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A genealogical workshop sponsored by the Conestoga Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution will be held Saturday, June 15, at the Tama County Museum, 200 N. Broadway, Toledo.
The workshop is open to anyone interested in working on family lines and exploring their family tree. "Basics of Genealogy" and "What Else is in the Courthouse" will be presented by Jeanette Shannon and Marlys Ankrum. DAR members will be available to provide individual assistance following the presentation.
Participants should bring in copies of any useful data about your family, such as birth, marriage and death certificates, Bible records, baptismal certificates, service records, land probate, and will records, census records and obituaries. There will be some access to computers.
The workshop is free. No registration is required, but the courtesy of a phone call would be appreciated so we have an idea of how many to plan for. Call Amy at 641-751-4079 or Sara at 641-484-6182. You may also reach Jeanette Shannon at jls37das@iowatelecom. net


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It has been said that "money isn't everything, but it's way ahead of whatever's in second place." There's just nothing like a healthy stash to carry one's message to an electorate. But insisting that candidates sign on to the concept of American "exceptionalism" defies logic and is a ludicrous political rallying cry that depends on an ability to pour enormous sums of money into campaigns as if it were just the free-enterprise system at work.
What exactly does this mean anyway? Is it like so many other slogans basically meaningless, a nonsensical diversion that negates the elements of rational discourse and allows proponents of political gibberish to take center stage? Pundits on Fox News for example attack anyone who falls outside the ideological confines that animate the political right and the network's iteration of what they like to call American exceptionalism. How does one define that term in a way that makes sense? In the end it turns our to be an attempt by candidates to make something out of nothing and pummel opponents if they fail to sign on to one more preposterous talking point.
Once money begins to define a political process it effectively cripples anything resembling democratic institutions. By what template do we model our governing principles? What kind of supreme ruling entity establishes money as the primary standard by which our laws and behavior are to be fashioned? Come to find out that the most exceptional characteristic of our political process these days involves the corruption of our principles and the pretense that free markets and cold hard cash are the best of what we as a people have to offer. Anything else is seen as political heresy by some.
Into the money wars we have allowed a stressful relationship to develop between religion and government and there are those in our legislatures who would lead the country away from our constitutional directive that religion not to be used as a requisite for holding office. Instead we see prayer vigils held to prevent the passage of health-care legislation and discussions about how the use of contraception is antithetical to religious observance. Now money can turn elections and impose religious sanctions on the conduct of government - a deadly combination.
If abortion is a cause celebre for some it is nevertheless legal. Still its proponents want to impose such draconian impediments to a woman's right to choose that they have all but nullified that right in many places. In the District of Columbia because it is not actually a state the rights of its citizens are being trampled by legislators from outside the district who have silenced Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district's elected representative - not allowing her to address Congress and represent her constituents in a meaningful way. When did it become acceptable for religious zealots to rescind freedom of speech because of their particular beliefs? Religious freedom should ensure the exercise of free will not be used as a way to impose religion through governmental strictures.
In fact what may be considered the earliest expression of a separation between religion and the state a passage in the Bible has Jesus telling his followers to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and that which is God's unto God." Whatever the reason for that biblical distinction, it remains an early indication that such matters as taxation, for example, were deemed to fall into a category separate from religious observance.
Today money has begun to circumscribe our better selves while we continue to pretend that we still occupy the moral high ground - a twisted form of American exceptionalism.

subset: commoncrawl


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Hi all, I have tried researching but failed miserably on how to create a code window for an elearning site that I am
creating for a school.
My intentions is to have a frame or iframe where I type in the programming language python. Onclick the syntax
would be converted into what it would represent and shown on the opposite screen. This can be seen on w3schools and many other e learning sites
I am looking for any knowledge or pointer where I can find information to begin this process, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards Andy


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Nutrition for cross-country skiers is the same as nutrition for runners. What you need in your diet is: Carbs, Carbs, Carbs! And if you ski for more than an hour, you also need to pay attention to drinking fluids. When temperatures are below freezing, you may not feel motivated to drink, but you will still lose fluids though perspiration. Since a dehydrated skier can't ski as fast or as well as one properly hydrated, bring an energy drink with you on the trails. Also pack some snack food, such as an energy bar. If you compete in ski marathons, you need to pay very close attention to refueling, particularly since, compared to road races, there often are fewer aid stations in the woods.
Also important is nutrition before and after skiing. I devoted an entire chapter to nutrition in my best-selling book, Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide. In the following paragraphs, I have borrowed and modified material from the chapter titled: "The Distance Runner's Diet," changing running references to cross-country skiing references at appropriate points.
When you ski long distances, your energy requirements increase. In an article on endurance exercise in The Physician and Sportsmedicine, Walter R. Frontera, M.D., and Richard P. Adams, Ph.D., comment, "During sustained exercises such as (cross-country skiing), total body energy requirements increase 10 to 20 times above resting values." Skiers need to eat more of the proper foods to fuel their muscles. They also need to drink more, even in cold weather.
Linda Houtkooper, Ph.D., a registered dietitian at the University of Arizona, stated at a sports nutrition conference before the 1992 men's U.S. Olympic marathon trials in Columbus, Ohio that endurance athletes in particular need to get most of their calories from carbohydrates. No argument there. The only problem is that with 35,000 items in the supermarket, cross-country skiers sometimes need help in determining which foods are highest in carbohydrates. Unless you plan to eat spaghetti three meals a day (and even pasta contains 13 percent protein and 4 percent fat), you may need to start reading labels.
