Unoriginally around these parts, my parents are Christian, all four of my grandparents were devout Christians, my aunts and uncles are Christian, my cousins are Christian, my... whatever else is Christian. All authentically, too. There aren’t any phonies in the bunch. Thus, my falling away from not only Christianity, but any form of religion whatsoever, bucked several generations of family tradition.

Not a day in my life passes where I don’t give serious thought, often aloud to myself in my car, to religion. I debate with myself and anyone interested what our world would be like if it ...

The following is a how-to guide for surviving terrible situations that I wrote with two roommates, Dan Lindeman and Ross Lepine, back in undergrad in 2008 after watching 30 Days of Night. Without further adieu:

In the case of an attack from any perilous creatures, including but not limited to:

vampires, zombies, werewolves, mummies, ghouls, dragons, minotaur, gremlins, gargoyles, chupacabrae, giant insects, aliens, demons, Godzilla, dinosaurs, serial killers, mutated sea bass, Sasquatch, or killer robots,

the following pact shall supersede the Ten Commandments.

1. The “When You Gotta Go, You Gotta Go” Rule:

   Once shelter has been secured, remain in said ...

Up and running with Django, MySQL, Apache2, and EC2

Before we get started, I'm assuming you've mastered or completed the first part of the tutorial, your site code itself is complete, your virtual environment is functional in local development, and you have your domain name pointed the IP of the EC2 instance we just made. If any of these assumptions are false then you are probably getting ahead of yourself.

STEP 1: Make some directories

In your EC2 box, run sudo mkdir -p /var/www/[my-site] and sudo mkdir -p /var/www/static.[my-site]. Remember, production Django is ...

Up and running with Django, MySQL, Apache2, and EC2

This is super fast and easy. Here we go:

Step 1: Literally the first step

Create and log into your http://aws.amazon.com account. Yadda yadda yadda.

Step 2: Pick your AMI

Click the giant Launch Instance button under the EC2 tab. I personally like to use Ubuntu (because its the best), so I chose Mr. 12.10 there in the middle, but you should choose whichever version of Ubuntu is highest by the time you stumble on this post.

Continue down this path of glory, choosing mostly defaults. There ...

I've had the same debate at every company for which I've ever worked, and the setup is always the same. Legacy tools are in place that technically get the job done but the annoying, but newer programmers are calling for new methods and tools. Some of the older dogs and management don't want to change, citing the overhead and cost of switching gears -- while the voices of change insist that a smoother, faster, easier, and more stable iteration process awaits at the end of that overhead. On healthy teams this leads to a lot of passionate, respectful ...

First, allow me to make a few assumptions:
1) You’re running Mac OS X 10.8.
2) You have MAMP 2.x installed (and this is preventing MySQL-python from installing).
3) You’re going to run your Django site within a virtualenv (If you weren’t planning on doing this, now’s a great time to change your mind!).
4) You’re tired of PHP and you want to use Django, but because of other projects are unable to remove MAMP and start fresh.

Why it's failing:
MySQL-python won’t compile because it needs the MySQL headers which ...