I just finished the Law section of my Honors College class KHC HC302. I very much enjoyed taking it and it shows me once more how valuable it is to branch out. Generally, the American attitude to higher education seems more appropriate than Germany's I-just-study-my-major-philosophy. But that's another discussion.
For my last day project, Collegememes, I needed cron and delayed_job functionality. Basically, my app, which can be found on Github by the way, fetches the memes from their respective Facebook groups' walls and feed them to the database. Since I didn't wanted to pay money for an extra worker or cron functionality to keep the memes up-to-date, I initially just thought of using either cron.io or just manually updating the database via HTTP-authenticated GET requests (/admin/update). However, I remember reading about introducing more concurrency to a Heroku dyno here, and I ended up doing the following:
Stop talking about SOPA. I mean stop talking about JUST SOPA. I'm neither trying to diminish the scope of a law like SOPA or the efforts of its proponents, but seriously, is this really worth it (relatively)? Just a quick overview of what the protestors achieved:
There has been a recent surge of piracy and IP discussion on Hackernews (here and here) and given that today is January 18th, the official anti-SOPA blackout day, I decided to write a little. First of all, this is not a post about whether there should be IP or not and in which capacity. This is about why I think piracy is wrong, no matter what your beliefs are.
For a couple weeks, I have been working on an idea that I hope will develop into something greater in the next months. While that idea involved mainly theoretical and operational issues, I wanted to keep my practical skills inline and since I have been reading a lot about web applications and especially Backbone.js, I decided to just play around with it. I ended up writing a small prototype for a Facebook Photo Browser based on the Graph API.
It's 2:35 AM and I have three problem sets, a malloc lab and a ten page paper on Vichy France due soon. Instead of working on it, I do the general procrastinating mix of Facebook, HackerNews and various blogs. Yet, something is different than usual: Groupon's IPO is coming up this friday. Groupon's IPO made me think a lot and the conclusion I draw every time is: This is going to fuck me over.