Dr. Houtkooper explained that the body requires at least 40 nutrients that are classified into six nutritional components: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, and water. "These nutrients cannot be made in the body," she said, "and so must be supplied from solid or liquid foods." Dr. Houtkooper listed six categories that form the fundamentals of a nutritionally adequate food selection plan: fruits, vegetables, grains/legumes, lean meats, low-fat milk products, and fats/sweets (in descending order of importance).
The recommendations for a healthy diet suggest 15 to 20 percent protein, 30 percent fat and 50 to 55 percent carbohydrates. (Forget fad diets that suggest a different low-carbohydrate mix.) All carbohydrates, however, aren't created alike. There are simple and complex carbohydrates. Simple carbohydrates include sugar, honey, jam, and any food (such as sweets and soft drinks) that gets most of its calories from sugar. Nutritionists recommend that these simple carbos make up only 10 percent of your diet. It's complex carbohydrates you should concentrate on--the starch in plant foods--which include fruits, vegetables, bread, pasta, and legumes. Cross-country skiers in particular benefit from fuel-efficient complex carbohydrates because of the extra calories burned each day.
Finally, let me offer eight important words taught me by Joanne Milkereit, R.D., a dietitian connected with the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. We once co-authored a cookbook, and she told me that every runner (read "skier") should clip these words to the refrigerator: "Eat a wide variety of lightly processed foods."
The better you eat, the more you will enjoy the sport of cross-country skiing.
|Getting Started
|Ski Technique
|In Full Stride
|Moving Forward
|Going Uphill
|Going downhill
|Where to Ski
|Two Techniques
|Downhill Skiing


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August 14, 2012
Crankworx Opening a Success for SRAM Athletes
SRAM athletes raged in a weekend chocked full of racing with medals to prove it during the Crankworx opening weekend in Whistler, BC, Canada. Jérôme Clementz and Curtis Keene tore through a roster of seasoned athletes during the Canadian Open Enduro under bright and sunny BC skies. With unlimited visibility atop the final stage, Clementz and Keene throttled it to the finish 5000 feet below to Whistler Village earning first and second for the day.
The Avid Dual Speed and Style followed as racers pinned it through a bermed dual slalom course combined with slopestyle jumps. Kyle Strait did not disappoint as he aired himself to a third place finish.
BC native Stevie Smith took it home in the Garbanzo Downhill Sunday evening on a dry, dusty, and incredibly fast course. Stevie sped though the course connected by a network of familiar trails to win the gold medal and local hero title.


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CTAHR Receives Hawaii Community Foundation Grant for Obesity Prevention ResearchUniversity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Arlene Abiang, (808) 956-5637
External Affairs & University Relations
HONOLULU — The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources was awarded a $48,300 grant from the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation's (HCF) Ingeborg V.F. McKee Fund to support studies on muscle-fat tissue interactions and obesity prevention.
Dr. Jinzeng Yang, principal investigator in the college's Department of Human Nutrition, Food and Animal Sciences, says there is concern for the increase in juvenile obesity in Hawaiʻi. Yang is working on molecular regulation of skeletal muscle growth and adipose tissue deposition. With the funding, Yang hopes to reveal critical molecular mechanisms of skeletal muscle and tissue interactions to provide scientific insights on obesity prevention.
"The obesity epidemic is a worldwide phenomenon, affecting adults as well as children," said Yang. "I am pleased that HCF supports research in this area."
Established in 1916, the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation is a statewide, charitable services and grant making institution endowed with contributions from many donors. HCF also serves as a resource on philanthropy, and community issues and trends.


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teams are much better at solving problems than individuals
even this slashdot forum could be thought of as a sort of team, in that many people are coming together to address a problem
ok there is no leadership and its full of trolls, shills and idiots... maybe it's not really a team... more like a committee... ok so you're probably doomed
even this slashdot forum could be thought of as a sort of team, in that many people are coming together to address a problem
Good point. That's best argument against teams I've ever seen!
teams are much better at solving problems than individuals
Please correct me if I'm wrong
Based on my experience of past few decades (from the 1970's) in the tech field, the conclusion that I get is the reverse
Teams are much better of IDENTIFYING problems
On the other hands, people are much better at solving problems when they are in the "individual mode", than when they are part of a "committee", aka "teams"
As I said, I may be wrong, and if I do, please correct me
Thank you !
Yup, his best bet is to find a good dick-head business type to partner up with and spilt 50/50 (or less if necessary). Edison died famous and rich. Much smarter men have died penniless and frustrated. Find an Edison and be his Tesla - but be smart enough to stake your claim in black and white.
One company I work for (until I found a sweeter place elsewhere) got rid of their entire dev staff except for the top level designers. An offshore dev team gives guarenteed results, low bugs per line count, and actual contracts to say that. As an added bonus, the parking garage doesn't smell like BC bud anymore.
You might give them, or another offshore place a call. They may be able to get what needs done, with little QA, for pennies on the dollar than it costs to hire people locally.
http://evergreen-ils.org/opensrf.php [evergreen-ils.org] I do not know much about it.
I was reading that as OpenSerf.php. What a great idea! All the help you need for a pittance, if anything at all. I believe serfdom is highly underrated and I'm glad to see people bringing it back!
Seems like the submitter wouldn't take kindly to an open environment lest he lose all his yet to be found new found riches so let's get the BSD types on board with UnlimitedHordes! Just be sure no one knows what anyone else is
Just use Heroku. Honestly you DO NOT need to worry about this problem. If you don't make enough money by the time you get 10,000 users to hire someone to solve this problem for you then your idea is not as great as you think it is.
