Warren Buffet: Why I'm not buying the U.S. dollar

..as head of Berkshire Hathaway, I am in charge of investing its money in ways that make sense. And my reason for finally putting my money where my mouth has been so long is that our trade deficit has greatly worsened, to the point that our country's "net worth," so to speak, is now being transferred abroad at an alarming rate.

A perpetuation of this transfer will lead to major trouble. To understand why, take a wildly fanciful trip with me to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset on these islands, and their communities are primitive, needing only food and producing only food. Working eight hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that's how things go along. On each island everybody works the prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society is self-sufficient.

Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they start to work 16 hours a day.

Canadians: A Euphemism

"Canadian" the new black? Perhaps – that is if you're a racist speaking in code.

Recent revelations that the term "Canadian" is being used to replace racist names for black people have got a Texas assistant district attorney into trouble and have left others wondering what exactly it means to be labelled a Canadian in the American south.

Prank: Wrong Phone Number Generator

Feel like driving someone insane in a malicious way? Come on, everybody knows at least one person they'd like to drive bonkers. This Wrong Number Generator is a brilliantly simple way to do just that.

How's it work? Well, you plug your victim's phone into one end and run the other end into the wall jack and leave it to do its business. It'll then intercept any numbers that they dial and replace them with wrong numbers. This will be annoying. But the real coup? It'll let the right numbers through 25% of the time, making them think that the problem is with their fat, inaccurate fingers, not with the phone itself.

recumbent bike: off road

UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits

Ten good habits to adopt are:

1. Make directory trees in a single swipe.
2. Change the path; do not move the archive.
3. Combine your commands with control operators.
4. Quote variables with caution.
5. Use escape sequences to manage long input.
6. Group your commands together in a list.
7. Use xargs outside of find.
8. Know when grep should do the counting -- and when it should step aside.
9. Match certain fields in output, not just lines.
10. Stop piping cats.

Eloquent Javascript

Besides explaining JavaScript, this book tries to be an introduction to the basic principles of programming. Programming, it turns out, is hard. The fundamental rules are, most of the time, simple and clear. But programs, while built on top of these basic rules, tend to become complex enough to introduce their own rules, their own complexity.

Offline Development With Django

Local developing means also that you don’t have access to the production database. It’s often necessary to have some data in the database before you can do any development at all. Django provides you a way for setting basic initial data automatically after syncdb-command, and it also helps you move all your data across different databases via fixtures.

A fixture is a collection of data that Django knows how to import into a database. You can export your whole production (Django-)database (or just one app) to a fixture with dumpdata-command. You can then move this fixture to your local machine and import it with loaddata. This way you can easily make copies of your production database and use them in your local development.

Pexpect: automate interactive apps

Pexpect can be used for automating interactive applications such as ssh, ftp, passwd, telnet, etc. It can be used to a automate setup scripts for duplicating software package installations on different servers. It can be used for automated software testing.

Datasets Available on the Web

Most of these datasets are related to machine learning, but there are a lot of government, finance, and search datasets as well. I probably won’t get around to organizing and posting them to the wiki myself, but theinfo community should be able to figure out what to do with them. The concept reminds me a lot of Jon Udell’s post on public data.

Modern Marriage: Likes Attract

Thus marriage isn’t dead, it is, again, transforming. Hedonic marriage is different from productive marriage. In a world of specialization, the old adage was that “opposites attract,” and it made sense for husband and wife to have different interests in different spheres of life. Today, it is more important that we share similar values, enjoy similar activities, and find each other intellectually stimulating. Hedonic marriage leads people to be more likely to marry someone of their similar age, educational background, and even occupation.

Code Base Productivity

I have noticed a trend in my own productivity: my productivity varies greatly with the code base I'm working on. This variance may be greater than that between individual programmers. While many are rightly concerned with individual and team productivity, no ever talks about code base productivity. If we do, where does it lead us?

go PHP 5: upgrade campaign

PHP developers cannot leverage PHP 5's full potential without dropping support for PHP 4, but PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts and users would then be forced to switch to a different application. Web hosts cannot upgrade their servers to PHP 5 without making it impossible for their users to run PHP 4-targeted web apps, and have no incentive to go to the effort of testing and deploying PHP 5 while most web apps are still compatible with PHP 4 and the PHP development team still provides maintenance support for PHP 4. The PHP development team, of course, can't drop maintenance support for PHP 4 while most web hosts still run PHP 4.

DabbleDB Commons

WHAT IS THE COMMONS? It’s a way to build free Dabble databases under a Creative Commons license. Functionally, it’s the same as our paid service except that data you keep in a free application is publicly accessible.

• Anyone can see your data and the structure of your application.
• Data will be indexed by search engines like Google.
• If you create a really useful or innovative application, it might be featured on the site.