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Archive for August, 2005
Wikipedia Fundraising
August 25, 2005Rich Dad Poor Dad Financial IQ
August 10, 2005Yesterday I received a shipment of 4 fresh books from Amazon. Including Rich Dad Poor Dad. I’ve read it for 80% now, so I decided to do some research on the subject online.
Above, you see the result of the “Financial IQ test” I filled in.
Beware, register and login first or you’ll have to submit all answers twice :S
I might write more about the book after I’ve read it entirely.
w3’s quality tips for webmasters
August 5, 2005Read while sipping your morning tea: quality tips for webmasters. Not too difficult, yet so important.
My favourites:
Choose URIs wisely
Use international date format
Don’t use “click here” as link text
43 things to do
August 5, 2005Today yesterday at work I encountered a site I really like: 43things.com. To get an idea of what it is about, check the Zeitgeist section.
43things has a positive attitude. It looks good. It is fast. It is there to help you realize dreams. Popcorn, they even have functionality available as a webservice!
Although visually it is too busy (what’s the word?) if you first visit it.
I’ve found out it is written using Ruby on Rails. Since this is at least the third good Rails site I’ve encountered, I’ve had our Repro print a tutorial for further investigation.
Sigh. So much interesting things to do.
PUN meeting Den Haag outcome
August 5, 2005Joel hitting his High Notes
August 4, 2005In Hitting the High Notes, Joel Spolsky tells us that good software is not the result of just putting enough resources into the development process. It is the result of employing the best programmers.
Best Working Conditions → Best Programmers → Best Software → Profit!
For the Rock Star programmers among us, he has some advice:
“Internal, in-house software is rarely important enough to justify hiring rock stars. Nobody hires Dolly Parton to sing at weddings. That’s why the most satisfying careers, if you’re a software developer, are at actual software companies, not doing IT for some bank.”
My previous job was at a software company. We did not deliver Best Software. My working conditions weren’t Best either. We probably weren’t Best Programmers too.
With this conclusion in mind, I have two questions for Mr. Spolsky,
- What to do with this Best Software knowledge, not being a Best Programmer?
- Can one learn to become a Best Programmer?
2005-08-04 15:05: KC pointed me to Career Calculus by Eric Sink.
X-Rated XML (18+)
August 4, 2005Yesterday, I ran into this service returning a list of currently online camgirls in a custom XML format.
Isn’t that funny?
Example output:
<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<tj>
<camitem>
<tjcamid>9950</tjcamid>
<tjcamname>xxkiki</tjcamname>
<tjipnumber>217.70.242.32</tjipnumber>
<tjphoneon>True</tjphoneon>
<tjpoints>166993</tjpoints>
<tjcamport>8099</tjcamport>
</camitem>
</tj>
Running Zope3 as daemon service
August 3, 2005The first Zope3 site I built a few months ago is still running on our development server. Which was a decision. We did not want to experiment with this new technique on a server also serving customer sites.
To be honest. I also did not get to installing Zope3 in such a way that it would fire up my z3 application when the server is restarted. Until yesterday, everytime the server was rebooted—not too uncommon for a development server—I had to restart my Zope application manually.
How nice would it be to be able to just reboot without bothering about restarting my Zope application. And eventually I should get this site onto one of our production servers of course.
Anyway, my Linux skills do not go far beyond ‘user’ level. With the difference that I have ‘root’ access. A dangerous combination 🙂
After some searching (thanks fromdownunder) I succeeded.
Assuming you have
- RedHat Linux Fedora Core3
- a Zope3 instance installed that you can start manually
Here’s the How-To get Zope3 running as a Linux daemon service.
- Change to root with
su - Copy <your z3 instance path>/bin/zopectl to /etc/init.d/zope3ctl
- Edit /etc/init.d/zope3ctl to include (new: lines 2-3)
#!/usr/bin/python
# chkconfig: 345 30 70
# description: Zope - My installation
- Then run from the command line
/sbin/chkconfig --add zope3ctl
and
/sbin/service zope3ctl start
If all went well, you should read something about a process having been started.
You can check if your zope3ctl was added to the services list, run
/sbin/chkconfig --list zope3ctl
Comments are welcome.
Webabonnement NRC Handelsblad
August 1, 2005Last week I decided to take a digital subscription on – according to my girlfriend – the most respected Dutch newspaper: “Het NRC Handelsblad”.
Until now, I do not have full access yet… maybe my facsimile did not arrive. Personal reminder: give them a call.
2005-08-02 10:30: I have access now. Their procedure requires you either call them or you upgrade your subscription using a private code in a confirmation letter I had not yet received.
PUN meeting next thursday
August 1, 2005I will be attending the Python Users Nederland meeting thursday the 4th of August in The Hague.
One of the advantages of living in the Randstad: one is always closer to interesting events.
Nederhoed 