Niall's Weblog

DealExtreme are selling these “LED Power gyro wrist ball things for just under USD $8. They seem to be cheap clones of NSD Powerballs. The NSD Powerballs are much more expensive, though. Apparently, these products can provide some RSI and wrist-strength benefits. One of my friends got one of the cheap DealExtreme versions, and says [...]

I’m a big fan of Baudelaire’s poetry. I am particularly fond of his interest in conveying beauty through typically repulsive imagery – e.g. Une Charogne which features vivid description of a decomposing human body. While I enjoy reading the original French, I’ve recently discovered a fantastic online resource – http://fleursdumal.org/. This site not only includes [...]

Andronico’s near my place have had a great deal on pork loin chops for the past few days, you can pick up a couple of pork chops for around $3. Pork chops are super easy to cook and are very tasty. When I cook red meat, I make a special effort to mix in some [...]

I run OpenBSD on all my machines. I think its a great operating system with excellent range of features and all the components fit together nicely. One of my favourite things about OpenBSD is the highly aggressive release schedule. While a stable release is cut every 6 months, Theo is producing complete, full builds of [...]

This article is a followup to my previous post, Facebook apps in Python and Pylons part 1. I’m going to talk a little more about what is interesting about Facebook apps and how they work in practice. At the end, I provide a little code sample and a convenience decorator to save you some hassle. [...]