So I realized the problem is that once the inspiration goes away, and it always seems to run out at some point, I end with this ‘meh’ feeling and things just aren’t as fun as they used to be. It sucks to admit this happens, and I’m writing this blog post to help myself from making lies in believing that I’m still pumped about things I’ve started earlier and convincing myself that I’m just too busy at the moment to put time into it. Instead, I need to just suck it up and get back to work on things that I’ve started until they’re finished. If I was excited enough at one point to put so much work into it, I might as well complete it and stick to it so that it at least has a shot. My goal with any project of mine is to just have people use it and appreciate it, not to make millions and cash out quick. So quitting is obviously the worst thing I can do, but also the easiest thing to do because I can always make excuses as to why it would never have worked anyway.

Some of the past projects I’ve quit include a web app directory in 2007 that I didn’t see a market for after it was all built and complete. It was also designed terribly, code wise, so changes took far too long, never try to roll your own framework if you really don’t know what you’re doing. Now I see about 5 or 6 clones that all have a decent user base and I think how that could have been me.

I also had a podcast with two friends that was running for about a month back in 2008. We had about 10 listeners by episode 5 but since we were expecting overnight success, and didn’t get it, we decided that we just didn’t have the time to continue working on it.

Finally, I created a Craigslist alert app which, after spamming twitter quite a bit, ended up with about 100 happy users. I saw some opportunity to make it even better so I started from scratch and started developing what I would describe now as Notifo + Twilio + other cool features. Neither of these services existed at the time, and I had a family friend who is an amazing web designer on board for equity to help out. I had some personal issues that set me back about 6 months and by the time I came around I saw too many competitors in the space and decided to stop development and not even give it a shot.

After thinking last night about all these things, I ended up being a little disappointed with myself, so here I am writing a blog post to make sure I never make these mistakes again. The point of me telling you? I’m hoping you keep me in check. If I say I have a project to share with you, hound me until I actually release it.

Django authentication backends are quite simple, essentially whenever you call the django.contrib.auth.authenticate() function, Django uses the authenticate method in any of the classes specified by the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS tuple set in your settings.py. If one of the classes fails to authenticate the user, Django moves on to the next one until either one successfully returns a user object or there are no other backends to attempt, in which case it results in a failed login. A very simple authentication backend which allows users to login via email rather than username is the following code in backends.py:

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from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class EmailModelBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(email=username)
            if user.check_password(password):
                return user
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

And you simply need to add to your settings.py:

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AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'path.to.this.backends.EmailModelBackend',
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
)

I generally place my backends in whatever app I create to store extra user info, but you can put it anywhere, just make sure it’s in your PYTHONPATH.

403 Forbidden

CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

Help Reason given for failure:

CSRF cookie not set.

Edit 10/29/2010 I’ve modified this post to only contain the proper way of resolving the issue. You can read about Cross Site Request Forgeries here and Django’s protection mechanisms here

To resolve the 403 issue, you want to add the csrf_token template tag within your form somewhere. This adds a hidden div with the value of the input as the csrf token:

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<form action="..." method="POST">
    {% csrf_token %}
    ...
</form>

If you’d like to not protect against CSRF with Django’s built in mechanisms, use the csrf_exempt decorator:

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from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
...
@csrf_exempt
def my_func(request):
    ...

The Failed State Index gives each country a score off 1-10 based on 12 indicators. The higher the index score, the more unstable the country is. Comparing the index score to the penetration rate of internet usage based on population yields interesting results:

One potential argument could be that the states(countries) with low index scores are most likely states with poor economies, which would obviously effect the number of people who could even afford internet in the first place.

To test if the trend of increasing stability exists when countries with similar economies are compared, a similar chart is created using countries with I-5 indicator scores below 6. This indicator of the Failed State Index gives a score based on uneven economic development along group lines.

By comparing countries only with economies promising enough to sustain the costs of the infrastructures needed for internet, we get a better picture of how the internet truly effects ones stability.

As we can see, the upward trend still exists with countries with similar economies. Efforts by groups like the OLPC Association could end up affecting more than just the children the project aspired to help in the first place. Maybe some foreign aid should go towards building the infrastructures needed to get these failing states wired so they can stop relying on their corrupt or incapable governments and help solve critical issues themselves.

Besides, our foreign aid policy has proven not to work well in the first place, so we might as well try something new. I’m aware by simply wiring a country and allowing the citizens to have access to computers and the Internet isn’t going to magically increase their stability, but it would definitely help them in so many ways. Just think how much these technologies help us everyday and where we’d be without them. To say that this couldn’t help a failing state pick itself off the ground would be absurd.

All data used for this can be seen here