The last time I did this, the version of Django was 0.9 and today’s version is 1.3.1. As a I started work on the site I discovered some things here and there that had changed in the years in-between those version. The one that bit me the hardest was this: I could view the main page (/), but any other page (including index) would give me a 404 error.

This was really weird because the mappings existed in the urls.py file, but a 404 error means it couldn’t be found. If it was a programmatic error you would expect a 500 error, but I never saw one.

Slowly but surely I tore the system apart looking to see what could cause mapped urls to disappear in Django. Eventually I discovered the root cause was how static resources are handled.

One of the changes in the new versions of Django was to add functionality for handling static resources. The biggest change (at least as far as my ancient code was concerned) was in introduction of the STATIC_URL variable. According the documentation this is the prefix for static resources (like css, javascript) that are referenced by the web page that is being built by Django.

In my laziness many years ago, I just plopped the main CSS file (and everything else) in the root of the web directory so that in the html pages didn’t have to have paths on them. So when I was adding the STATIC_URL variable to make sure my CSS file would actually load, I set the variable this way:

STATIC_URL = ‘/’

…because it wouldn’t let me put an empty string of ”. Well, it turns out that this was wrong wrong wrong. Django was looking at the incoming requests as I tried to visit the pages of the site and checking the static directory to see if there was anything there (which there wasn’t, just my CSS file).

Once I realized this, I changed it to:

STATIC_URL = ‘/static/’

…which basically forces you to create a directory to hold your static files. Which is right right right right. Basically Django was forcing me to clean up my act and code the site in a much cleaner manner. As soon as I did that all of the 404 errors went away and I was able to hit every page in my urls.py file.

Information is quickly piling up all over the place, and I agree with the article that the people who are able to capitalize on this are the ones that will get the big payoff. I especially like the idea of calling these start-ups “wildcats”, that perfectly captures the wild west atmosphere that is going to start happening.

The neat thing is that a lot of this information is out there for free, the real value is how people are going to aggregate those individual data streams into a new and often unexpected products. Take twitter for example (are you following me on twitter?), it is a conduit to what is going on in the hive mind of the internet. This site seems to be gathering up the trends on twitter and then adding news articles about some of the things that are hot.

That is pretty neat: Data is generated in the form of people tweeting about Topic X, as X becomes more “important” (in this case more people discuss it so that it rises above other topics) it gets published to the “trending” list. This website then goes in and looks at that list adds more data to the conversation by reporting news about topic X. That way the separate data points are tied together to show that there is a relationship between them, and in the process makes the data more valuable to the end users (by supplying more context, etc.)

Big data is going to lead to a lot of big opportunities. All we have to do is find the data, combine it in the right way, and perform the right data analysis on it. And unlike bit oil, big data is going to be around a very long time.

But my one major gripe has been the seeming lack of RSS support in Chrome. In Firefox, Safari, and almost every other browser out today if you visit a page that has an RSS feed for it, you will see a little RSS icon (usually in the address bar). Clicking on it will take you to your preferred RSS reader where you can add in that feed.

However in Chrome, there did not seem to be any native support for doing this. It turns out its an extension you have to install.

Once you install the RSS Subscription Extension you will get that RSS icon in the address bar and be able to subscribe to the feed for that site.

Rate-my-resume.com

Now if you are wondering if your resume is a good match for a particular job posting, you can use my site to find out! At the moment I’m giving the score in terms of 0 (being a total non-match) to 100 (being the absolute perfect match). In this economy, the more your resume reflects the skills listed in a particular job, the more likely your resume will be looked at seriously.

If you run your resume through and it gives you a low score, look at your resume and the job posting and try and figure out what keywords are in the job posting that are not in your resume. Then, assuming you have the necessary experience, put those keywords into your resume! Be sure to add them in a way that makes sense to a person, after all humans (especially HR people) don’t like to read fragments and words peppered into someone’s resume.

Try out the site with your resume and see how you rank!

p.s. Python rocks!

Easter Eggs are little hidden things in side of a bigger program. Some times it just the developer’s names, other times it can be something totally unexpected like a flight simulator hidden in a spreadsheet program. With the power of Javascript and nice tutorials like this one, there’s a lot of opportunity to have some real fun!

Just think, with all of the computing power a modern browser affords us developers, it should be very easy to recreate tons of games from the Atari 2600, early Nintendo systems. The imagination can very easily run wild….

Overall it seems like a good approach to aggregate this data together to get the “big picture” of where one’s website stands in the web. I’ve tried this but I’ve noticed that Technorati doesn’t seem to report the numbers I expect it would.

For example: I got a link to my blog from Hip Egg a few weeks ago, and this link has not been reported on Technorati. I know this blog is small potatoes in the grand scope of the universe, but it strikes me as odd that my more recent updates are featured in my “favorites” (as is Hip Egg’s posts), yet the link from him hasn’t shown up.

My working assumption is that Technorati has some kind of filter where lower popularity sites aren’t “updated” as often as the bigger sites. Either that or the link database is broken. But links for other sites seem to be working, although I’m not watching them as closely as I watch my own stats.

