soundstripe.net

Here's a nice little photo of a label on our Splenda(r) brand brown sugar "alternative."

If I'm reading that correctly, it says that simply by using half the amount of "Splenda brown sugar" as I normally would of real brown sugar, I can cut the calories in half! That...is...amazing?

While on the subject of confusing text...the following took me a while to figure out:

This is hopefully not a common occurence, but I just read about a woman being asked to medicate her child on a plane to get him to stop talking. As if that weren't bad enough, when she refused and the other passengers around her vocally supported her decision, the overreacting flight attendant caused the plane to be turned around (they were still on the ground at the airport) and the mother and child were forced off the plane!

The sculptures on 1st street in Chattanooga seem to be on some sort of rotation. I thought at first that they were all permanent, but it seems to be an exhibition location or something. Here are a few pics I shot yesterday walking down 1st street. [Click here for the gallery.](http://soundstripe.smugmug.com/gallery/2770722/1/147468334) 

Cait Murphy has an [interesting article](http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/13/magazines/fortune/pluggedin_murphy_terror.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007031311) on [CNN Money](http://money.cnn.com/) (FORTUNE online) today. The point of the article is to debunk the common thought that poverty breeds terrorism. I find that highly fascinating, but some of the statistics quoted were chilling for entirely different reasons. Murphy cites a [2003 Krueger and Maleckova study](http://www.atypon-link.com/AEAP/doi/abs/10.1257/089533003772034925) (which I previously had not seen) that asked respondents if there were, "any circumstances under which you would justify the use of terrorism to achieve political goals." 43.3 percent of higher-education respondents agreed that there were such circumstances. Thats almost half. Half agreed that they would use *terrorism*. Thats killing innocent people. We are dealing with a problem that runs far deeper than the general public realizes. Why do we not hear this in our daily lives? Why do we not talk about it? Why can't we focus on solving this problem? Political junkies say it is not reported because the media is all made up of liberals. That may be true, but I think we simply ignore things that scare us. Millions of people out there disagree with Americans' political views and think that is OK--no, worse--*justifiable* to kill innocent, uninvolved people in order to change the world. I don't want to think about that. I don't want to talk about it. We saw what these people want to do on 9/11. Lets remember that they would do that over and over again if they could. We need to stop them. I'd be interested to see that same study done in America though, just for comparison.

Just putting my plug out there for this [indie music venture](http://bumrushthecharts.blogspot.com/). Buy the song "Mine Again" by Black Lab on March 22--see if we can get this song to #1 on the iTunes singles list. We don't record labels to tell use what good music is! Purchase the song through the affiliate link below and about half your money (half of 99 cents!) will go to a scholarship. (And no, this is not a plug for Black Lab)

I have used Python for quite a while, and one of the best reasons for using it when I started was its incredible standard library. Everything I could think of to write was fairly easy because the necessary functions were already in the library. Finding them was another story, however. The organization is not hierarchical, multiple modules sometimes rely on each other, names are confusing (I still have to research every time to know the difference between `time` and `datetime` or `urllib` and `urllib2`). A recent podcast episode ([python411, from Feb 4, 2007](http://www.awaretek.com/python/index.html)) brought this to my attention, and maybe I'll try to contribute some updates or suggestions. Part of [PEP 3100](http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3100/) talks about the updates to the standard lib planned for Python 3000. That seems to be the best time to introduce these changes, because of the other massive changes involved. The standard library in Python has been one of its greatest strengths. It makes it easy to hit the ground running when learning the language. Lets not let it fall too far behind.

A [recent ARN article](http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php/id;7680622;fp;16;fpid;1) quotes Microsoft's Steve Ballmer as saying: >"We have new technologies built into Windows Vista, something we call Windows Genuine Advantage [that] we've really dialed up in capabilities with the Vista release, I do think that will bring some revenue growth. We will have strong growth in the Windows business in emerging markets: China, India, Brazil, Russia and many others. Those markets are very high piracy." He goes on to quote some statistics of legal vs. pirated software sales in those "emerging markets." If his words reflect Microsoft's thoughts on piracy as a whole, they have completely missed the point. People in emerging markets buy pirated software because that's all they can afford, and even if they could afford to pay more, why would they when they can pick up a pirated version at 1/100 the cost of the normal version. Genuine Advantage turns of spyware protection and *Aero* eye candy when it recognizes a pirated copy of Windows Vista. Big deal -- just use Firefox to avoid spyware and enjoy the speed your computer exhibits when you turn off the unnecessary Aero effects. Microsoft needs to understand that the way to sell Vista in emerging markets is to lower the cost and provide a better product. There will always be a pirated version of Windows available. Crippling those pirated versions will never work in the long run, as the protections will always be circumvented eventually. By comparison, look at a very little-pirated piece of software--MacOS 10. The upgrade to Tiger costs $129 for a single license, and $199 for a 5-pack family license. Compare this to $199 for Vista Home and $299 for Vista Business. That brings me to the next point--there are no stepped licenses of MacOS like Vista's confusing array of [Starter/Home Basic/Home Premium/Professional/Small Business/Enterprise/Ultimate](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050910-5298.html). All of this has been gone over before. Get the point, Microsoft. Lower your prices; make more sales; make more money.

Garett Rogers on ZDNet [writes](http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=480) that Google is now letting you suggest better translations with its language translation tool. This is very neat, as I've always been a little unhappy at how Google's translator handles common phrases and domain-specific language such as computer terms and medical terms. I think it is overall a bad idea, however, as it is just asking for the masses to pick a phrase and translate it to whatever they want, opening an avenue for attack just like Google bombs in which thousands of bloggers link a certain phrase to a particular web site. Google may be trying to adopt a Wikipedia-esque notion of trusting the world to edit and maintain its database--hey its free labor--but they need to remember that the world is constantly trying to figure out how to conquer Google and push their own web sites and issues to the top of their search results (and now, possibly, their language translations). When there is a way to exploit Google's algorithms, people will use it. To test this theory, let's all try to make the phrase "He's such a geek" translate to "He will one day rule the world!"

I love the lattes at [Greyfriar's](http://www.rarecoffee.com). This isn't a great photo, but the coffee looks so good. The quality of the espresso there has made even my wife start liking coffee! 

In an attempt to debug some cache problems with an app my friend is writing, I helped him come up with a no-cache decorator for Pylons. This might be useful for people in the future, so here it is:

from decorator import decorator #must have decorator module from cheeseshop
 
def nocache(func, *args, **kwargs):
    response = func(*args, **kwargs)
    response.headers['Cache-Control'] = 'no-cache'
    return response
nocache = decorator(nocache) #preserves tracebacks for debugging, etc

This works in combination with decorators/functions that return pylons.Response() objects (e.g. `@jsonify`). The `no-cache` parameter is set in the HTTP response headers, preventing clients including Internet Explorer from caching the response at all. Example Usage:

class DataController(BaseController):
    @nocache #nocache decorator must come before jsonify for this to work
    @jsonify
    def getDataDict(self):
        return data