Ungenius

Pwn2Own winner Charlie Miller on the most secure browser:

There probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about. The main thing is not to install Flash!

Arizona has the largest budget gap in the country when measured as a percentage of its overall budget, and the state Department of Transportation was $100 million in the red last fall when it decided to close 13 of the state’s 18 highway rest stops.

I’m sorry, what was that about being Taxed Enough Already? Seems to me you aren’t being taxed nearly enough if you can’t even keep a toilet operating.

Coming to America.

The end of the Mac Gaming wasteland is at hand, folks.

Some players got their start in the majors thanks to the Rule 5 Draft, including Roberto Clemente, George Bell, Darrell Evans, Johan Santana, Josh Hamilton and Joakim Soria. Most, however, slip quietly back to the minor leagues.

Somehow, I completely missed that Clemente was a Rule 5 pick. For some reason, I expected that the Rule 5 Draft was a more modern innovation, but baseball-reference shows him as a pick in the 1954 draft.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Jim Sarosys dream is at hand – the first outdoor game in American Hockey League history.

I wish I’d have known about this sooner. I might have gone.

So, I tried. I really did. I stopped writing about it almost entirely out of frustration with the situation. But I kept working on it.

For my day job, doing the work for which I get paid, doing that work that I do that requires my use of a computer rather than just those hobbies and writings where a computer is simply more convenient, I am a python web developer. I use python-django to craft quick and dirty web apps that manage our marketing mailing lists, customer CRM, office processes, and more. Most of these are deployed to servers running the LAMP stack, though a few are run on “MAMP” – same software, just Mac OS X Server as the host OS. My workflow is drop dead simple.

I keep all my projects in ~/Projects/, sorted by client. I use the incredibly excellent TextMate editor. I have my settings.py haxied to know the difference between running in django’s built-in webserver and a real Apache instance. It also knows to use the SQLite storage engine in dev and MySQL in deployment.

When I’m ready to deploy, I can use Mac OS X’s built-in Apache to test my site configuration, ensure none of my code changes stop working when switching from SQLite to MySQL, and so on. Once I’m convinced everything’s good, I push my changesets to my Mercurial repository, pull them down to my production servers, and let fly.

In OS X, this all fit together seamlessly. No effort on my part, nearly all of it set up exactly for this workflow as if on purpose, right out of the box.

Windows 7 broke nearly all of this. All the pieces exist to make it work, certainly, including a TextMate clone called eTextEditor. However, getting it all to work together was a big pain. I blame this mostly on the lack of a free and easy, compatible compiler in Windows. python-setuptools and pip failed to properly install a fair number of the libraries I needed, so I had to hunt down binary installers. These installers were, of course, keyed to specific releases of both Python and Windows, but to my chagrin would actually install if I’d accidentally downloaded an incorrect distribution, and would install and sometimes fail to throw exceptions if a prereq wasn’t installed.

And when I decided I wanted to upgrade to Python 2.6 (I’ve generally been in 2.5), and to a newer django, things went downhill rather quickly.

So this Monday, several weeks into what was supposed to be a 7-14 day experiment, I said “fuck it.” I simply gave up trying to get it all to work, went back to developing on my Mac, and devoted my Windows box to gaming and general productivity.

[The makers of the Kindle's E-Ink] will be introducing a wide variety of new e-reader displays this year including color, flexible, and touchscreen EPDs. PVI also says that response times have been improved enough to allow for animation support on products in 2010.

Huzzah! Every time I point out how much I love my Kindle, someone has to be an ass and tell me that color or some other feature is “impossible” on E-Ink.

Whoops.

Charles King:

Software for the iPad can be downloaded through the App Store, but that doesn’t provide for applications to be deployed in a uniform way across an enterprise

I love it when pundits spout off about things they don’t know about. There’s an Enterprise Developers program, different from the normal iPhone Developer program, that provides exactly what he says Apple doesn’t provide.

By a wide margin, this is the most asinine news to ever come out of Cooperstown.