ralpress.org

Absolutely hilarious. Cal Henderson (head of engineering at flickr.com and author of O’Reilly’s “Building Scalable Web Sites”) gave a talk at DjangoCon 2008, titled, provocatively enough, “Why I hate Django”. I saw the slides shortly after the talk and even without the accompanying narrative I was laughing out loud. I made a mental note to check YouTube at regular intervals in order to watch for a video of the talk, and sure enough here it is: Why I hate Django

Cal is the chief architect for a site that is built primarily using PHP and that during peak hours serves up to 35,000 photos per second, really, over 2 million per minute! It’s probably reasonable to conclude that he knows a thing or two about scalability. Prior to his talk Cal had apparently been “building a blog in Django” (you’ll understand the quote marks when you watch the video and the talk is based upon his experiences doing that, as well as his involvement with Django-powered Pownce.

It’s good natured stuff, and very funny.

Why I hate Django.

EDIT: I meant to add that I think it’s very cool the Django folks got Cal to do this talk. It seems to be a sign that they don’t take themselves or their framework *too* seriously, which can only be a good thing, IMO.  On a more serious note, the talk also serves as a pretty good introduction to advanced web database issues.

Hilarious:

Turning the tables on unsolicited commercial callers, in style.

Seen on Butterflies and Wheels: hilarious clbuttic shenanigans on the American Family Association web site:

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/127271.html

Seen on reddit.com:

Irish scarecrow

A great collection of quotations for people who like their reality just as it is. If, like me, you weren’t “imprinted” while young, or like others, you were imprinted, but managed to break free, you’ll enjoy these.

Top 50 quotes for non-theists

“A New Zealand man who claimed he was raped by a wombat and that the experience left him speaking with an Australian accent has been found guilty of wasting police time.”

The full, lurid story.