life | delimited

McCain meet McCain

What America needs now is someone who will finish the race before starting the victory lap

-John McCain 10/25/08

I just watched the Palin supreme court decision video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRuBdW0yBUY
It got me to thinking, I would love to see candidates answer more questions like this. The VP debate should start out with a few actual questions from the citizenship test.  Here’s a few that I would love to see asked:

Q: When is independance day and who do we celebrate getting independance of?
A: England

Q: What do we call a change to the constituion?
A: Amendment

Q: What are the three branches of our government?
A: Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary

Q: For how long do we elect each senator?
A: 6 years

Q: What is the judiciary branch of our government?
A: The supreme court

Q: How many Supreme Court justice are there?
A: 9

Q: Who was the main writer of the Declaration of Independence?
A: Thomas Jefferson

Q: Who has the power to declare the war?
A: Congress

Q: Where is the White House located?
A: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave

Q: Name the right guaranteed by the first amendment.
A: Freedom of: speech, press, religion, peaceable assembly, and requesting change of the government.

How great would that be: “We’re going to start off a little differently tonight with a pop quiz. The following questions are pulled directly from the INS test required for US citizenship. If a candidate cannot answer a question the other may respond. Governor Palin, we’ll start with you…”

I’ve been spending way too much time time on reddit lately and came up with a way to curb my addiction.  Here’s how:

1. Host file entry:
   This is the first level of defense where you set a specific host entry for the site you want to block to 127.0.0.1. It’s a bit annoying but takes a few seconds to back out the change when you need a fix. On *nix OS’s this file is typically at /etc/hosts.
   
2. Block at router and reset router password
   This is the next level I went to after step one failed. Most routers these days have some sort of access restrictions built into them. What you need to do is set up a restriction for the site and change the router password to something you’ll never remember. Now the only way you can get to the site is to reflash your router which is a pretty big inconvenience and in my case did the trick. Note: I did allow sites to be accessed for 1 hour out of the day.
   
   

Have that next great domain name on the tip of your brain?  Here’s a few tools that might help come up with something…

http://definr.com/

http://www.visuwords.com/

http://visual.merriam-webster.com/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/

http://www.whatdoesthatmean.com/

http://www.forvo.com/

http://www.howjsay.com/

http://www.morewords.com

I went to download the latest App Engine release and took a look at download counts for all releases since the launch of App Engine.

Link to : App Engine Download counts

I broke up windows and mac downloads and graphed them by version.  Shows some interesting trends.  

Windows users tried out v1.0 and trailed off, when 1.1 came out everyone jumped back on the bandwagon only to find nothing that different and users trailed off again.

Mac users showed the same initial trail off after 1.0, but there was no huge bump after v1.1.  Mac users have nearly caught up with Windows users as of the latest release.  I have a feeling some of it has to do with the App Engine Launcher released exclusively for OSX…

1. Go to http://delicious.com/help/bookmarklets
2. Press “Control-B” to show the bookmarks toolbar
3. Drag the “Bookmark on Delicious” link to the bookmarks toolbar
   
4. When on a site you want to bookmark press “Control-B” then on the “Bookmark on Delicious” button in the toolbar
   
5. That’s It!
   

When OSX 10.5 came out there was a small update that put a smile on my face.  It was that the iCal icon showed the actual date instead of showing March 9th every day.

The current weather icon on an iPhone acts the same way.  It always shows 73 and sunny.  I didn’t see it mentioned so I’m guessing this will not be fixed in the 2.0 firmware.

Anyone else wish it was?

I just just launced a new site http://www.wetire.com built on Google’s App Engine over the weekend.  It aims to promote people to keep their tire pressure correct and shows the net effect of a lot of people doing a little thing.  Sign up and check it out!

I’m working on a clean up project on a C# .net app and came across the following code that is a pretty standard way to assign a value based on the value of something else.

DateTime dNow;
if (sNow == null)
{
    dNow = DateTime.Now;
}
else
{
    dNow = DateTime.Parse(sNow);
}

Most languages have what’s called a conditional assignment operator which exists for this very purpose. Here’s an example that does the same thing as the above code, but in one line.

Date Time dNow = sNow == null ? DateTime.Now : DateTime.Parse(sNow);

In addition to the benefit of saving screen real estate, I think doing it in one line is actual easier to understand…

A recent study found the average American golfer walks about 900 miles a year.
Another study found American golfers drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol a year.
That means, on average, American golfers get about 41 miles to the gallon
Kind of makes you proud…