Archive for September, 2009
Best Practices for Managing Small Projects
15, Sep 2009Small projects, though often overlooked, can make up the bulk of the portfolio and are crucial to a company’s success. They might not involve large sums of money, but the fact is that if managed improperly, these small projects can add up to some …
- In: General
- Tags: Project Management
It is a known fact that if you want to commit something to memory, continuous revision is the key. You read something every time you are at your desk and within days it becomes second nature.
To be able to revise quickly and often, it helps if the info…
4 Sites Where You Can Download Old PC Games For Free
13, Sep 2009
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What happens when you mix Star Wars with Cute Overload? Animals with Lightsabers, where Sith cats, Jedi dogs, and the flying squirrel answer to General Grievous duke it out.
Also over at Animals with Lightsabers are a couple of videos of canines showing off their Force powers, and pre-made lightsaber images so you can add them to your own pets’ photos.
[Animals with Lightsabers via The Official Star Wars Blog]
- In: General
- Tags: Animals with lightsabers, Cats, lightsabers, Squirrels, Star Wars
Russia's New Official Holiday — Programmer's Day
12, Sep 2009Glyn Moody writes “Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, has decreed a new holiday for his country: Programmer’s Day. Appropriately enough, it will be celebrated on the 256th day of the year: September 13th (September 12th for a leap year). Do programmers deserve their own holiday ahead of other professions? Should the rest of the world follow suit?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- In: General
- Tags: Programming
Book Titles, If They Were Written Today
11, Sep 2009Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them
Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany
Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us
Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss
Then: The Prince
Now: The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)
- In: General| Uncategorized
Facebook releases the "Tornado" web server
10, Sep 2009Facebook has announced
the release of its Tornado web server under the Apache license.
“Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework
written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous
connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services. Tornado is a core
piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed’s real-time functionality,
which we plan to actively maintain. While Tornado is similar to existing
Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google’s webapp, web.py), it focuses on
speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.” The code
can be had from tornadoweb.org.
- In: General| Uncategorized
Facebook just announced that it has released Tornado, the real-time web framework that powers FriendFeed, as open source code. According to Facebook’s David Recordon, Tornado is one of the core infrastructure pieces that power FriendFeed’s real-time functionality. The framework, according to Recordon, is similar to other Python frameworks like Google’s webapp or web.py, but is faster and able to handle more simultaneous traffic than its competitors. On his personal blog, Bret Taylor, one of the co-founders of FriendFeed, explains the technical details behind Tornado in more detail.
Sponsor
Tornado is available under the Apache open source license. A basic demo of Tornado showing the commenting feature is available here.
Developers will now be able to tap into one of the core infrastructure pieces that made FriendFeed tick so well. While other services (like Twitter) tend to have a lot of trouble to scale up when they grow, FriendFeed never ran into these problems and Tornado was surely one of the main reasons why the site managed to stay up and running even when demand spiked during major events.
Here is what developers will get when they implement Tornado according to Bret Taylor:
All the basic site building blocks – Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.
Real-time services – Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed’s servers.
High performance – Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado’s baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks
NASA scientists have created an magnetic field powerful enough to make lab mice levitate, which is a big Where’s My Back to the Future Skateboard breakthrough. The only problem is that the mice have to be high as kites too.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have created a superconducting magnet that generates enough energy to lift lab rats animals off the floor. While there were experiments with tiny animals like frogs and bugs before, this is the first time they have made a large animal like this fly under these conditions. The magnet pushes the water inside the mice up, making them fly.
The amazing fact is that the JPL magnet works at room temperature (Correction: the space the rat is in is room temp, not the magnet) —not the ultra-cooled down environments typical of these magnets—and it's powerful enough to make these rodents levitate, something that wasn't possible before.
The mice were high in more than one way, though. According to researcher Yuanming Liu, the “first mouse actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented.” So they gave a mild sedative to the next mouse, who was happy to float. [Live Science via Yahoo News]
- In: General
- Tags: anti-gravity, jpl, Levitating mouse, Magnets, Nasa, Science, Superconductors