So I’ve been on and off playing with some of the developer builds of Chromium on Mac. For folks who don’t know, Chromium is the name of the open source browser that Google builds Chrome from. There isn’t an official Chrome for Mac yet but the source for Chromium has been in a state such that you can build the browser for a few months now. Well I just found out that I’ve been wasting my time doing my own builds because there is a buildbot up now.
Trust me, the browser is still far from prime time. Things like plugins don’t work yet – so you won’t be watching any Single Ladies videos quite yet, but it is still fun to play around with and wonderful to see that even in it’s early stages it is QUITE snappy at rendering web pages!
To download a copy go to http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/sub-rel-mac/ and then select the most recent build number and download the zip. Enjoy!
This talk blew me away. It was presented by David Ewing from Synapse Wireless and shows how they put together an RF engine that runs python right on it. How great is it to be able to write code for embedded hardware using such a high level language!? Really the technology is interesting enough but you have to watch the video for the live demos. Unfortunately the first couple minutes didn’t get recorded because of technical difficulties but you can jump in pretty easily and besides, it gets you closer to the good stuff.
I’ll definitely be buying some of their modules to play with! (and maybe even an easy button)
My new job involves a whole lot of Django development. While we were testing the first version of our new site just before launch we stumbled across an interesting limitation of Django: The included django.contrib.auth package limits usernames to 30 characters and this can not be over-ridden easily. Thirty characters may seem like a lot for a username but if you want to use email addresses as your login identifier it can easily become a problem.Â
So I found myself in the office at 8pm digging through Django’s source code to find all the locations where the character limit is hardcoded in such a manner that it can not be overridden. There aren’t many but there are a few and it is honestly quite annoying that these values are hard coded. Eventually I’d like to contribute changes to the project that will allow you to change the limit more easily but for now I’ve attached a patch that can be used against Django 1.02 and will allow for up to 75 characters in the username.Django 75 character username limit patch
Applying is as simple as dropping the diff in the django/contrib/auth directory and running patch -R < django-75-char-username.diff
Django 75 character username limit patch
I randomly stumbled across what has to be one of the coolest new websites around -- animoto. This site takes your pictures and whatever music you want and makes an amazing video from them. One of the coolest behind the scenes aspects of the site is that they’ve used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to scale their business. If only Google App Engine had a service for background processing. Here is one I created from my cruise last month:
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Check out this quick 60 second explanation of how the system works. Oh, and let’s talk about how hot Tom Clifton (the guy in the below video) is… damn hipsters (check out this picture if you don’t think he is hipster enough.
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Here is a video of Tom talking about the service at more length:
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Finally, the guys that work there seem to be pretty geeky, and their blogs are totally worth reading, even if you do think Ruby is freakin strange.
This is a great talk on where technology, AI, and our understanding of ourselves as humans is headed. Thanks to my friend John for sharing it on Facebook.
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Or in the future I may. Scientists in Japan has figured out how to see into your brain and interpret what visul images you may be seeing. “In as little as 10 years, advances in this field of research may make it possible to read a person’s thoughts with some degree of accuracy.â€
Spooky.
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