In other news: you can buy a USB mag stripe reader – for cheap! I went ahead and picked on up, and it just arrived today:

Time to get Swiping!

Notes:
-For obvious reasons, I’ve substituted actual values with their meanings (CA => STATE)
-I’ve added brackets[] that were not present in the scan to group the information visually.
-I used a lowercase ‘d’ to stand for “digit” (a number)
-I used a lowercase “a” to mean “alphanumeric” (mixed letters and numbers)

First up, my CA Driver’s License.  Here’s what was embedded:

I suppose I was a bit suprised at just how much information was embedded.  I expected just the DL number.  Something interesting to note, that means that anyone who swipes your ID (say to buy alcohol or get into a nightclub) can store all of your personal information including your address, height and eye color!

I decided to round up every card I could find with a Mag Strip.  Here’s a few results:

UCD ID Card:

UCD Gym Card:

IKEA Gift Card:

Safeway Club Card:

AAA Member Card:

And some Finance Cards:

Wells Debit Card:

REI Visa:

 Conclusions:
Although I didn’t have any hotel cards around to test the original claim, the mag stipes of the cards I did have were interesting nonetheless.  Club cards tend to be well-behaved and only showed your account number amongst other digits (what I suspect are store codes and such).  Financial cards have plenty of sensitive data in the stripe, but that’s no suprise.  I’ll keep the reader around, and I’ll update this post if I come across any cards with overly-sensitive data embedded.

                          

2. Fill out Forms.

3. Call Lender, request Title.

4. Get car inspected.

5. Fail inspection because there’s a tiny sub-bulb of the headlight out, windshield wipers are worn, and the windows are tinted.

6. Fix headlight and windshield wipers, need to have MVA police officer inspect tint.

7. Lender mails notice, saying DMV has Title and will send it within 21 business days.

8. (On a Friday)Visit MVA to have officer inspect tint, find out police officers are only on duty Wed & Thurs 8:00 – 12:00.

9. (On a Thursday) Visit MVA, officer measures tint. Too dark, must remove.

10. Go to tint shop, pay to have tint removed.

11. (On a Thursday) Visit MVA, officers are now only on duty Wed 8:00-12:00.

12. (The following Wednesday) Visit MVA, officer approves lack of tint.

13. Go back to inspection place; car needs all new inspection because it’s been more than 30 days.  Bring back when you have time to wait.

14. Get car inspected.

15. Pass inspection.

16. Call up the CA DMV and ask them why it’s taking so friggin’ long to get Title.  They say it’s in process.

17. Receive Title in mail, ~50 days after requested.

18. Go to MVA with Title and inspection certificate in hand.  Wait in two lines.  Find out you need proof of Maryland insurance.  CA insurance doesn’t cut it.

19.  Call insurance, transfer isn’t simple, They need more info and signed docs.  Leave the MVA.

20. Set up new Insurance.

21. Cancel old insurance.

22. Re-fill out forms.

23. Visit MVA with Title, Inspection, Insurance and Forms.

24. GET MARYLAND LICENSE PLATES & REGISTRATION!!!

                          

$('option[value='myVal']').detach().prepend('select.mySelect');

Viola!  Way easy!

                          

Preliminaries
Hardware: All tests will be conducted on my Desktop Computer; a custom built PC with a 3.5Ghz Core2 Duo, 4GB of Ram, and a 10,000 RPM hard drive.  Not identical, but similar to many server setups on the market.

Software: I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 with Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3, and MySQL 5.1.  Once again, apart from using a Desktop OS, this is almost identical to your usual LAMP server software. For benchmarking, I will be using Siege 2.68.

Step 1: Fresh Installs
I downloaded and installed the latest version of Concrete5 (5.4.1.1) and WordPress (3.03)  Here are the screenshots of the home pages out of the box:

WordPress Fresh Install

Concrete5 Fresh Install

Step 2: Balancing
Okay, First thing, to be fair we need to balance the page weights.  Siege will not load all the linked resources (like CSS and Javscript), I actually only care about the html page weights.  Out of the box Concrete is 1771 bytes and WordPress is 2015 bytes.  Pretty close.  After removing several widgets from the WordPress sidebar (Those extra queries weren’t fair anyway) and adding the right amount of Lorem Ipsum, the WordPress page is now exactly 1771 bytes as well.  Perfect.

