http://parand.com/say Parand Tony Darugar: A Cruel and Petty Dictator Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:48:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Tonight I had my first experiencing with getting choked out - going unconcious from a Jiu Jitsu choke. The black belt was showing me how to do a triangle, and somewhere in the middle of saying "that's tight" I went to sleep. I'd always wondered what it felt like. Very surprising ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/07/02/choked-out/ I hear complaining about the Windows/DOS command line window and how unusable it is, which is surprising considering how easy it is to make it usable. Here we go: Start a new cmd session. On Vista, click on the round windows icon at the bottom left of the screen and type ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/07/02/how-to-setup-your-windows-cmd-window-to-be-usable/ Entertaining if long winded rant from Erik Naggum: When the markup overhead exceeds 200%, when attributes values and element contents compete for the information, when the distance between 99% of the "tags" is /zero/, when the character set is Unicode, and when validation takes more time than processing, not to mention the sorry fact that ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/06/21/xml-the-evil-adult/ Another one of those that's mainly for my own notes. I needed to create a mock object that always a returns an empty list no matter what method is called on it. That is, you can instantiate one of these and call any made up method on it and get ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/06/19/python-simple-mock-object/ Note to self: this is how you start a python SMTP debugging server: python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25 http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/05/29/python-smtp-debugging-server/ Thinking through my performance as coach (of my son's under-8 soccer team): We had a tough season, winning only a single game. Clearly not very good. On the other hand, each and every player showed improvement, some quite significant. One parent even took the time to thank me for helping his son ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/05/25/on-coaching/ In need of creating various UML Sequence Diagrams and in no mood to deal with Visio or its other graphical editor ilk, I did some research and ended up at a really nice solution. What I wanted was to be able to specify my sequence using a simple text description and ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/05/22/easiest-way-to-create-uml-sequence-diagrams/ Django-Piston in a promising looking REST frameowork for Django. On first inspection it seems to have all the right attributes and setup. I hope to give it a try soon. One question I have - while I agree HTTP PUT and DELETE are the right verbs to use for Update and ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/04/30/django-piston-rest-framework-for-django/ We subscribed to the local paper, mainly to support a cause that was raising money by selling subscriptions. Thursday through Sunday we get the paper physically delivered to our house. And I get to experience the value first-hand. The value of the printed paper is less than zero. I'd prefer they stop delivering ... http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/04/27/value-of-the-printed-newspaper-less-than-zero/ Non-traditional data stores are coming fast and furious these days. Here's another interesting one: Preserve with JavascriptDB. This one I'd like to check out. http://parand.com/say/index.php/2009/04/22/preserve-javascriptdb-yet-another-non-traditional-data-store/