The Economy of VGMix published on Jun 28, 2007

A recent commentary from Kevin Cheng regarding a dating site got me thinking about economics in general, and how the in-site economy of VGMix might play out. It’s interesting to consider economics in a non-financial sense, and doing so has made me very glad for some of the things we’re doing with VGMix.

Essentially, the purpose of an economy in these environments is to encourage certain types of user behavior, while discouraging others. This same approach is used …

Signed Cookies published on Jun 16, 2007

Some time ago, I created a Signed Cookies middleware for Django, allowing views to transparently sign and validate cookies. With recent developments on django-developers, it was best to create a separate project for it, rather than maintain it as a ticket.

With that in mind, I created a Google Code project for this application. For those who haven’t been following its progress, I’ll list some of its features:

• A middleware to do everything automatically
  • Signs outgoing cookies
  • Validates …

What’s up with that name? published on Jun 1, 2007

Over the years, I’ve had enough people ask me about my moniker that I thought I’d take the time to try to head off some of the questions.

I’ve been online using one service or another for well over 15 years now, with my first ID being FKJW36F. For those of you who don’t recognize the format, that’s Prodigy Classic. And for those of you who don’t know what Prodigy Classic was, go back …

Offline Django? published on Jun 1, 2007

A few weeks back, I got bored for a bit and started trying to emulate Django’s declarative model syntax in JavaScript. This was a fairly useless exercise, but one that seemed entertaining at the time. However, now that I look into some of the information on how Google Gears helps makes web applications available offline, I wonder it might actually be worth the time to make it happen.

Essentially Google Gears uses a combination of a fake server to …