OpenStack. You can start with a hosting provider like Rackspace that has as a faithful implementation of it. I know they were recently pinged for some incompatibility, but they have vowed to fix that. If you still can't stomach it, choose a different OpenStack provider. OpenStack is the key.
When you get really big, then you can work on running your own datacenter or paying someone to host the hardware for you (again, Rackspace, DreamHost, etc.). Then you can put your own implementation of OpenStack on the hardware with all the customization specific to your needs. This will naturally build on top of your years of investment with the vanilla OpenStack when you were smaller. The progression path is laid out for you.
I'm replying to this parent because Heroku is also an excellent choice for scaling where you pay as you grow. I'm just not sure if you can later fork Heroku to suit your needs with the datacenter supplier of your choice.
Maybe his application is performance critical, and that's why the others in the domain have failed. I think performance / latency was always a priority with Google when they entered an already-crowded search engine space, and that was one of the main things that drew people to their service from the established competition.
Also sounds like he already has his prototype app working on 2 boxes, and doesn't want to pull an EA by launching with that. It's non-trivial to just scale out N instances if they all h
Before going all-out to reinvent the wheel on yet-another-next-big-thing web app, why not roll out a proof-of-principle version letting someone else competent do the "heavy lifting" back-end work. Use an existing cloud/hosting service like Amazon EC2 (they'll do a lot better on the basic back-end stuff than your "I'm incompetent but building a cloud app anyway" approach). After you get your first hundred thousand users, and have investment rolling in by the gazillions, then you hire your own crack team of cloud experts to design your own custom back-end solution (or just sell out for a couple hundred million to whatever group of suckers thinks your zero-dollar-per-user profit model will start paying off once they hit the million-user mark).
Sounds right to me. Protoype quickly. Don't worry about scaling. Get it out there and see if it works. If it does, then you worry about scalability.
This. The submitter has made an assumption that there will be hundreds of thousands of users. There might not. The only sure thing is that if he spends all his time trying to build a platform capable of serving hundreds of thousands of users right out of the gate, the project will probably fail before a single user sees it.
Remember: not even Facebook, Twitter, or eBay started off with platforms capable of handling their current load. They all started with something quick and built things out as their respective user bases grew.
True enough, but you do not want to have the issue where the first sign of your success is your website failing. Early users get turned off if the service is flaky. So you can't just throw up a free website and wait to see when and where it crashes. A little planning is always good and so is a good reasonable starting architecture. That would include for example designing from the start for running with multiple backend servers behind a load balancer.
PEngs will soon be able to so the same thing they laugh at software people for when 3D printing is more mainstream. And they will use it for exactly that.
Pretty much the same thought I had.
Step 1 is to get a version that works for one user.
Step 2 is to get more than one user.
You're jumping a few steps ahead of the game.
I would likely build a front-end using a couple HAProxy load balancers hitting an Apache cluster running opencluster. Use red-black trees with mySQL and cluster a few databases across multiple locations. I would build the front-end with Python and html5, as well as using iphython for cluster controls and other fun stuff.
In my case I have a rack of HP p-class blade servers that use an Amazon EC2 Centos box to route inside/outside of EC2. When we test something out we use my cluster at home, then when we roll an app or website out we keep it at my house. If the load gets high, then we simply modify the cluster to bring up slave web servers, cache servers, etc. In our case we build the backend first and can roll out an app or web service for very little money or resources, but if we have success with something we just leave it on EC2 since it can likely pay its own bills.
Youtube was a lame app with basic mysql setup. Same with Facebook. When it took off, they hired gold people and fixed the scalability issues. Twitter didn't exactly put scalability first either.
So get real. Don't worry about "hundred of thousands of users", but about getting something decent out there for users to try. If users come, you'll get scalablity sorted out.
Twitter didn't exactly put scalability first either.
Which is strange to me, because Twitter seems like such a simple website, and yet they had massive scaleability problems. Even today, sometimes. I've wondered what is so difficult about their website that has caused them such problems?
It wasn't the website, it was the backend that had problems.
I remember they had started with Ruby on Rails which is notorious for being able to get you up fast and then failing to scale.
They then offloaded parts of the infrastructure to Scala of all things.
http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/05/how_and_why_twitter_uses_scala.html [redfin.com]
Scala is interesting and has some good paradigms built in to the language for the things Twitter needs to do. Not sure if it is really fundamentally better than Java though - after all it runs on the same JVM.
Anyway if I was starting something like this out and I already knew Java I would go with Java. There are enough large sites running it, and there are a lot of people out there who know it so I would feel some confidence that I could do what I needed to do.
Plus I like static typing.
"They then offloaded parts of the infrastructure to Scala of all things.
http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2010/05/how_and_why_twitter_uses_scala.html [redfin.com]
Scala is interesting and has some good paradigms built in to the language for the things Twitter needs to do. Not sure if it is really fundamentally better than Java though - after all it runs on the same JVM."
Disclaimer: I was a developer at Twitter until last year.
From the point of view of scalability, Scala is so much more advanced than Java it's not even funny. Ultimately, this boils down to the adoption of immutability as a core concept of the language. In particular, Scala's approach to concurrency is a decade or more ahead of what's in use in Java. Finagle, Twitter's async RPC system, simply wouldn't have been deliverable in a language that makes the use of Futures as difficult as Java does.
"Plus I like static typing."
Scala is statically typed.
Disclaimer: Another Twitter engineer here. What my apparently former colleague said, plus X.
Also: Don't be afraid to add caching layers when you see your web server or DBs start to run hot. Putting a memcached instance in place in "front of" your database layer is much easier than sharding the database layers to relieve load - eventually you'll have to do both, but you'll definitely want the memcache layer first. Same with web caches/proxies - putting varnish or squid in front will take some pressure off before you need to implement load balancers.
