Peterbe.com

This site now has a RSS feed (version 0.91).

The URL is https://www.peterbe.com/rss.xml

An RSS feed is a XMLish summary of what is being updated on a website. It's standardised so it should be possible to view it from any program or web application.

My recommendation for an RSS feed viewer is Feedreader which is free and works really well. Download it, install it and enter https://www.peterbe.com/rss.xml as a new feed.

There is a free web book with the title Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python

The book is not yet in print but when it is I'll buy it.

I found this article on BBC News very interesting. Just a quick summary of the "rogue states" as defined by G.W Bush and his buddies.

I didn't know that:
"Most analysts no longer consider Libya to be a threat."

And this is funny:
US Undersecretary of State John Bolton has described the ruler, Kim Jong-il, as "a dictator".

In return, North Korea called him "human scum".

Web Design Practices summarises what the "standard" conventions are on web design.

I find that my site almost always is like the most common way of doing web design.

All my web design principles I have learnt from the book Don't make me think by Steve Krug And to avoid thinking you follow the standards.

Disclaimer: These tests are not very scientific so values as they stand are irrelevant.

What is interesting is the difference between the two tests.

Basically what I did was that I sucked the whole www.peterbe.com site (22 files, 111KB) down and served it via Apache on the same machine as the Zope server.

Then I did a benchmark test using using ab with 10 users at 10 concurrent requests. The result is that Apache served the files about 30% faster than Zope.

Complete results

BUT! Bare in mind that the files that Apache served up are static whereas the files Zope served up are dynamic. The content of the Zope request depends on extracting data from a database, sorting, filtering and other various conditional statements. Apache can do none of that unless you use some sort of scripting like PHP, mod_python or mod_perl.

Pages served from Zope are also checked through a comprehensive security mechanism that Apache did not in this case. Every single item (22 of them), when extracted, were with security precautions on the Zope test.

The conclusion from this is: Zope is surprisingly fast considering all the work it needs to do compared to static Apache.

I have now trained with Dave at FWC City & Islington for two years.

It's been great so far and I plan to stay on and train even harder.

To celebrate I accept donations such as a car, a woman or a video

I just saw One upon a time in Mexico and it think it was pretty shit.

Antonio Banderas with his bloody guitar the whole time and like many others almost invinsible to bullets.

Shooting and blood the whole time. If you really want to see a film with lots of guns and violence but good, you should go and see City of God instead.

And also, if you're a fan of Salma Hayek (like me) you will be disappointed because she's in the film only for a few minutes.

"Perhaps even more worrying - when confronted with the same map, only 89% of Americans could find their own country!"

Even Sweden youths did poorly:
"Not a single country managed the 42 points need for an A grade, even top scoring Sweden only got an average of 40 questions right."

"The WISP study for the 1990s has just been published, with Sweden and Denmark sharing first place, just ahead of Norway - a sweeping victory for the Scandinavian way of life, with Nordic neighbor Finland and the central European nations following after."
"measures the quality of life in 163 nations using 40 different social indicators"

Apparently Swedes and Danes are the most content people on earth about their quality of life.

It's just a short article this and notes that USA ends up on 27th place and "Afghanistan and nine African nations came bottom of the study."

I can't find the homepage for this research other than the news article.