At any rate I wonder how many other blogs (or sites in general) are suffering from this problem. Metrics for websites are difficult to agree on, so a site or sites where a reputation can be established and measured becomes more and more important. Aggregating data from multiple sites is a good start, but if there are too many “issues” with how a site is ranked, then the data becomes suspect and it becomes harder to get a clear picture of what’s going on.

Graphs, and what you can do with them, never ceases to amaze me. The article talks about how looking at the relationships between users on eBay can help uncover fraud and the accomplices that help keep it going. They do this by seeing if the relationship between groups of users turns into a biparte graph. That is, there is a concentration of links between two groups of users, and few links with other users.

The links between users refers to the “feedback scores” that eBay users use to determine a user’s trustworthiness. Usually, when someone begins ripping others off, they get bad feedback until it reaches a point where no one will do business with them. This is the way that community sites commonly work (i.e. letting the population of users determine each other’s rankings). The issue is that sometimes there are people lurking in the shadows assisting the fraudster, but because they are never the target of the bad feedback, they are able to keep going supporting new fraudsters (i.e. a new user id).

This setup allows a scammer to setup a new user id and get its feedback levels boosted quickly without having to engage in a lot of “legitimate” transactions. Think of it as passing a baton in a relay race: Instead of one person running a mile, why not let several people sprint as fast as they can for a quarter-mile and then hand off to someone “fresh”.

Think about it: When was the last time you checked someone’s feedback ratings on eBay? Probably right before your last purchase/bid. But, when was the last time you checked the people who gave the feedback to see what their reputation was? Probably never. I know I had never thought of this before reading the article.

This technique produces a graphical representation of this relationship which stands out quickly to a user. (Also, as side note, there are mathematical formulas that would/should see this also.) A normal user would probably have a relationship graph (over 2 or more degrees) that looks like a star-burst pattern. A potential scammer would show up in a clustered bipartite graph. This would give the community of users (eBay bidders) a powerful tool to determine who is the real deal and who is trying to give them a wooden nickel. Very cool stuff. Graph theory to the rescue!

A few weeks ago I was searching for something (I can’t even remember what it was) and I stumbled across a new feature on their site. They are now selling short (around 50 pages) PDF’s called “Short Cuts” that are basically short papers on some topic that they don’t have a book for yet. Its a pretty neat idea, the PDFs range in price from around $5 to around $10 or so.

And the coolest thing is that there is a promotion going on where you “Buy 3 books for the price of 2″. With the short cuts I was hooked because there were a couple that looked interesting and the price was hard to beat. The whole process was pretty painless and within minutes I had my new PDFs.

Fast forward to today: Again I’m searching for something (RTF documentation to be exact) and a hit turns up on O’Reilly’s site. This time its for one of their pocket reference guides. I was bummed because it looked like the book had the answers I was looking for, but I knew the odds of finding it locally were low, and I didn’t feel like waiting for it to show up in the mail…

And right around then I noticed the book was available as a PDF for *half* price. It turns out that O’Reilly is now offering a lot of the pocket guides as PDFs for immediate download, and they are pretty much half the price of the dead tree book. Isn’t that awesome? the best part is the 3 for the price of 2 sale is still going on.
So, I wound up spending $10 and now I’ve got 3 more PDF of pocket guides. Go check it out if you are in the market for any of the pocket guides. Also, several of their newer books are available in PDF form also. Sadly, their older books aren’t in PDF form yet, which bummed me out because there’s a couple that look really interesting. This is the long tail at work.

Finally, a mashup that does something useful.   As the article points out there are certain patterns of usage that probably would raise red flags. What surprises me the most though is people aren’t excited about this type of technology being used.

Given the large size of the user base of MySpace, it is pretty impractical to have a set of eyes on every user and every posting that goes on. Granted, there is a real possibility of false hits when doing an automated search like this. But given that a computer can sift through the set of millions of possible hits and narrow it down to a few hundred (which can then be followed up by a human), to me it is a no brainer.

The best part of doing an automated data mining scan of a site like MySpace would be that its a computer, not a person doing the scanning. Computers don’t make judgements, or laugh at your music choices, they just scan. To me it seems like this would be the best of all possible worlds: Let the computer make the rough pass over the site, and pick out the most “questionable” users/postings for human followup. That way the “invasion of privacy” (if there even is such a thing on the internet anymore) is limited. And by making sure that a human is doing the follow up, we hopefully remove the problem of the over-zealous filter that assumes everyone is bad.
I’m curious to see what the reaction is when the reporter releases the code that lead to the investigations in the story. Will MySpace adopt its usage? Will vigilante surveillance groups pop up and patrol the internet? Interesting times lie ahead…

I’ve been using the reader for a while now, and this new update to it is really great. My feeds were getting hard to manage (some feeds were updating often, others only once in a while) and the new format allows for fast and easy viewing, without letting good things slip by.

Its still a beta product which shows sometimes when it reports new items that aren’t there, but overall its pretty good. Google has a pretty good track record with these beta products, so if you are interested in an RSS news reader, head on over and check it out.

And speaking of press, Google’s Code Search sure did make waves this week, and that really puzzles me. The site is a great resource for finding code, but most programmers I know usually are looking for an explanation about how something works in addition to a code sample. In fact, I was surprised Google launched this seeing how other sites like Koders seem to be doing a good job of covering this niche.

But at least some folks out there have been having some fun with the search: Which women do nerds prefer?