Java... ok, why not. I would take a look at Cassandra and Zookeeper to get the ball rolling. You'll need a good load balancer; nginx or haproxy since I don't know of a good one in Java. I assume a bunch of tomcat servers for the actual app. I suppose jboss messaging to keep with the java theme.
You can get all that on one machine for development, then for deployment you can flexibly adjust the number of db servers, queue servers, load balancers and app servers based on anticipated load. If you're extra-cool you can deloy to a cloud and dynamically allocate servers as-needed.
Been there, done that. Got the t-shirt. It's fun. Enjoy it.
Spend an extra day or two thinking about exactly how you're going to handle logging. It will be worth it.
OTOH, it could mean success in another idea. The problem is you will never know unless you try everything, and resources usually limit that. You have to decide.
You may be able to do proof of concept with a couple cheap servers. But if it succeeds, time will be extremely short to go to full scale. So you need to think scale up front, but in a way that works downscaled as well. Do everything agile so every component can work all on one server, or separated on many. Use a distinct hostname for everything
Can't do it yourself, then get partners. Set up an equity agreement.
As far as tech this is no longer new territory. Create server images for a cloud host such as AWS or Rackspace. Bring them up or down with Chef. Concerned about Database? Figure out if you really need a relational database. If not look at a high performance NoQL DB or something that is more or less always in Memory (such as Mongo).
Following your example of using Mongo, I am interested in hearing how you counter the arguments in this article [hackingdistributed.com] and why Mongo is a better fit for any task, please.
Sounds like you may want to check out hosting your stuff over a VPS, maybe with Hawkhost (http://www.hawkhost.com/vps-hosting) or some similar provider?
I guess the general idea is that you'd want to install / set up your own OpenStack (cloud) solution, and then scall VPS coverage if you need it, without having to install / clone over multiple machines. Check out Openstack and Java integration. As far as I know there's an SDK available: https://github.com/woorea/openstack-java-sdk [github.com], but I'm not sure how compl
Not to mention scalable is also relative, if you are a smash hit and need to upgrade fast you can get a 10G link to the backbone with an 8-socket Xeon E7-8870 server, a ton of memory and a RAID array of SSDs as a pretty damn good stop-gap, which I assume you can't afford now since you can't afford to hire developers. There's probably a bunch of other optimizations you can do too in order to offload parts to other machines when you get that far. This is like asking "Will the wind resistance of my afro keep me from breaking the world record on 100 meter dash?", start caring about that when you get below 10 seconds not when you're considering a running career and don't count getting a haircut as the first step of the way.
Agreed. This guy doesn't really understand scalability.
The OP needs to read how Plenty of Fish started off:
http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture [highscalability.com]
* PlentyOfFish (POF) gets 1.2 billion page views/month, and 500,000 average unique logins per day. The peak season is January, when it will grow 30 percent.
POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind.
* 30+ Million Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second).
* 1.1 billion page views and 45 million visitors a month.
* Has 5-10 times the click through rate of Facebook.
* 2 load balanced web servers with 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of RAM (using about 800 MBs), 2 hard drives, runs Windows x64 Server 2003.
And also about NginX:
http://www.aosabook.org/en/nginx.html [aosabook.org]
If you "need" multiple servers when you are first _starting_ out you're probably focusing on solving the wrong problems.
That was in 2009. I certainly hope he's not still running Server '03, for starters.
It may be worth it to spend a little time thinking in peculiarities of you data that may greatly reduce scalability problems. For instance:
1.- If your data or user base can be easily partitioned
2.- If you can get away with low consistency semantics
If you can find a nice architectural design that has any of these characteristics, many bottlenecks can be removed and scaling up in the future may prove easy. In those cases, there are abundant technology solutions that you could pick up in the future.
So do
It may be worth it to spend a little time thinking in peculiarities of you data that may greatly reduce scalability problems. For instance:
1.- If your data or user base can be easily partitioned
2.- If you can get away with low consistency semantics
If you can find a nice architectural design that has any of these characteristics, many bottlenecks can be removed and scaling up in the future may prove easy. In those cases, there are abundant technology solutions that you could pick up in the future.
Or perhaps this idea of his doesn't have to be centralized at all. It seems to be a knee-jerk reaction today to "N users will want my FooBar idea, therefore I need one big www.foobar.com web application which handles all of them". Might be true given the FooBar idea -- or might not.
Usenet, Git and BitTorrent are some counter-examples.
- If your data or user base can be easily partitioned
- If you can get away with low consistency semantics
I agree, those properties make scalability much easier. There is another possibility, which is if your data is mostly static. If you can simply copy your data to a bunch of servers and be done with it, then scalability is easy.
The real killer is if you have strong consistency requirements, and you have users worldwide, and data cannot be partitioned since users around the world need to read and modify t
Probably the worst thing you can do is start with some complex clustered architectural design.
Just start on a single server with technologies that are scalable, and design with future scalability in mind. Also design in the ability to capture detailed performance metrics of every tier. When, and if your application usage grows, scale the parts of it that need scaling.
The biggest issue with scaling is usually the database, and for applications where you are just using the database as a simple persistence store for user settings and simple small data sets, you are probably best to go with one of the many scalable "NoSQL" type solutions such as MongoDB, as they've got scalability baked in for free. If you're trying to run heavy duty analytics that join and aggregate massive datasets, there are single DB clustering solutions, but they aren't cheap. You can always scale out SQL databases horizontally, but then you've got issues cloning and replicating, though there are a lot of products in that space, both free and commercial. A cheap place to start would be with PostgreSQL, which appears to have multiple open source replication products.
