Tom Printy’s Blog

I was researching the Chicago fireworks that will take place downtown tommorrow and found the songs that they will be using. Not one of them is what I would call patriotic, instead it is composed of the garbage you hear on FM radio. This is just sad!  Here is the list of songs that will compose the musical portion of the fireworks display:

Intro (Before fireworks launch)
KAYNE WEST - Homecoming
CHRIS MARTIN
Fireworks
BON JOVI - Living on a Prayer
LENNY KRAVITZ - American Woman
RIHANNA - Don’t Stop the Music
PRINCE - Let’s Go Crazy
KILLERS - Mr. Brightside
SARA BAREILLES - Love Song
COLDPLAY - Clocks
GWEN STEFANI - The Sweet Escape
GOOD CHARLOTTE - I Don’t Wanna Be In Love
KAYNE WEST - Stronger
K. T. TUNSTALL - Black Horse and the Cherry Tree
MATCHBOX TWENTY - How Far We’ve Come

Ok so there are some local artists there and the is ok. But these songs do not even mention the very reason why we celebrate the 4th of July.  For those who forget here is why this day is special

 In the United States, Independence Day (commonly known as the Fourth of July) is a federal holiday commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

A much more fitting song selection would be some of the following

Air Force Anthem (Off We Go!)
America (My Country Tis of Thee)
America the Beautiful
Army Anthem (Caissons)
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Marine Hymn (From the Halls…)
Navy Anthem (Anchors Aweigh)
Navy Hymn (Eternal Father)
Stars and Stripes
Star Spangled Banner
When Johnny Comes Marching Home
Yankee Doodle

So while you are watching the fireworks this weekend I hope that you feel proud about our country and at least have something patriotic playing in your head and heart.

While I was waking up this morning I had a thought….. Normally around 7:00am there is a rush of traffic down my street as people head off to work. This morning that rush was eerily absent. So this got me to thinking that you could judge the state of the economy based on the amount of traffic.  I suppose to do this you could look at historical traffic data  and compare the morning and even time commutes with things like stock market prices and offical job numbers from the government.

Of course this is all just an observation it could be that gas is so high that people in my neighborhood are choosing to walk or ride a bike instead of drive.

All I can say is WOW about Rober Byrds recent activity on the Senate floor. Take a look and see for yourself.

I was happily sleeping this morning when I was woken up by the a strange sensation. I thought to myself wow this feels like an earthquake. It appears that I was right. There was an earthquake. Here is the map image from the USGS.

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UPDATE:

The following is a release by the United States Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center: An earthquake occurred 35 km (20 miles) SW of Vincennes, Indiana and 205 km (125 miles) SW of INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana at 3:36 AM MDT, Apr 18, 2008 (4:36 AM CDT in Illinois). The magnitude and location may be revised when additional data and further analysis results are available. There have been no reports of damage.

This large region borders the much more seismically active New Madrid seismic zone on the seismic zone’s north and west. The Illinois basin - Ozark dome region covers parts of Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas and stretches from Indianapolis and St. Louis to Memphis. Moderately frequent earthquakes occur at irregular intervals throughout the region. The largest historical earthquake in the region (magnitude 5.4) damaged southern Illinois in 1968. Moderately damaging earthquakes strike somewhere in the region each decade or two, and smaller earthquakes are felt about once or twice a year. In addition, geologists have found evidence of eight or more prehistoric earthquakes over the last 25,000 years that were much larger than any observed historically in the region.

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi).

About two weeks ago I worked a booth at recent Chicago Dice Career fair. There were may 15 other companies with booths there. This fair was devoted towards job seekers who considered themselves technical or software development related. This fair was interesting to me because it gave a real sense about where the economy is and what types of people are looking for jobs and what types of people are not looking for a job. The good news is (based on my observations) is that if you are a good solid software developer you are employed and not looking. Te bad news is that if you are a Project Manager (PM) you are out there looking for new gig and you are not alone.  I must have had at least 80 people in a 4 hour period ask if my employer was looking for a Project Manager.  I would tell them that we are looking for developers or sysadmins and they would frown. I guess they were hearing that a lot.

What does this say about the economy? To me it says that we are in the very early stages of a slow down or  recession. It seems that companies are just starting to trim the fat (Project Management) and have decided to keep the meat (developers).  This also means that there possible could be more fat trimming and even meat trimming in  the near future, and that we haven’t even started to see the effects of this recession or coming recession.

