Posted in February 2009 …

Feb 23 2009
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Frameworks and sessions

I hate sessions, they’re evil.

PHP is the worst offender since it’s built into the language and you end up with effective scalability limitations and turds in your temp file system. django isn’t much better since all of the cool admin functionality is built using the contrib.auth module which depends on sessions as well. Long ago in a galaxy far away I learned that such assumptions are bad, you should handle your authentication with some cookies that are totally independent of your application. Your sessions state should be passed around via posts or other URL tricks…

Don’t get me started today on the detail that django requires a “username” to authenticate. Half tempted to write the “uber auth” module which allows for both email registration and facebook/google connect, etc. authentication.

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Feb 09 2009
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Ski Instructor Clinics

Most of the time when you go out for a training class in the business world you typically have sessions that last 50 minutes then have a 10 minute “bio” break — Maybe they do one and half hour sessions with breaks. I’m doing a Children’s Specialist certification class for the next few weeks and I realized just how “odd” ski instructors are. Which after being a ski instructor isn’t that “odd”, but funny in comparison.

The general schedule is, arrive at 8:30 “clinic” until noon, eat lunch reviewing material, go back out on the hill until 3:30 and then summarize the lesson until 4:00. Sounds simple, but what you didn’t notice is that there was no “bio” break, no smoke break, no stopping. Ok, everybody gets a trip to the bathroom during lunch and we’re all adults so if you needed a stop you could. But, of course we’re all ski instructors so we don’t. This is the same schedule we do with classes — ok, the kids get many more “snack”/”bio” breaks, the instructors .. nope…

Just and interesting comparison.