Author: Matt

  • Next Gen Websites

    the web 1.0 was defined by static html pages and simple cgi scripts.  Web 2.0 was marked by improvements in CSS and HTML capabilities, as well as growing influence of Javascript especially with AJAX to make things a bit more interactive. The next significant shift in the development of websites is moving a lot more…

  • Another Personal Test

    There are 3 different things you can do to affect your weight. Exercise changes Dietary changes Take drugs It is possible to take any weight management strategy and estimate percentages of effectiveness to each of these 3 categories.  You can lose weight by just exercising more, or just eating less, or doing both. I have…

  • Lines of Code Per Day Performance

    There are few arguments with programmers that can elicit such passionate hatred as a debate about measuring a programmer’s performance by tracking the number of lines of code they write per day. There are far too many variables at play which can affect a programmers ability to type code – how well they understand the…

  • Great App Challenge of 2013

    This year myself and a friend have taken up the challenge of releasing a new iPhone/iPad game every 2 weeks to hopefully have 20-25 finished games by the end of the year. The strategy is to build upon 3 different game platforms for all the games.  Each game will add one new feature to the…

  • The Great App Challenge of 2013

    UFO Invader version 2.0 is submitted to the iTunes App Store for review.  It should be published in about a week. That marks the first app for what I’m calling the Great App Challenge of 2013.  The goal is to release 20-25 Apps this year between myself and Colum.  That’s one app every 2 weeks!…

  • Hiking to the inkpots

    We’re spending a night in banff and we went on a 5 hour hike along a river and then into the mountains to some interesting coloured springs.

  • Why you should use Celery and Django

    Celery is something that I kept hearing about but took me a while to wrap my head around.  Why is it important? What is it good for? With a couple of big Django websites under my belt it has become more obvious where something like Celery fits and why it’s useful. The first thing you…

  • Home Music System

    A while ago I set up a music system above the fireplace.  It uses an AirPort Express as a destination for playing iTunes music from my computers, iPhone or iPad.  The audio out channel from the AirPort Express feeds into a small amp that I found on Amazon for $20 which powers a pair of…

  • Finding Focus

    Programming is a task that requires long stretches of uninterrupted time to be productive.  A simple 15 second “How’s it going?” will almost inevitably lead to a 15 minute delay in work getting done.  A scary but true fact.  Programming, like design, and engineering tasks are most productive when you get into the “flow” or “zone”.  They…

  • Migrating from Apache to Nginx + Gunicorn

    I was never really sure why people opted to swap out the heavily tested, widely deployed Apache web server for alternatives other than those trying to eek out a little bit more performance.  Finally I found a good reason to change my setup. When trying to enable Celery for asynchronous tasks on my web server I ran into some…