I don't think there is anything inherently limiting to sticking with Java. It's what you know, and the toolsets are deep and rich. No, it's not the hot new thing, but sometimes that can be a good thing.
The biggest issue with scaling is usually the database, and for applications where you are just using the database as a simple persistence store for user settings and simple small data sets, you are probably best to go with one of the many scalable "NoSQL" type solutions such as MongoDB, as they've got scalability baked in for free.
Are you a troll, malicious or just plain not knowledgeable?
But but but it's webscale!
If you're aiming for as many users as you say, then it'll take awhile to get there and you'll have plenty of time to hire folks along the way. At that point, you can go ahead and worry about re-architecting everything. First things first though, especially if you're by yourself: get it up and running with whatever technologies you do know. Once it starts to take off, you can hire people to rewrite it and redesign it around best practices.
It's not the simplest path, but without bringing in outside investors who'll have the capital to allow you to hire the team it sounds like you need, I don't see what choice you have.
You mixed up your wording.
Do it right the first time, optimize for speed later. You don't want to find out you're unable to optimize because the design is flawed.
While there are a number of good tools out there for working with scalability, more important than any particular tool is building your application in such a manner that it's easily parallelizable. In a Web app, a core principle to keep in mind is that the more stateful the application server-side, the more difficult it is to scale, and so designing your application tiers in such a way as to decouple requests is key. Limit the amount of session state the server has to keep track of, and you'll be able to load-balance request handling smoothly.
I salute you for your ambition and determination. I hope you get to realize your vision.
Now, as I read your question, I remembered an interview I saw a few days ago with Ben Kamens, one of the engineers working at Khan Academy, talking about scalability and things like how they manage their operation and the spikes of growth they have experienced in the past. It's a little light in technical details, but you may find it interesting: Root Access: How to Scale your Startup to Millions of Users [youtube.com].
One thing I'd like to mention is that when you hear someone else talk about the things they've done and how they have done it, it's easy to see it as an advertisement for a particular technology platform (AppEngine and other Google machinery in the previous video, for example), but that's not the thing to focus on. Whatever choices other people have made, the good thing is that their advice can be useful no matter what choices you end up taking. I know this seems like such a trivial thing to say, but evidence suggests that a number of people miss this basic concept, and then discussions quickly degenerate into pointless noise about concrete technologies, instead of the ideas.
I'd also recommend that you pay a visit to Google Developers youtube channel [youtube.com] and type something like "scale" or "scalability" in the little channel search box. You might learn a few things from some really smart people who have confronted very real situations regarding scalability.
Best of luck to you, my friend.
You haven't said anything about the problem. If you want ease of scaling go with a pure functional language. Functional languages will force you to isolate state issues. Isolate state and you can operate in total parallel. But... generally you have shared objects which are mutable across the users. So you'd end up with very little meaningfully isolated. Those shared mutable objects are what is creating the scaling complexity. The language or technology doesn't solve that, though it can make the sol
If there famework is so good, why does their web site run Apache and PHP?
I like C++, therefore I use Wt [webtoolkit.eu] for webapps. Great performance and scalability, great for embedded systems, great for huge systems, great when using third-party libraries (you can use any C or C++ library), etc.
Sounds like you want a PaaS provider that doesn't lock you in to a platform. I have a similar problem to you (PHP not Java) and I rejected AppEngine for the same reason as you. To my surprise I am leaning towards Azure, Microsoft's cloud offering. Their website service allows you to write your web app in a few different frameworks without having to customize it for their platform and then only pay for what resources you use. Management is as simple as manipulating sliders to how many resources you are w
keep it simple stupid
the more complex you make the app, the bigger the load on your infrastructure and bandwidth
if you follow google's lead, they developed everything in house. same with pixar, which develops software to handle very high end graphics performance, and even linux started off by taking a problem and solving it with a home grown solution
if you want a specialized application to handle that many users without running into software performance issues (nevermind server infrastructure and bandwidth, which can probably be gradually improved), you want to make it efficient... so you will probably need to develop it yourself
if you use off the shelf packages like wordpress and the like, they are full of all sorts of features that you might not need but will still pay for performance-wise
many people will try to tell you that there is no point reinventing the wheel and that existing wheels will always be better than anything you can come up with, but they are full of shit. if everyone stuck with that ideal we would all have wooden wheels on our cars. there is a lot of merit in reinventing wheels, not only to make better wheels, but in understanding wheels to learn how to better use them. be a little selective about where you want to start customizing from... i wouldn't recommend reinventing the operating system, although google did (based on the linux kernel) and they are reaping the rewards of a more efficient search platform than might otherwise have been possible.
if you're handy with microcontroller programming you might be able to make a pretty efficient microcontroller-based server cluster, sort of similar to what HP is doing with their new SOC blade technology. microcontrollers and SOC are the future, so if you want to get involved in future tech today, pay attention to what is going on with ucs... a simple example is sheevaplugs and its derivatives. this is also where linux probably has a major leg up on windows because microsoft has been so focused on the x86 platform that (even with the recent release of WIndows RT) they are lagging a ways behind linux in multi-architecture support (have to wonder how much of the linux kernel has been plagiarized in WinRT).
other things that affect scalability and performance include the efficiency of algorithms... if you haven't done a CS degree, go onto youtube and watch lectures on data structures and algorithm optimization. there are free CS lecture series from MIT and UNSW that I know of. Richard Buckland of UNSW also makes the lectures a little less boring with his antics.
how you develop your app will also depend on your goal to get 100,000+ users on the site...
