+1 on RedHat. We're on RHEL6, still updating to the "latest" as 2.6.6 through yum. (No, RedHat was NOT my choice.)

We've jumped through hoops to get up to 2.7.5 to support SQLAlchemy, Django and Flask fully. Bless you, virtualenv.

Except, they DID choose to use WebSphere. CGI Federal should pay us back our tax dollars for making the choice to use IBM WebSphere... when literally no one else (statistically relevantly) does. The stats are staggeringly in favor of choosing something like Apache, nginx, or even IIS, especially when you consider the scaling concerns already experienced by web sites with similar privacy concerns and traffic loads / spikes. I'm not saying Open Source would solve everything, but there are certainly more experts in tuning and scaling Apache than there are for WebSphere by many orders of magnitude.

Yeah, although the series was well on its way before then. Here's the video clip, for anyone who hasn't seen it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIakZtDmMgo

Dear Publisher:

Please be advised that your novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird", violates the Boy Scouts of America's legal rights. We not going to say which ones, but if you don't change the name of the novel's protagonist, it'll mean a long and drawn out expensive legal battle. And you don't want to mess with us, because AMERICA, obviously.

Warm regards,

A Homophobic, Dated, Desperate Organization

But does she do the Vulcan mind-meld on the first date?

+1 to Vagrant for local development. If there are any problems, you can easily just blow away the VM and start again. Vagrant scripts all of this with the same Chef repos you use for production. I modified and updated a Django Vagrant run-through I found on the net. It is free to the public on Github:

https://github.com/FlipperPA/djangovagrant

Naturally, this includes Python as well. I hope this helps gets you started, and thanks for going above and beyond with your students!

SQL Server on Amazon Web Services starts at $0.629 per hour, for about $15.10 per day. That comes out to be about $5,500.00 per year.

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

Slightly OT, but California is doing a great thing. I used to be IT Director for a company which did environmental testing of gas stations for compliance with federal, state, and local regulations. All states (some better than others) follow California's environmental need. CARB, the California Air Resources Board, has done more to ensure gas stations (at least) don't do nasty things like spill gasoline into the water table any more, and have good vapor recovery systems in place than any other entity I can think of. They're sort of the opposite of the schill filled and lobbyist group, the PEI. If you want to see a news story about a virtual environment I designed showing how VR systems work for training our new employees (yes, in Second Life, I know ), I've got it up here: http://www.peregrinesalon.com/blog/2007/02/wfmz-feature-crompcos-innovation-in-virtual-worlds/

Cheers.

I'm hardly a fan, but geez, why don't you just start legislating taste? I sense a bit of jealousy in your egotistical, self-serving post as well.

...that everything is causing autism in children. Shit, I'm probably autistic. And please, that microwave does NOT belong there.

There's a campaign that was start to Knight Alan Turing, which would be an appropriate honor bestowed by the government which treated him so horrifically. More information is available here:

http://news.pinkpaper.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=1704 ...or just Google it. If it were to happen a year from today, that would be wonderfully appropriate, though I doubt Turing would care too much about a number stuck in base 10.

Can't wait for the due process... I've been wondering how the "I Did It For the Lulz!" defense would hold up in a court of law for years!

...of these freeloaders coming to our shores from the ocean who don't even speak English! They don't pay any taxes either!

SciFi/SyFy has being going downhill since Bonnie Hammer took over over CEO in 2001. They never gave a Babylon 5 series a real chance, interfering with the one pilot they did attempt. Add on to that the whole fiasco of promising two seasons to Farscape before pulling a bait and switch, followed up by bringing in Shannon Frickin' Doherty to do that godawful Scare Tactics, and the writing has been on the wall for some time.

Now she's on to killing NBC Universal. How people like this keep getting more chances after abject failures is beyond me.

Time to kill it, not fund it.