Engine, but I'm not so sure the trade-offs are worth it.

I've been contributing to a Roth and 401k since I graduated from college. I'm invested in mostly index funds and bonds, along with one or two emerging markets mutual funds. I figure that if the stock market totally tanks and never recovers in 40 years, then I'll have much bigger problems than an unperforming retirement account.

The rest of my savings goes to an online savings account.

Ooh, yuck. I'll look into that issue. Thanks for reporting it.

I'm using data from Project Votesmart (http://www.votesmart.org/services_api.php). At one point I planned on also using data from OpenCongress and OpenSecrets.org, but that functionality didn't make the cut for the initial launch.

Thanks for the link to Sunlight Labs, I'll check it out.

Thank you for the feedback.

The search functionality makes a call out to Geonames.org to get location data, and unfortunately I hit the quota for more free account. I'm going to purchase premium service with a higher quota, but in the meantime I modified the search to only accept zipcodes, which will not require a call to geonames.

Yep you're right. I'm using Geonames' free postal code search, and unfortunately I went over the quota around midday today, so searches stopped working after that point.

I'm going to look into purchasing their paid service, but in the meantime I modified the code to only accept zipcodes and bypass the geonames web service call.

Thanks for the feedback.

You can view details on how I calculate each position by clicking on the position's 'check' or 'x' image. Doing so will open a modal dialog provide that displays detailed information in both a graph and table view.

Getting additional position data is one of my top priorities in the next week or so. The first additional subset of data I plan on using is the Political Courage Tests from Project Votesmart (http://www.votesmart.org/npat_about.php). With this data, I should be able to provide positional information on 40-50% of all Congressional candidates, including Independents.

Finding this same data for regional candidates will be tougher. I am thinking of providing some alternate information for these candidates, such as a Twitter feed or RSS feed.

Also thanks for reporting the error. I will look into it today.

Thank you for reporting this. I tested in IE8, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera, but it looks like I should have also tested in IE6 and IE7.

I will address this issue tonight.

Elect.io is a side-project I've been working on for the past few months, and is my attempt at providing a tool for voters in the U.S. to learn more about the candidates that are running for office in their area.

In addition to providing basic candidate bio information, when possible I also provide details on what issues a candidate supports or opposes. I calculate each position programatically using the following data:

- Special Interest Group ratings for this particular candidate. i.e. the NRA may give a candidate a score of 90 out of 100 in the year 2007 for the candidate's position on gun rights issues.

- The bias of the Special Interest Group i.e. the NRA strongly supports issues related to the preserving of Second Amendment privledges.

These ratings are then weighted by year (more recent ratings have greater weight) and run through an algorithm to determine a candidate's calculated "position" for each issue.