In the interest of perpetuating (or reviving) pointless flame wars, I offer this simple badge (now featured near the bottom of this page as well):

If you decide to have it tattooed on your bicep, send me a photo.

Verbatim headers from a spam I recently received:

Subject: STR_RNDLEN(2-4)}{EXTRA_TIME_4} {WORD}
Date: {DATE}

That’s not going to sell much {PRODUCT}…

Sam Newman has posted a useful high-level comparison of Django and Rails on his site. In it, I think he hits on one little-discussed reason why these two projects are grabbing so much mindshare right now:

[Rails and Django] … historically would have ended up being written in Perl or PHP - but ended up being written in Ruby and Python respectively.

When I heard DHH speak at OSCON, he mentioned switching to Ruby after giving up on trying to make PHP do the kind of stuff he wanted to do. Back in July I asked Simon Willison (of the Django team) about PHP; he said that both he and Adrian Holovaty had worked in PHP for years, but it was Python that “gave us the flexibility we needed to pull everything off.”

You can be FPS-illiterate like I am and still be fascinated by This Spartan Life, a talk show staged inside the Halo multiplayer game world. Guest and host (and “camerapeople”) attempt to have a cogent conversation while running around trying not to get shot by interlopers. Right now there’s one episode posted, divided into six segments, including interviews with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh and multimedia innovator Bob Stein. The Stein segment is my favorite for its combination of substance, humor, and visual antics.

At OSCON I learned that just up the Willamette River from Portland, in sleepy Corvallis, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab hosts www.mozilla.org. Maybe you’ve heard of it. They also provide hosting and/or mirror services to Apache, KDE, Xiph.org, Debian, Gentoo, and others. In the early ’90s I briefly lived in Corvallis and this just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Public universities have a long history with open source – my server would not be what it is without Berkeley in particular – but I don’t come across a lot of explicit advocacy from schools beyond the level of individual employees or researchers who work on projects of their own volition. Public universities should be big backers of open source, I think, so I hope that OSU’s example is inspirational.