Michael Matuzak // Programmer by day, booze drinking calamari cruncher by night.
“Don’t you worry about that. You just let Boss worry about that.”
Any framework that is called Chicago Boss has to be awesome. When people criticize it you can just be like, "BUT IT'S DA BOSS!!!". Now all we need is T-Pain to autotunize about erlangs concurrency.
Ass Bomber
Nobody tell the TSA, but last month someone tried to assassinate a Saudi prince by exploding a bomb stuffed in his rectum. He pretended to be a repentant militant, when in fact he was a Trojan horse:
The resulting explosion ripped al-Asiri to shreds but only lightly injured the shocked prince -- the target of al-Asiri's unsuccessful assassination attempt.Other news articles are here, and here are two blog posts.
For years, I have made the joke about Richard Reid: "Just be glad that he wasn't the underwear bomber." Now, sadly, we have an example of one.
Lewis Page, an "improvised-device disposal operator tasked in support of the UK mainland police from 2001-2004," pointed out that this isn't much of a threat for three reasons: 1) you can't stuff a lot of explosives into a body cavity, 2) detonation is, um, problematic, and 3) the human body can stifle an explosion pretty effectively (think of someone throwing himself on a grenade to save his friends).
But who ever accused the TSA of being rational?
JSNES
A Javascript NES emulator. By Ben Firshman @bfirsh
Initialised. Ready to load a ROM.
Controls
Button Player 1 Player 2 Left Left Num-4 Right Right Num-6 Up Up Num-8 Down Down Num-2 A X Num-7 B Z Num-9 Start Enter Num-1 Select Ctrl Num-3 About
A few months ago, I stumbled across Matt Westcott's excellent JSSpeccy. I had seen some pretty imaginative canvas creations, but Javascript emulators? What a perfect idea for a daft new project.
I got underway shamelessly porting vNES into Javascript. Although not the most efficient, it didn't have any of the pointer memory mapping magic associated with emulators written in lower level languages. As such, it was more or less a direct port, bar a few tweaks to compensate for the lack of static typing, and obviously a rewrite of all the I/O.
I highly recommend you use Google Chrome to play JSNES. Thanks to its high performance canvas element, and a clever optimisation by Connor Dunn, it runs at full speed on modern computers. Mac builds are also available. Otherwise, it just about runs on Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4, but it's hardly playable.
The source is available on Github, contributions welcome!
I am one of the authors of Tornado (http://www.tornadoweb.org/), the
web server/framework we built at FriendFeed that we open sourced last
week (see http://bret.appspot.com/entry/tornado-web-server).
I just checked in change to Tornado that enables you to run any WSGI-
compatible framework on Tornado's HTTP server so that Django apps
could run on top of Tornado's HTTP server and benefit from some of the
performance work we have done. (I just sent a message to django-users@
with getting started instructions as well, but if you are interested,
take a look at http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/master/tornado/wsgi.py#L188).
I chose the WSGI approach because it is generic and applies to all
frameworks, but Django is obviously the most widely used. I am curious
if there is any benefit to implementing more "native" support in
django.core.handlers or if WSGI is the preferred way of adding support
for new servers. If there is any performance or usability benefit, let
me know, because we would be happy to contribute our time to make it
happen.
In the meantime, if you find any issues with our WSGI support, let me
know so we can fix problems.
Bret