security is probably the hardest and most significant hurdle you'll face... if you fuck security up (either the app isn't secure enough or it's a pain in the ass for users to authenticate) then your app will be a flop
you also need to think like a user, not like a developer... this is probably where having a small team will help at some point (a few eyes with different perspectives)
many developers fall into the trap of developing software that is easy for the programmer and thinking that the user will get used to it... which is fine if you have a monopoly. unfortunately by the time you have 10,000 users, your idea will be copied to create competition, and if they do a better job with the user experience you're dead in the water.
make sure you are standards compliant. use the HTML 5 and CSS 3 validators, but i would recommend avoiding features that aren't also in HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 until HTML 5 and CSS 3 become fully implemented and debugged. the exception would be that if you want a feature that would otherwise require flash or java, use html5 instead of flash. if you want 100,000+ users, don't use flash or java!
i would use a linux distro such as debian with all the fat trimmed. it should be obvious, but don't use a WISA stack.
keep your service clear of advertising, 3rd party cookies and any 1x1 hidden iframes. don
Google App Engine apps can be written in Python 2.5, 2.7, Java, or Go. If you ever want to move it to something else, I think you can just change the way it communicates to the new database -- the rest should be pretty portable.
Regarding your recommendation of mongodb, I am interested in hearing how you counter the arguments in this article [hackingdistributed.com] and why the other solutions are worse.
Based on my experience at a fortune 100 company with a heavy interest in Java. Don't use Java. Use PHP or LUA as a cgi. Your sysadmins who have to keep your application up will thank you.
If you use a database you MUST understand and use the relational aspects of things. If you use the database as just a key:value store I will personally beat the ever living shit out of you.
Like all simple rigorous rules. This is sort of bad advice in a lot of circumstances. Sure inventing your own hashing function and using the hashes as the keys in a relational DB is stupid. That said, focusing on the main relationships with your tables, and not trying to describe every single edge case will massively simplify the schema. Plus, there are tons of little pieces of information that often need to be persisted, that just don't tend to have any kind of obvious relationship to anything else in the schema. Being able to add key:value attributes on the fly in the code without screwing with the schema can be a huge bonus to initial productivity. Sure if at some point you discover common, frequently used attributes, or you have some kind of performance issue because your reading some value out of a key:value store frequently then by all means fix it.
All that said, I'm not really a fan of trying to eak performance out of a databases. Use the database for what its good at, complex relationships, and easy storage/retrieval of information. But if your app is trying to do 500k updates per second to a single table, its probably a better idea to seek alternatives rather than throw a bunch of money at database hardware. I have my own mental rule, is this code path going to be a hot one? Yes, then no database queries. There are a ton of strategies for moving the queries/updates out of the paths that are performance sensitive.
Write your public and private Apis first. Then implement them quick and dirty. Get feedback. Get users. Keep working on the API to make improvements. As you get more traffic hire good people to reimplement those same APIs on a better tech stack. Runs and repeat. You can even mix and match platforms, just use a smart routing proxy like HAProxy to send requests to the appropriate places. Static files go to a CDN, logins can go to something small but secure, high volume requests can go to a big cluster or IaaS like Amazon or Google for on demand scaling.
API first.
Write your public and private Apis first. Then implement them quick and dirty....
API first.
So true, it can't be stressed enough. Supplementary:
1. when considering API-s, consider them in term of service interfaces: even better if these services are stateless.
2. implement the services as different processes, exchanging data in whatever serialization format you fancy (Java serialization, JSON, Google's protocol buffers). Use the quick-and-dirty for their first cycles of implementation: as long as you maintain the interfaces unchanged, one can later come and re-implement them better.
3. pay attention to what needs to be shared across the whole system and what can be divided/partitioned on different hosts.
E.g. highly probable that "subscription info/user identity/login services" may need to be supported by a single "database" but, once the user finishes the login, she gets her data from a storage hosted else, supported by whatever later development cycles would find appropriate (of course, at later stages, one will need to implement a "registry" mapping a user identity to where the data is stored. But the first implementation can use a single database for the data of all users as long as you do not tie in the login service with other services
Break your whole project down into little tiny modules, with a configuration file to provide various host names when you start breaking things up onto different hosts. And, where possible, use wrapper functions for things like DB calls.
This way when you move from mysql to postgres to oracle to NextBigDBPlatform you change the one wrapper function, not every part of your code. When you see that Java isn't the best tool for a particular job, re-write the small module in charge of that job in some other lang
As someone who has written an application that scales to over 1 billion requests per day, let me offer my thoughts.
Scaling your application should be as trivial as launching more application server nodes. If you can't add/remove application nodes painlessly, you've probably done something wrong like keep state on them (this includes sessions).
Don't worry about scaling your application layer at all (within reason). You can always throw more machines at the application side in a pinch, and for a long while it will be cheaper to add servers than to hire someone. When your application servers are costing you more than a salary, hire someone to find the hotspots in the code and make them faster. Until then it's a waste of your time.
Scaling state, aka your datastores, is where the challenge lies. You need to spend a large amount of time sitting down and analysing every operation you plan to do with your data. SQL is great for a lot of things, but you will eventually run into a point where heavy updates make SQL difficult to scale. Mind you, decent hardware (lots of cores, RAM, and SSD) running MySQL should scale to several thousand active users if your queries are not expensive. The Galera patches to MySQL (incorporated into Percona XtraDB Cluster and MariaDB) can give you true high-availability, but you will still have write-throughput limitations.
