I am shocked (shocked!) to report that, after doing some comparison shopping today, it turns out that the Wegman’s in my area is *cheaper* for *MANY* things than my local Stop & Shop! WTF?! Today, my wife and I took our Stop & Shop receipt from our shopping trip two days ago over to Wegman’s,…
Useful stuff – 2008 – first half
Having a Google account is sometimes useful in ways you hadn’t planned for. For example, at a few different employers I’ve been at, I’ve had to prepare for reviews by providing a list of accomplishments to my supervisor. One decent tool for generating this list is email, though it can take some time. Another useful…
Do I Even Care About the iPhone 3G?
Steve Jobs is one of the best presenters you could ever hope to see. He’s great at tapping into that part of your brain that makes you just want whatever it is he’s holding. But this time, it was a little different. You see, I already have an iPhone. I bought one in February. I…
Cloud computing hype overload
I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational…
This is how I want all project web sites to look…
My brain has a set of rules that software project websites get tested against. Each time a project site fails to comply with a rule, I get ever-so-slightly more annoyed, and ever-so-slightly less likely to use the software in question (if there are alternatives, this is even maybe not so “slightly”). I thought I’d list…
Plug-ins: isn’t there a better way?
If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m…
PyWorks 2008, November 12-14, Call for Papers Open!
Yes, the same folks who bring you Python Magazine and php|architect magazine (and several other things, like online training, a full line of books, and more conferences), are hosting our first ever Python conference! You can see more about it, and the Call for Papers, at the conference site. The hotel which once hosted php|works…
Why should I pay for this AWS design decision?
I was writing a utility in Python (using boto) to test/play with Amazon’s SQS service. As boto isn’t particularly well documented where SQS specifically is concerned, I also plan to post some examples (either here or on Linuxlaboratory.org, or both). When I had some trouble getting a message that was sent to a queue, I…
O’Reilly: Give your authors Safari access!
UPDATE – 2008-06-23 – A member of O’Reilly’s editing team commented that this privilege has *NOT* been discontinued, and all O’Reilly authors should receive a free Safari account. Thanks a bunch, Mary, for the clarification (see comments for more). I learned from one of the authors of the recently released second (read: first, squared) edition…
High Performance MySQL on Safari!
All right! In the past, some books seem to be delayed in getting into O’Reilly’s Safari site, but on the day that Baron announces the book’s arrival, I find that I’m able to access it in Safari right now! Sweet!