Chewing The Cud

Seems the Department of Homeland Security is making information available online that perhaps should not be disclosed to the general public. Want to view your’s or a friend’s (or foe’s) licence online? Now you can, by going to this site and typing in your information. Fortunately there is an opt out button once you’ve found your licence, which will hide your licence from the general public (though it will still be viewable by law enforcement officials).

If you are worried about your information being online, go to the site and remove it from the public’s view, then call your congress representative and get this site offline!

I like puzzles, and not the kind that you assemble on a table that look like a cute pastoral scene. I’m talking about puzzles that stretch your mind. /. had a survey of its readers of fun puzzles that are seemingly difficult but have surprisingly simple solutions. I have been playing with the Petals Around The Rose puzzle for some time now and have yet to figure it out. Have fun playing and don’t ruin the solution for me by telling me. I swear I’ll figure it out.

What? Scalability is becoming a moot argument against LAMP? But what will the big wigs use to dismiss LAMP now?

Alex Bunardzic makes some interesting arguments regarding the scalability issue that seems to blunt the point of attack for LAMP critics:

Whenever I give presentations on Ruby and Rails, the number one question invariably pops up from the audience: will it scale?

At first, I was allowing myself to fall prey and to drop down into the detailed and quite meaningless discussion. But then I’ve changed the tactics, and began countering the question with: “Scale to what?”

Amazingly, most people don’t know the answer to that question. They just throw in abstract answers, like to thousands simultaneous requests, etc. But pretty much no one can supply a real life example that is more concrete than the yahoo or amazon or google. In other words, it seems that not too many people are working on the super busy web applications.

Also, do read the comments to the article. Other than a little ego in some of the posts, the discussion is quite lively and useful. A lot of good thinking going on, making the world a better, safer place.