I would also highly recommend you look into Cassandra (especially 1.2+, with CQL 3), which was built from the ground up to scale thousands of low end machines that often fail (if you can't tolerate hardware failure, you messed up). Cassandra is more limited in the kinds of queries you can execute, more relaxed with data consistency, and more thought is needed ahead of time. On the other hand, it can also be used for global replication, which is something you are interested in. At the very least, having a good understanding of its data and query model will open your mind to the kinds of tradeoffs that must be made to enabling scaling.
Contrary to what others are saying, you are correct to think about scaling now before you even start! Doing a rewrite is costly and expensive in money and time. Why set yourself up for that? Planning for scale before you start is the best time! If you start with a scalable datastore like Cassandra, and structure all your queries to work within its model, it is no more work than doing things in SQL, and you're way ahead of the game!
The most important part is spending time modeling how you will access your data. Think about how you'll avoid hot spots (which make scaling writes difficult), and think about how to make reads fast by reading as little as possible. Think about caching, and how you'll invalidate the cache of a piece of your data without having to invalidate caches for things that didn't change. (Think about updating on data ingestion instead of running statistics later.) If you can't avoid hot spots, make only small reads, and cache independently, you are not done.
Good luck!
This is the best response I've read in the entire thread. I just wanted to add, you are probably okay with SQL if you are familiar with that and you're expecting "thousands of users simultaneously." Postgresql 9.2 can hit around 14,000 writes per second. [postgresql.org] I'm sure MySQL is similarly capable. If you need more than that, then you have to have go with something like Cassandra.
Netflix has demonstrated Cassandra can hit 1.1 million writes per second [netflix.com] on Amazon's commodity hardware. You just have to be willing to
It's cool that you're interested in developing to an open standard, but I think it's worth noting that there are two kinds of proprietary platforms.
The first is platforms like Google App Engine or Windows. These platforms lock you in, by forcing you to write your code to a certain API. If you decide you don't want to keep using this platform, it's really hard to move to something else. The bottom layer of the platform forces a lot of implementation details in the upper layers of the system.
Then there are th
First things first... Do you have hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users?
I worked at a shop where we did. I've known a lot of others who didn't, but their goal was so lofty. Some actually said "millions of simultaneous....", but only ever managed to get dozens, or even only one dozen at peak times, including themselves and their friends.
Even at the shop where we had hundreds of thousands of simultanious users, they didn't start out like that. It grew in
If we're doing work for you, how much do we get?
1st Rule on scaling: If you have a scaling problem, you don't have a problem.
Wrong approach. Yes, many have said it and I'll say it again and it will remain true for all eternity.
If you think you've got the next Google or Facebook up your sleve - well so be it.
Build your app, use regular common sense when doing it and the rest just happens. I've handled upwards of 20 Million active users with user tracking and billing with a few thousand hits per second per product in an internet gaming company and I can t
You mentioned wanting to stick with open standards.
I would point out that if this is ultimately to run as a business, you need to make decisions based on what's best for the business. Which may or may not be something based around open standards.
Making a decision early on and sticking to it dogmatically even when there is no business benefit in doing so - and refusing to even contemplate alternatives simply because they're "not open" sounds dangerously close to operating a religion rather than a business.
Unless you have the money and management experience to start a company, hire developers, etc, then the technology that you'd hypothetically use is irrelevant. OTOH if you do have the money to hire developers with the right skills then the problem will solve itself.
The notion of not having the money or management skills but somehow bootstrapping yourself up from nothing is almost certainly not going to happen. Even those who did start major companies without venture capital did so by borrowing significant mo
Not sure this is right for you, but it was once upon a time designed to match some of your buzzwords.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/reddwarf/ [sourceforge.net]
While I agree with everyone that says build small to start and scale up later as needed, the one caveat I'd give is whatever technology you use, design with the THOUGHT of clustering from the start. I've seen many designs fall down when scaled because, for example, the app used session too liberally and now session replication across clustered nodes is a serious problem.
There's nothing that says you must use clustering later, there's other approaches, but if your app inherently can't be clustered because y
Never buy from a rich salesman. -- Goldenstern


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MIAMI – Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson and Derrick Rose are injured. Richard Hamilton was suspended. Luol Deng and Marco Belinelli are on minutes limits.
And Jimmy Butler, Kirk Hinrich, Carlos Boozer and Nazr Mohammed incurred early foul trouble.
The Bulls lost to the Heat 105-93 Sunday at American Airlines, and are lurching toward the playoffs with about as much momentum as a used Yugo. Their fourth loss in five games dropped them one game behind the Hawks for sixth place in the Eastern Conference with two games remaining.
"We've kind of been inconsistent in both [offense and defense] as of late, and we just have to gear up," Hinrich said. "Once the season ends, the playoffs are here. It's not like we get another training camp. We need to play two solid-effort games on both sides of the floor, unselfish on offense, sharp on defense."
About the only thing sharp about this one was the officials' whistle-blowing skills. A total of 57 fouls were called, leading to 72 free throws, 41 of which were shot by the Heat. In the first quarter alone, the Heat attempted as many free throws (15) as field goals.
Given that LeBron James, who scored 20 of his game-high 24 points without missing a shot, complained about physical play from Hinrich and Taj Gibson following the last meeting between these teams, the tone seemed to be set early.
"They got a lot of calls that went their way," coach Tom Thibodeau said. "That was to be expected. It was still a winnable game down the stretch. We had a couple tough plays where we had poor body position. I thought the foul trouble hurt us. Jimmy getting early fouls hurt.
"Hey, look, sometimes the calls go your way. Sometimes they don't. That's part of the game. It can't affect the way you play. You have to play the same way. The early fouls on some guys took away some of the aggressiveness. We can't do that. We have to keep playing hard. For us, it's about the intensity."
