How Not to Choose a Web Framework (And Django Sucks!)
A journalism professor friend of mine wanted to start teaching her students to program using a web framework, and quickly narrowed her options to the two obvious choices: Rails and Django. Faced with two fairly similar, can't-go-wrong options, she turned to her technical friends, and asked a simple question: Which should she choose?
Anyone who's spent any time at all in the company of nerds (present company included) knows what happened. For those who have not, let's put it this way: she might have gotten less vitriolic, less doctrinaire, less jingoistic responses had she asked about Middle East peace or global warming.
Snow Leopard Ugrade Nightmare
I dumped my last Windows box well over two years ago, which means the pain and suffering of OS upgrades were, unfortunately, a distant memory when I pulled Snow Leopard out of its plastic sheath last Friday. If I had flashed back to those horrible days of endless backups, clean reinstalls and upgrade utilities that did nothing like what they were supposed to, maybe I would have thought twice.
But every upgrade of OSX to this point had been painless, or nearly so. Stuff broke, certainly. But fixes were easy. And I thought that's where things were headed when I tweeted the following Friday night:
Went to Snow Leopard, and so far so good. New VPN support is killer (goodbye flaky Cisco client). Also, +30 GB of space. Nice work Apple.
What I didn't know at the time was how badly my dev environment was hosed. MySQL was working, but wouldn't talk to Ruby. My Ruby gems were completely messed up. Rails was throwing completely bizarre errors, and lots of things that should have gotten upgraded seemingly didn't.
