Very short story… Working on building a website that is designed to assist students with studying for classes or subjects. Hence the idea for ZapQuiz.
Interested in people testing and playing with things, create things, test things, comment and give feedback. I know it needs work, but I’m interested in understanding where I should focus rather than all over the map.
Check it out : http://zapquiz.com
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.
Tags: django · frameworks · zend
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.
After being hit and watching other people getting hit on my local ski hill, I’m working on a few theories. Fundamentally I think there are a few classes of skier (snowboarder) v.s. skier (snowboarder) collisions. This is just your day-to-day type, since of these end up with bruises not sled off the hill injuries.
Lack of Awareness — This really could be broken down into either two or three groups, based primarily on age (approximate).
I classify many accidents as lack of awareness, snowboarder rides over your skis. Somebody fails to look uphill before a merge, etc. Hence the question becomes how do people learn to pay attention to their surroundings, since at the heart this would reduce the accidents. Here’s some examples of things I’ve experienced:
In the case of Adult skiers not paying attention, is due to a few factors:
I’ll group teens and youth into two groups for the purposes of description. One of the primary ways that adults are “taught” to pay attention to their surroudings via other inputs — peripheral vision, hearing, rules — is via driving. An experienced adult driver, while never perfect, most likely has a lot of experience with motion based tracking when their driving. Youth on the other hand lack this experience.
My original theory on how youth learn awarness was via similar ideals to driving, things like scooters or bicycle riding. Since, riding a bicycle involves both speed and awareness of your surrounding while in motion. Alas, via a bunch of polling on charilifts it turned out there was a low coroloation between “non-accident skiers” and bicycling. However, in doing these surveys the current contenter is:
Participation in team sports may reduce the likelyhood of awareness accidents for youth skiers. Which makes some analytical sense when you start thinking about it. Specifically if you’re playing team sport (soccer, basketball, etc.) in which you have to have field awareness combined with rapid decission making while in motion. You clearly will be developing your peripheral vision awareness, and your spacial awareness.
There of course is exceptions to every rule, we know the drivers we don’t like to drive in the car with… But, the other side is that my $0.02 thory makes me want to encourange team sports not only to reduce skiing accidents, but also potentiallly the long term improvement in traffic accident reduction.
I’ve got a very simple problem… I’m trying to get a WAR file running under tomcat that references an external JAR file.
I thought it would be as simple as having a manifest file with a class-path. That doesn’t work, clearly I either need to set a web.xml context-param or enable tomcat to look at the manifest for the class path.
Help???