As always keep your resume polished and ears to the ground.

I attended Pycon this year. This is the definitive conference for all things python. This was a one of the larger geeky conferences that I have been to in a long time. I think that there are a lot of developers starting to migrate to the language. There are a lot of very cool things being done with python. I would venture to say that if you are a software development company that python can almost run your whole organization. I saw tools that will allow you to do everything from managing your systems (http://www.zenoss.com/), keeping track of your accounting (http://www.fivedash.com/) to programming windows based applications and mobile applications. This is truely and amazing ecosystem of software.

The main reason that I attended Pycon was to really nail down id python was something that I wanted to explore more and if Django can really help me put some of my ideas into action. I can say without a doubt that Python is something I need to spend a lot more time on, and Django seems like a very usable environment for creating web apps. I was even more excited when I passed by a booth that showed Python running on a Nokia N95.

So will I dump perl? No I don’t see that happening soon as I must use perl everyday to pay the bills, but I see all my new personal projects moving towards python. Once I start thinking in Python I am sure this will be easier.

Thanks Pycon for showing me the light.

On the way into work this morning, I noticed a hand painted sign on the side of the road that read “Google Ron Paul“. I think this is really interesting! This is interesting to me because the sign does not mention that he is running for president, nor does it mention that he is part of the Replublican party. It just tells people that the are number 1 in Google and to go look it up. It is a very interesting way to call people to action. So go Google Ron Paul

Ever since my local Hollywood Video store closed it’s doors I have been in search for a new place to rent my DVDs. At first I started to use the Redbox machine that was located in my local Jewel-Osco, however this got to be very inconvenient, since the movies are due back the next day, and expensive 1 dollar per day per movie. So this sent me out in search of a new way to rent movies. What I liked about renting movies from Hollywood video was that I could rent as many movies as I could watch taking out three movies at a time with their MVP program. I didn’t have to wait for movies to come to me in the mail  and since the store was less then a mile from my house I often walked there. None of the available options were able to replicate this experience.

I knew that I had to choose at least on online rental option for DVDs. In my mind there are only two choices Netflix.com or BlockBuster Total Access.  These two servics seem to be battling it out for king of the online DVD rental market so I has to give them a try. While Netflix is the king of the hill in this market right now I choose not to go with them because my only option for renting DVDs would be to wait for my postal person to deliver my videos. With Block Buster total access I can trade in the movies that I have for movie in the store, when I drop the movies off at the store Block Buster sends out the next batch of movies. I can watch many more movies this way then I can with Netflix.

I have have been a member of the  BlockBuster Total Access program for about a month now and am pretty happy with it. While I am renting fewer movies then I was a Hollywood Video I still have stuff to watch. The added bonus is that I can watch quite a few older movies that I wasn’t able to get before.   The actual website is ok, I am using the recommendations from Sourcelight to populate my Blockbuster “Q” as I don’t prefer Choicestream recommendations.

If you have a BlockBuster close to you I encourage you so sign-up and see how it goes for you. The first month is free so you have nothing to loose. If you use an online DVD service, which one is it and how do you like it?

Recently I had cause to setup a new Wordpress blog on a system that was hosted by Hostway. We ran into problems getting the permalinks to function. The .htaccess file that Wordpress generates for permalinks was causing Apache on the Hostway system to through a 500 error or give a 400 error. To find out what was going on I looked at the Apache error log and saw a line like:

Permission denied: cannot read directory for multi

After a bit of googling I came up with the following .htaccess that fixed Wordpress Permalinks:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -MultiViews

#BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Notice how in the options line I turn off MultiViews and Indexes? Once I dropped this .htaccess in place Wordpress and Apache were able to play nice. My guess is that Hostway has Multiviews and Indexes on by default such that you can be lazy about the files that you place on their server. It isn’t a terrible way to go just that I wish they had a document showing what options they have enabled. As a side note I can see what mods they have enabled on the server by looking at /etc/apache2/mods_enabled .

I hope that this helps someone else out.

Greg Sterling met with the company that I work for.  It is nice to finally be recognized for the hard work that all of us are putting in everyday.   I wonder what, if any impact this will have on the business.