biais.org

I'm working on a linux box (ubuntu). Sometimes, I work on web design and web development with firefox and firebug but I have to maintain scripts and styles working with Internet Explorer. I used to deal with these solutions:

• Work on Linux, reboot on Windows and debug
• Use a Windows box with VNC
• Virtualize a Windows on my Linux box (unusable because it's too slow on my computer)
• Work on Windows
• Use wine with a complete windows installation

I recently discovered a better solution: ies4linux. It simplifies the configuration of wine and the installation of different versions of IE 5.05, 5.5, 6 and also 7 in their new beta version.

django-logging, a python module to help debugging django apps.

From their overview page:

It is really useful to know what your Django project is doing, especially when debugging. [...] Python had a built-in logging system, so django-logging was created to allow it to be easily used within Django projects. [...] When you view a page in your browser, any log messages that were created during the processing of your request will appear at the bottom of the page.

Note: a blog entry about django and logging (with comments from django devs).

In my first post about how to split the pie when you start a business, we where 3 founders. After, what we can call a "trust crisis", one of us left the boat. Now we are trying to fix the business plan and continue. It's easier (but not easy) to split the pie.

Here is the preview of a new spreadsheet:

Criterias:

• Idea: How the idea of your business grow up, who have been enlightened and who give the direction to the road you're going to build ?
• Business plan: Who set the checkpoints on the road ? How are you going to build your product, to sell your product
• Domain expertise: Who is going to build and sell the product and who is capable to do so.
• Commitment & risk: You're working full time in your new company ? Sure, you're more commited than the one who give some time when he has to do. Note: in the example above, I set 1 for 1 day per week and 5 for full time.
• Responsabilities: CEO have more reponsabilities than employee
• Cash: cash you put in the company if you do

Notes:

• Weights may not fit with your project. Before putting numbers in founders' cells, you will have to agree with other founders on weights.

Number Spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center. The trick is to arrange the spiral so all the perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) line up in a row on the right side. [...] It looks as though primes tend to concentrate in certain curves that swoop away to the northwest and southwest, like the curve marked by the blue arrow.

I like this kind of data visualization, it reminds me a comparison about different algorithms of pseudo random number generator and some periodicity found in visual patterns.

A very interesting article from a FreeBSD kernel developer. Learn what the kernel can do for you (and better than you):

Varnish allocate some virtual memory, it tells the operating system to back this memory with space from a disk file. When it needs to send the object to a client, it simply refers to that piece of virtual memory and leaves the rest to the kernel. [...] Varnish doesn't really try to control what is cached in RAM and what is not, the kernel has code and hardware support to do a good job at that, and it does a good job.

Since few monthes, We (me and 2 others people) are trying to start our company. The first problem is we worked for it, we are working for it and we are going to work for it but not with the same ratio of time. Some worked part time and will work part time and others will work full time.

Second problem: One of the two others thinks that experience (age) must be taken in consideration to calculate the distribution. I don't think so, maybe because I'm the youngest, but really because knowledge of technical issues and target market are not directly related with experience.

I read this article about a method to split the pie. It helps me to clarify my thoughts but it didn't resolved the problems (mainly because numbers you puts in cells are purely subjective.

Note: I created a founders’ pie calculator based on the article but with some improvements (Cash contribution and Venture Capitalist dilution). Here is the open document spreadsheet (available in excel format, converted by openoffice).

We didn't agree on the repartition yet, so I will surely post another entry about this subject.

Warning if you use the Django development version:

we've recommended that people use the Django development version instead of the latest Django release, as we try hard to keep the development version stable. We're loosening that policy, temporarily, for the immediate future, in order to make a number of backwards-incompatible changes to the development version.

Quote from the Django Weblog

Django shines when it comes to developing "content-oriented" web sites....

If you think about it, most of the really popular and big sites online are "content-oriented": YouTube, Wikipedia, Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist... it's pretty obvious to me that well organized content drives traffic. Django's main goal is to make organizing that content as painless as possible.

I'm also extremely proud of how well Django makes the transition from development to deployment. We've always kept performance and scalability at the top of our list of goals, and I think we've made out very well. There's nothing worse than developing a site only to discover that the tool you chose makes deployment or scaling impossible.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss (one of the lead developers of Django) interview

I started a new project called plotmoi, hosted by code.google: http://code.google.com/p/plotmoi/. The goal is to plot any formated or non formated data. After some hours of coding plotmoi can generate interesting svg without pain. For example, I extracted from a database the following table in tests/reallife_data_5.data:

   size   | count 
 ---------+-------
        1 | 73719
       17 | 58136
       21 | 51949
       19 | 47431
       16 | 47027
       15 | 46303
       24 | 44450
       25 | 44388
 ...
 (25673 rows)

Then run plotmoi:

$ python src/plotmoi.py tests/reallife_data_5.data plotmoi_loglog_example.svg

It generated this svg file (log/log scale). bitmap preview:

You can retrieve sources via subversion:

svn checkout http://plotmoi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ plotmoi