There may be one or two Republican readers out there, and to them I’m sorry, but in the Dubya-and-since era, treating that party as substantially either crazy or stupid is a fairly mainstream position. Possibly the Republicans are right that homosexuality weakens marriage and tax cuts don’t cause deficits and imprisoning a world-leading proportion of your population increases public safety and deregulating the finance industry is good economics and invading large Middle-Eastern nations (then staying) improves America’s security, as does spending more on the military than the rest of the world put together. And maybe the rest of the world is wrong on these things. I doubt it, though.-- Tim Bray
2011-08-02
Tim Bray on Republicans
2010-03-13
Things I would like to build (software)
- A python equivalent of Chef or Puppet
- A python equivalent of Vagrant
- A new auth system for Django that works with: OpenID/OAuth, Facebook Connect, Facebook app authentication, CAS, etc.
2009-10-11
Adventures with Django
On Thursday evening, I gave a short talk at PyAtl on Django at the AJC. It went well, and there were a good number of questions afterward on our system and architecture, as well as on how Django is perceived within the company.
Unfortunately, our ridiculously amazing Django group at the AJC is being broken up. In a move that makes a lot of sense, Cox is pulling web development into a central group that will take care of 128 radio stations, television stations, and newspapers across the country. However, they're shrinking the number of development positions by almost half. We are keeping a team at the AJC, but it too is shrinking by half, and shifting focus a bit to deal more with legacy system integration and AJC-specific projects.
We have to apply for positions within the new organizations: resumes, interviews, the whole shebang. While completely understandable, the uncertainty, unknown timeframe, conflicting schedules, and confusing process are making things difficult for everyone involved. The 50% shrinkage means that we all have to be looking for jobs outside of AJC and Cox too, just in case. The AJC has already lost the best manager I have ever worked for, and I'm sure there will be more.
These are certainly exciting times to be working in the media industry: whether exciting-good, or exciting-bad, it's sometimes hard to tell! I will be more than happy if I get to keep doing what I'm doing now, either at the AJC or in the new central group.
And if you are looking to hire Django developers: sadly, I may have a few amazing candidates for you shortly.
2009-05-23
Biking
2009-03-15
Martinis on the Titanic
I started working for the city paper in Atlanta in October, almost a year and a half ago. As we brace for layoffs, Clay Shirky has reminded me why these are such interesting times to be in, and especially to work for a newspaper.
We are watching the complete destruction of the print-based publishing world we all grew up in. The internet is doing to the printing press what the printing press did to hand-copying illuminated texts, and things are getting fascinating.
Working at a paper gives me a ringside seat. I sometimes morbidly joke that we're sipping martinis on the deck of the Titanic, watching the water and the great ship as she slides under the waves. But it's important to remember that this is not the death of Journalism. It's just the ruthless removal of all the artificial frictions of publishing. In the post-post-Gutenberg world, this is publishing. Already, almost a quarter of the earth's population has internet access, and could theoretically read this blog post. That's almost as crazy as the fact that about 60% of the earth's population has cell phone access, and could hit 10 or 15 buttons to call me and talk right now!
Crazy times… and exciting. Let's see where we go next!
2008-11-14
Being famous takes work
I haven't posted a fake beauty post in a while, so here's something in a similar vein: Celebrity beauty is a full-time job.
It's depressing how “attractiveness attributes” (low weight/high weight, no tan/suntan) match with whatever you'd need disposable income and leisure time to accomplish.