The Pylons web framework is aimed at making webapps and large programmatic website development in Python easy. Pylons combines the very best ideas from the worlds of Ruby, Python and Perl, providing a structured but extremely flexible Python web framework. BlastOff is a Pylons application template providing a working site skeleton configured with SQLAlchemy, mako, repoze.who, ToscaWidgets, TurboMail, and WebFlash.

Don’t have the guts to compete in Ultimate Fighting? Perhaps you’ve got the skills for the Ultimate Typing Championship! The action is online and it’s asynchronous so you could enter the competition whenever you’re ready and you don’t have to go anywhere to do it, unless you make it to the finals which are in Austin, TX.

Think of all the software you install on your computer as windows on a battle tank. Every app is another window where armor used to be. The next time you get hit with a virus, the chance that it’s aimed at one of your windows just increased.

Instead of storing whole dd images, even if they’re just backups of small partitions, you can save space and bandwidth by piping dd into a compression utility like gzip. You can then unzip the files straight into sha1sum to get a checksum of what you just backed up.

I have a hotmail account. I’ve had it since 1996, so there’s some nostalgia there, but it’s garbage. Sure it looks smoother than it did in 1996, but it’s still the same old weak sauce with the same basic features it had a decade ago.

The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores settings for low-level operating system components, kernel, drivers, services, and user interface along with 3rd party applications installed on the platform. Before you dabble, it might be a good idea to backup your registry using a restore point or exporting the registry to a file.

Millionaire spam mogul Dale Begg-Smith has thrice won the World Cup and was ranked #1 mogul skiier in the world. However in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Canadian Alexandre Bilodeau took the podium, winning the Gold. If he doesn’t want to be in the media spotlight, more power to him. But to the journalists: just make sure to spam him with more requests for comments please. I’d really like to hear what he has to say.

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient. There are a lot of ways to order a 52 card deck. You can hide a message by putting the cards in the correct order. The only thing missing to take this from an obscure message to a secure one is a password, or pre-shared key that serves as the agreed upon starting order of the deck.

Why cat something and pipe it into grep when grep can easily search a file by itself. It’s like taking your car to the dealership so you can change your own oil. What? No that doesn’t really make any sense. But neither does piping cat into grep. If you’re dealing with large files or complicated expressions, the reason you shouldn’t cat something into a pipe just to grep it becomes obviously clear.

ATI allows xorg.conf to have the normal customized settings you’re used to for X, but it relies on this little PCS database at /etc/ati/amdpcsdb for driver configuration. If you have a customized amdpcsdb, or a binary installation from your favorite package manager is screwing up your X when using the fglrx driver, try reverting back to the default ATI settings.