I wrote a stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, called Niko­la a while ago, and it's start­ing to get some adop­tion and con­tri­bu­tion­s.

I think it's a fair­ly nice piece of code, to be hon­est, and it pret­ty much does ev­ery­thing I need. On the oth­er hand, it's fun to code with.

So, if you are us­ing an­oth­er stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, or are re­search­ing in­to it, or just have opin­ions about it... what's miss­ing? What should it have that it does­n't have now?

No fea­ture too smal­l, no idea too crazy, please share! I prom­ise to make a good ef­fort to im­ple­ment any that seem like a good idea :-)

In­spired by Djan­go's in­ter­ac­tive con­sole, I added one to Niko­la, my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor so that if you want to play with its in­ter­nal­s, you can do it eas­i­ly. Here's an ex­am­ple ses­sion:

$ nikola init pepe
A new site with some sample data has been created at pepe.
See README.txt in that folder for more information.
$ cd pepe
$ nikola console
Scanning posts
.
.
done!
You can now access your configuration as conf and your site engine as SITE
>>> [p.title('en') for p in SITE.timeline]
[u'Listings Demo', u'Nikola: it generates static', u'Welcome to Nikola',
u'A reStructuredText Primer', u'A reStructuredText Reference', u'Sample
Nikola Config File', u'The Nikola Handbook', u'Theming Nikola']

Have fun!

Ay­er es­ta­ba pen­san­do ac­er­ca del saqueo aniver­sario del otro día. No me sor­prende que haya saque­os a su­per­me­r­ca­dos el 20/21 de di­ciem­bre porque bueno, habrá quien quiera con­mem­o­rar, or­ga­ni­za un saqueo con los amigos, esas cosas.

Pero hay al­gu­nas cosas que no en­tien­do.

La idea de "el gobierno no hace nada"

Has­ta donde sé, ro­bar un su­per­me­r­ca­do no es un deli­to fed­er­al. Es una cosa que la mane­ja la policía de la provin­ci­a. En­ton­ces, el que no hi­zo na­da mien­tras saque­a­ban en Vil­la Gob­er­nador Gálvez fue el go­b­ier­no de San­ta Fe ¿no?

O sea, un go­b­ier­no opos­i­tor al go­b­ier­no na­cional es el que le da las ór­denes a los policías que mira­ban mien­tras se rob­a­ban las cosas. ¿O aca­so es­per­an que haya gen­darmes cer­ca de ca­da su­per­me­r­ca­do del país y vayan cor­rien­do a reprim­ir? ¿Si eso pasara, no sería un aten­ta­do con­tra la au­tonomía de las provin­ci­as?

La idea de que "lo organizó el gobierno"

Es­cuché a var­ios de­cir es­o. Si el go­b­ier­no na­cional lo hi­zo, son pelo­tu­dos. No creo que lo hayan he­cho. Real­mente, es pare­cerse a De la Ru­a, y si hay al­go que este go­b­ier­no no quiere es es­o, ¿no?

La idea de "no tienen hambre, se robaron un LCD"

FE­LIC­ITA­CIONES SEÑOR CHOR­RO. Una de mis mo­les­tias con­stantes con el chor­ro prome­dio es la fal­ta de am­bi­ción. SI vas a ro­bar, la pe­na es la mis­ma no im­por­ta lo que robes, mas al­lá de cier­to pun­to. Ro­bar $1000 o $2000000 es más o menos lo mis­mo.

Si tenés ham­bre, ro­bate 1 (u­na) ban­de­ja de chur­ras­cos y un LCD. El chur­ras­co es para mor­far es­ta noche, el LCD lo vendés y comés un mes (aunque habría que analizar el pre­cio de reven­ta de un LCD com­para­do con, dig­amos, 25 ki­los de lo­mo).

Pre­tender que haya una "no­bleza" en el tipo que es­tá chore­an­do un su­per es cosa de lo­cos. Co­mo decía Olme­do, si lo va­mos a hac­er, va­mos a hac­er­lo bi­en. Si vas a chore­ar, choreá bi­en, choreá con ganas, y sé un ex­ce­lente chor­ro.

En fin, que co­mo casi siem­pre, las cosas que la gente opina no me cier­ran mu­cho.

I am on va­ca­tion, by the sea. So, I don't have my usu­al in­ter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty. I de­cid­ed to buy a 3G mo­dem and de­cid­ed pure­ly based on price, end­ing up with a ZTE mo­dem pro­vid­ed by Claro.

On Win­dows, it works well enough:

1. Plug it in

2. Get the au­­tostart win­­dow

3. Start the in­­stal­l­er

4. Click Next a few times

5. Re­­boot

6. Start the client to con­nect

7. Click on the "world" icon

8. Wait a lit­­tle

9. In­­ter­net!

I tried it on win­dows first be­cause I as­sumed it would work on my wife's com­put­er, and I could do an ad-hoc wifi net­work so I could con­nect mine. Well, no.

So I tried it on Ubun­tu. It does work too:

1. Plug it in

2. Say I am in Ar­­gen­ti­­na

3. Say it's a Claro 3G ser­vice

4. Go to Net­­work In­­di­­ca­­tor

5. Click on "Claro 3G"

6. Wait a lit­­tle

7. In­­ter­net!

And yes, I can do an ad-hoc con­nec­tion and pro­vide ser­vice to ev­ery­one else. Plus I don't have an un­clos­able win­dow lay­ing around all the time.

I al­ways am amazed by peo­ple sug­gest­ing that walk­ing in the rain keeps you dry­er than run­ning. Just saw an an­swer to this. Check it out, it's nice:

I have al­so seen it de­bunked ex­per­i­men­tal­ly, by Myth­Buster­s. But let's try a dif­fer­ent ap­proach: in­tu­itive math. In­tu­itive math is tricky be­cause it usu­al­ly is wrong, but hey, it's fun.

Ap­par­ent­ly, we all agree that how wet you get cor­re­lates to your speed. Oth­er­wise, the ques­tion is point­less be­cause the an­swer is "walk or run, but take an um­brel­la", while true, is cheat­ing, right?

So, for those slow­er-is-­bet­ter pro­po­nents: go and walk very, very, very slow­ly. You may no­tice that you end com­plete­ly soaked be­fore you fin­ish walk­ing. If you did­n't, you are still walk­ing too fast.

On the oth­er hand, if you were to go at 1000000 km/h we all agree you would on­ly get some drops in your frontside, right? Which would not soak you. Right? And most im­por­tant­ly, is con­stant re­gard­less of your speed, be­cause it's just the av­er­age amount of wa­ter con­tained in a man-shaped prism from point A to point B, and you get that wa­ter in your front if you go slow any­way.

As­sum­ing the speed/­soak­i­ness curve is rough­ly monotonous, it's clear that the max­i­mum soak­i­ness is when you go slow­est.

If it's not monotonous, then the ques­tion is rough­ly unan­swer­able, since it would in­volve there is an op­ti­mal speed and it's worse to go ei­ther faster or slow­er than that, which means the an­swer is some­thing like "jog" which is not what you wan­t.

So, go fast, go dry.