This isn't a joke, and its not a rip-off: plastic lens prescription glasses from $8. A friend had some cool glasses on tonight and I asked about them. They were an $8 pair. He said they work great, and he even skipped any tinting and the anti-glare coating. I found some ones I really like for $19 shipped. I'm going to order several pairs. Normally frames I like are $300+ so I just wear contacts. But I'm tired of eye gunk. So I'm gonna get an eye exam and then get several pairs of these.

Wow. Really cool.

Zenni Optical - Complete prescription eyeglasses from $8.00

Why is software development so hard? It could be argued that software development is so hard because programming is so easy. Since this seems to be contradictory, I will explain what that means.

Whether or not most people realize it, the titles "developer" and "programmer" are not interchangeable. Nearly all of us (myself included) start out as programmers. We learn the programming languages, the syntax, the data structures, the program flow controls, and how to assemble these elements to produce useful components. A good programmer knows the languages, the object models, and the techniques that are capable of producing stable, working pieces of code. But a good programmer is not a software developer. Some people remain very good programmers without ever moving to software development.

To become a software developer takes a good programmer who breaks out of the "program" mindset. A program does a specific task very well, but most professional development projects must go beyond specific tasks. When a company or government agency starts a project it is very seldom a project to create a program. Instead, it is typically to create a solution. This is a very important distinction. A program is a software solution to a single, focused problem while a system is a collection of programs that satisfy a much broader class of problems.

For example, a project to transform data from a legacy system to XML results in a program while a project to make data across legacy systems available to a web-based front end is a system. The difference is that while the transformation program does a single job very well, the legacy to web system consists of many, many components, any of which at their core are a program.

From this view of program vs. system, it makes sense that a software developer is not the same as a programmer. While a programmer must be an expert in a very narrow domain of the overall problem (depth), a developer must have a solid understanding of both the depth and breadth of the problem. Not only must the developer know how to create programs, but he must also know how to assemble the many programs that perform the various tasks required to solve the larger problem.

Metaphor Crash: The difference between a developer and a programmer.

Neat market for selling handmade items - where people are willing to pay a premium for that.

Etsy :: Your place to buy and sell all things handmade

If you live in or around Atlanta and you don't see this photo exhibit while its open (till October) you have made poor use of your time, as I can think of few things you could do with a Saturday afternoon here that are more important. The American Civil Rights movement is, I think, the last time people gave their lives for political establishment in this country. When I was young I used to think that these things had happened a long time ago... that this was ancient history and that ancient people did abhorrent things. Age changes your perception of time. The sixties weren't very long ago. These people... who were murdered by klansmen in the woods, who were shot at by snipers while marching in the streets, whose churches were bombed, who were infiltrated and spied upon by the government, federal, state, and local, who were brutally attacked, harassed, and arrested primarily because they demanded the right of poor people to register to vote... they were hardly older than my parents.

The threats that exist today to our civil liberties absolutely pale in comparison to what was going on here, in our hometown, just a few short years ago. If you want to know what a real fight looks like, and what real sacrifices are, you need look no further.

The exhibition features work by more than twenty... press photographers and amateurs who made stirring visual documents of marches, demonstrations and public gatherings out of a conviction for the social changes that the movement represented. Key photographs include Bob Adelman's Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, 1963; Morton Broffman's Dr. King and Coretta Scott King Leading Marchers, Montgomery, Alabama, 1965; Bill Eppridge's Chaney Family as they depart for the Funeral of James Chaney, Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1964; and Builder Levy's I Am a Man/Union Justice Now, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968.

Supplementing the photographs are archival documents, newspapers, magazines and posters from the period. These complementary materials demonstrate how, in the hands of community organizers and newspaper and magazine editors, photographs played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion. Documents such as Rosa Parks' fingerprint paperwork and the blueprint of the bus on which she protested are shown alongside related photographs for the very first time. Also included will be several contemporary portraits, by photographer Eric Etheridge, of the young men and women who challenged segregation as Freedom Riders in 1961 and who are now senior citizens. All the photographs and documents in this exhibition will be accompanied by descriptive captions and an audio-visual component to provide deeper historical context.

Don't miss the worksheet near the end of the exhibit listing security procedures for civil rights workers operating in the rural south.

Road to Freedom | High Museum of Art Atlanta

Dirty Dilbert - But Funny.

Dill Hole - NWS

Business::US::USPS::WebTools::AddressStandardization - canonicalize a US address

Business::US::USPS::WebTools::AddressStandardization - canonicalize a US address - search.cpan.org

Improving Ext3 performance by placing the journal on a Flash Disk

Running a Linux Server on a HW RAID6 / LVM setup we are plagued by the fact that heavy activity on one file system will impact performance on all of them. If there is an active writer on one file system (especially meta data updates) then all other file systems will face extreme performance degradation. Especially read performance fell right through the floor. Response times become large and highly fluctuating.

The problem seems to even exist on simple single disk systems as is explained in this Ubuntu bug 131094.

...

So tonight, after I had connected that new disk to a spare SATA port I was ready to go.

...

Performance Impact

After running the setup for a few days, I draw the following conclusions:

*

The general slowness of all file access, caused by a single heavy write is reduced so much that it does not interfear with daily work anymore.
*

The hardlink backup (using rsync to keep a copy of the files, with hardlinks to those that have not changed) is about twice as fast.
*

The tape based backup (bacula, running at the same time as the hardlink backup) is about twice as fast as well.

In other words, having an external journal with a HW RAID setup is a MUST.

I don't know if this is legit, but it looks neat.

O+P Insights: Improving Ext3 performance with an external journal on an SSD Disk

This new service lets you tap into ATDC’s more than 20 years experience helping entrepreneurs launch and build technology companies.

In the library at our headquarters and this virtual Web center, you can find resources to increase your speed and opportunity for a successful startup.

ATDC Entrepreneurs Resource Center

Since 1919, Western Textile has specialized in manufacturing custom made bags and other textile items for companies around the country.

We have worked hard to develop a reputation for quality, reliability, service and value. Over the years, we have successfully manufactured custom products for a long list of Fortune 500 companies, along with many projects for medium and smaller sized companies.

Our experience over the years involves everything from custom imprinted tote bags for trade shows and conferences, to elaborate custom designs aimed at fulfilling a customers specfic proprietary needs.

We utilize our manufacturing facilities in San Francisco, CA, and El Paso, TX, thereby increasing sourcing options for our customers, and ensuring speedy order completion.

To the left is a sample of some of the custom designed products we have manufactured.

Possibly a good place to have handbags manufactured.

Western Textile & Manufacturing Inc - Custom Made Bags

Introduction

Handel is a quick and not-so-dirty ecommerce framework written in Perl. It consists of a set of core modules to do basic cart interactions and order processing via a plugin based pipeline.

While Handel is written to be web agnostic, it does support various different web based languages and framesworks including AxKit, Template Toolkit and Catalyst.

It was started for the conversion of an IIS/ASP based commerce site to Apache/ModPerl, but I decided that is might be useful to others so here it is on CPAN.

For the curious, Handel is German for commerce.

Handel Framework: Welcome