Step 3: Attack!
To stress test my desktop server I am using the following siege command:

 siege -c 50 -r 40 http://localhost/[siteurl]

This will attempt to make 50 concurrent requests to the website, and will repeat each request 40 times.  This is a total of 2000 requests to each site.

Step 4: Results
Here is the raw data from the tests:

And the corresponding screenshots:

Results for WordPress

Results for Concrete5

Step 5: Conclusions
As we can see from the data Concrete5 outperformed WordPress by 20-30% in every measure. This is a significant amount.  What does this tell us?  For small sites with little content, Concrete5 will scale to additional concurrent users better than WordPress. What does this not tell us?  For one thing, the sites may not scale to additional content equally well.  This test also ignored all the static content which will download from either CMS with equal speed.  Finally, WordPress also has some excellent caching plugins that may have closed the gap.

Other Considerations
Am I suggesting you ditch WordPress and port your sites to Concrete?  Not at all. WordPress has many good things going for it; it is the #1 blogging tool and is a finely tuned engine that powers millions of websites.  What I CAN say for sure, is that if you can outperform that, then you’re doing something right.  Hats off to the team at Concrete.

——————————————————-

Update (1 Day Later)
Okay, After posting this, I had a lot of people point out to me that this is not a fair fight.  Concrete has caching enabled by default, and WordPress does not.   After installing wp-super-cache, the elapsed time for 2000 requests from WordPress fell from 123 seconds to 27 seconds.  Wow, crazy plugin.  Either way, my original results stand when you consider out of the box performance.  Wp-super-cache is neither bundled with WordPress nor do it’s version numbers suggest it is stable.  It’s technical options are overwhelming to all but advanced users.  Kudos still go to Concrete5 for integrating a simple, stable caching system into the framework.

                          

This book reads like a how-to for all aspects of software development.  It begins with preliminary things like gathering specifications, defining prerequisites, and planning.  It moves through very high-level decisions such as choice of language for a project, and how much project infrastructure to use (build tools, version control, automated testing, etc).  It covers estimation, and different techniques for planning the development and integration of large projects.

The author then moves through high level decisions within your code.  Things like class structure, interfaces, and guidelines for creating routines are covered.  He weighs pros and cons of breaking routines into sub-routines, choosing parameters to pass effectively, and vital concepts such as abstraction and encapsulation.  There is a very informative chapter on defensive programming that covers topics such as error-handling, assertions, exceptions, and debugging.

The bulk of the book is on the nitty-gritty of writing code.  Variables are covered in depth. He thoroughly covers topics such as variable scope, initialization, placement, and persistence.  He devotes an entire chapter to variable names.  Following variables is an excellent discussion of data types.  Moving right along, conditionals, loops, and other control structures are covered in great detail.

Next McConnell takes the reader through various other aspects of programming, including collaboration, testing, debugging, refactoring, and code tuning.  Finally, the book addresses topics such as the effect of project size on construction, using programming tools effectively, code documentation, and the considerations of programmer personalities themselves.

What stuck out most to me about this book (and what makes it stand out from the crowd) is the author’s effective merging of both professional experience and academic knowledge.  For things like variable names: he won’t just tell you a variable name should be between 7 and 20 letters, he’ll cite a study showing that code using variables of that length were shown to have fewer bugs.  The book is filled with pieces of “hard data” that are usually a result of a formal study that confirms what he has learned through experience.  McConnell’s bibliography is extensive, and his command of sources is impressive.

