japherwocky's posterous

Weekend projects, a rocket stove some gravity physics and some frustum culling / collision detection

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Michael Timm" <timmmr2@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2010 7:10 PM
Subject: set list?
To: "Chris Story" <stereostory@gmail.com>, "Marc Churchill" <marcchurchill170@comcast.net>, "Mikey Gardner" <mikeyg@liverybrew.com>, "Japhy Bartlett" <japhy@pearachute.com>

We should do all the new songs plus the newer songs.  Plus some of the older ones we did not do before.  here is a start...

Everlong
Kaw-liga
Oh Sweet Nothin>
Maggies Farm
Ball and Biscuit
Where is my Mind
Needle and the Spoon
All Apologies
Dead Drunk and Naked
You Cant do that
Wanted Man
Handshake Drugs
Box of Letters
Say it Aint So
Heart of Gold
Cinnimon Girl
Down by the River>breath>down by the river
Seven Nation Army
Let there Be Rock
Encore
3rd Planet

Thanks for your interest! As mentioned in the posting, we're generally
interested in candidates that do what they do really well. To that
end, our selection process involves setting up a time when you'll be
available to complete a short Python web programming task. At the
agreed upon time, I will send you an email describing the task, and
when complete, you'll reply with a link to the live web application so
I can try it, a download link to the source code, and any
instructions/dependencies I'll need in order to run it myself.

The task will be to write a simple web app in Django, and should take
1-3 hours to complete. There is no set deadline, but keep in mind that
speed is one of many evaluative factors. I'll also be looking at
usability, judgement calls you had to make, and especially code
clarity and documentation. You're free to do any research required and
ask any questions you may have for clarification.

I'll be giving similar tasks to several other applicants and comparing
the quality of the results across all of them, so how you do here is
your opportunity to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack.

If this process sounds OK and you'd like to continue, please reply
with a few times in the coming days that you'll be available to
complete the task. Thanks again, and look forward to hearing from you!
"""

django:360min::tornado:20

I've been teaching some beginners how to build web apps, using python
and tornado.

One of the only compelling reasons to use PHP for this is that it's
easy for beginners to wrap their head around embedding PHP inside the
HTML file with the tags. I wanted to be able to do this
with tornado, so I've hacked a _Codeblock class into template.py

When the parser finds a {{ }} block, it looks for a newline inside.
Instead of throwing an error, it takes the code inside, execs it, and
renders stdout. Eg,

template = """  
{{ foo }}  
{{  
bar = 'bar'  
if foo:      
    print bar + foo  
}}  
""" 
t = Loader.loadstring( 'footemplate', template)  
print t.generate( foo='foo')

renders:

"""
foo
barfoo
"""

For production use, it's marginally useful since you'd mostly want to
be keeping your python in your Handlers. But it doesn't really add
overhead, and it's nice for beginners.

Code is at:

https://github.com/japherwocky/tornado/blob/master/tornado/template.py

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Y Combinator
Date: Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 10:08 PM
Subject: Y Combinator W2011 application
To: japhy@pearachute.com

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally.  The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes.  It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund.  That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain
that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.
If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us
about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator team

==============================================