Also, what impressed me about this book is how the small topics reinforce larger themes.  One of the primary tenets of good software construction (and one that is thoroughly covered here)  is managing complexity.  Concepts such as good class structure, good routine names, and good commenting are not effective for their own sake.  They are effective because they make code less complex and easier to understand.  Programs that are broken down into smaller, less complex pieces are programs that are easier to develop, debug, and maintain.

All in all, I would strongly recommend this book to any software developer.  Even if you don’t feel like reading through a 2″ thick book with thin pages and no pictures, you can jump to any particular topic of interest and absorb what tidbit you need.  The book is also structured well enough to serve as a reference.  It will likely serve as such for me until a year or two from now when I plan on re-reading it.  It’s that good.

                          

1. There are currently (that I could find) no smart flashcard sites.  When I use flashcards I don’t just look at the front and back from start to finish.  This is how all existing sites online work.  I want to remove cards I know as I go, swap the front & back (starting with definitions), shuffle them, and much more.  This site will do all that.

2. There are no multi-platform flashcard sites.  I want to create the cards on my desktop computer, and be able to browse them later on my smartphone.  This site will have an iPhone and Android compatible web version, making it truly convienient.

3. I (personally) like to use flashcards to learn things, and I need a better system to do it.

4. I need a good project to get some jQtouch mobile code under my belt.

There is currently a beta version of the site available, it’s basically more of a proof-of-concept at this stage.  Many features are not yet implemented, it’s just the basics. Feel free to check it out, and leave some feedback as a comment. I’ve started the mobile version as well, but it’s currently buggy and not worth visiting.

Online Flashcards

Cheers
-Peter

                          

I love the way the book progresses.  It starts with the most basic of electrical circuits.  Simple light bulb and battery type stuff.  It spends a few chapters building your circuit board chops and BAM!  - he shows you how you can wire a circuit to add binary numbers.  Wow, you can now build a very simple computer.  He continues to add to what you already know piece by piece.   Components are added to the circuit board so that it can now perform subtraction, multiplication, and division.  You learn how a circuit can remember data, the basis of memory.  You learn the issues surrounding floating point math and how they are resolved.  He explains machine code, and how it can be simplified by assembly language, and in turn, high-level languages.

Mixed in with the technical chapters, he adds sections on lighter topics such as Morse code, Braile, alternate (non-base 10) number systems, and more.  He covers how letters can be stored as a series of bits, and why there are 8 bits to a byte.

This book changed the way I think about computers.  I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand them better.  Although it assumes no prior knowledge, this book is not for the faint of heart; some of the chapters require tenacity to stay focused and comprehend.  However, I guarantee it will be well worth it.

                          

I’ve heard it pointed out that all of the information in this book is already online, on the jQuery website.  But that’s missing the point.  The book presents the information at a well-thought out pace and order, minimizing confusion.  For example, early on it spends a good amount of time introducing and explaining the various CSS3 selectors and getting your “Wrapped Set” of elements before it jumps into how to manipulate those elements.

The book process to move through all of the awesomeness that jQuery offers with DOM & Content manipulation, Event Handling, Animations, Plugins, and Finally AJAX.  My First attempt trying to implement AJAX was without a framework, using the WROX “Beginning AJAX” book.  I’ve decided that book isn’t worth it’s weight in lead, and that it should be pulled from the shelves.  jQuery makes it ridiculously easy to make POST and GET requests to the server, and handle the results.  I was using AJAX in production code within a week of reading this.

I don’t know what else to say.  The level of Awesome that jQuery exudes is matched only by other epic wins such as Dropbox and Vim.  If you haven’t tried jQuery, you need to. Now.

                          

Download:
bp-my-groups-widget.php (zip)

                          

Once they complete the registration, it automatically adds them to the group.  It does this by checking their email address against a list of outstanding invites.  This removes the extra hassle of needing to invite them to the group after you’ve gotten them to sign up, and them needing to approve your group invitation.

In the future, this functionality will likely be bundled with another plugin already existing: Invite Anyone. That plugin allows you to invite non-friends to your group; this one allows you to invite non-members.

Here it is:
buddypress-group-invite-email (.zip)