The Bulls battled back from 15 points down early to trail by two at halftime. But they never pulled closer than seven points in the fourth, when they missed 16 of 20 shots.


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Sponsored By
Don King Keeps His Promise For Turkey Giveaway There's good news for thousands of South Floridians in need who came away empty-handed last week in Don King's turkey away. The boxing promoter announced Tuesday that his delayed turkey giveaway will take place on Thursday.
Don King's Turkey Giveaway Canceled After Truck 'Hijacked'Hundreds of needy South Floridians were disappointed to learn Friday that a truck loaded with Christmas turkeys to be donated by boxing promoter Don King had been hijacked.


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These businesses consist of the manufacture of treated wood utility poles and crossties, along with a variety of lumber related products. Sales for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2012, and reached approximately $52.4 million. The assets of Pacific Wood Preserving of Bakersfield, Inc., are not being acquired and existing shareholders will continue to own this operating business.
The definitive agreement provides for a purchase price of approximately $33.0 million plus the sellers' net working capital at closing (estimated at approximately $24.0 million). The transaction is expected to close in November 2013 and is subject to satisfactory completion of environmental due diligence, assignment of certain governmental authorizations and permits and other customary closing conditions. Stella-Jones plans to finance the acquisition through a combination of its existing credit facilities and a vendor note of $7.0 million.
"The acquisition of these facilities will further enhance Stella-Jones' offerings and expand its capability to supply the needs of North America's railroad and utility pole industries," said Brian McManus, president and chief executive officer of Stella-Jones.


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Another fine outing by Barry Zito, and another fine start wasted. I can't tell you what Zito is doing right, his curveball doesn't look any curvier, but he seems to get big strikes with it more often than not. His fastball seems to have a tad more zip, hitting the vaunted 88-mph mark more often than not, but mostly he seems to be pitching better. You know, mixing it up, keeping guys guessing, that sort of pitching. His head's in the game and he's battling, grinding out every pitch and every AB, and you know something? It's working. He's the very embodiment of Veteran Savvy Clutchness at this point in the season, and you have to be encouraged by that. The guy that had swollen-contract-that-messed-with-his-head disease is no more, and in his place is a guy with the 18th best FIP (3.56) among NL starters. Now if he could only score goals, we'd be in great shape.
"Expected W-L" tells us the Giants are underperforming by three games, that we ought to be 30-22 and not 27-24. You plug runs scored (211, 14th worst) and runs allowed (117, 2nd best) into the formula* and that's what you get. Are we just unlucky? Will these 1-2 losses be 2-1 wins in September? Is it bad managing? Lousy game tactics? Or are the players just not nutting up and "doing what it takes to win"? I'm pretty sure that Bengie Molina and Aaron Rowand are trying hard, as hard as they can, to get hits and make plays. In fact, they were both involved in some fine fielding plays that kept it close last night. I don't think the squad lacks grit, fire, or gamerissitude. They just have a hard time scoring runs, and I don't see that changing unless Buster Posey turns into
Matt Cain, possessor of the 9th best FIP (3.25) among NL starters, will get the start tonight. If he shows up in a goalkeeper's kit and shin pads, cut him some slack and hope the rest of the lads can


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Srixon Qualifier Series
The Woodmere Club
Woodmere, N.Y. • August 16, 2007
MEDFORD, N.Y. — Joshua Eure of Crofton, Md., took medalist honors in the Lessing's AJGA Classic Srixon Qualifier in the Boys Division. Nara Shin of Avon, Conn., received medalist honors in the Girls Division at Mill Pond Golf Course.
Conducted by the American Junior Golf Association, the Lessing's AJGA Classic Srixon Qualifier Series was an 18-hole stroke play event held at Mill Pond Golf Course. The 92-player field featured players from 17 states and Singapore. The par-70 course played at 6,180 yards for the Boys Division and 5,696 yards for the Girls Division.
Eure said he used his iron game to put him atop the leaderboard.
"My irons and wedges were working well for me today," Eure said. "I only missed three greens and two of those were on the fringe."
With birdies on Nos. 1, 5, 6, 7, 15 and 17 Eure fired a 4-under-par 31 on the front nine and a 1-under-par 34 on the back nine.
Thirteen players qualified for this week's event. Jordan Meltzer of Melville, N.Y., and Gabriel Lainez of Fairfax, Va., carded 2-under-par 68s. Connor Monaghan of Garden City, N.Y., posted a 1-under-par 69. Kyle Stucklen of Sayville, N.Y., and Michael Furci of Sayville, N.Y. both recorded 1-over-par 71s. John Nurczynski of Newtonville, Mass., Michael Kamargo of Bethesda, Md., and Andrew Tursky of Hillsborough, N.J., posted 2-over-par 72s. Michael McCarthy of Tolland, Conn., Timothy Rosenhouse of Dix Hills, N.Y., Bobby Krueger of Denville, N.J., Joseph Lovas of Manhasset of N.Y., and Sean Van Aken of Monroe, Mich., carded 3-over-par 73s.
Qualifying but opting to take a Tournament Exemption in lieu of playing in this week's event were Joshua Eure of Crofton, Md., carding a 5-under-par 65, David Gosselin of N. Chelmsford, Mass., recording an even-par 70, Adam Parisi of Holbrook, N.Y., shooting a 1-over-par 71, Kolya Wheeler of Wilmington, Del., and Branden Chicorka of Enfield, Conn., posting 2-over-par 72s.
In the Girls Division, Shin said her medalist honors in the qualifier renews her confidence entering into the tournament, Monday.
"The entire round I played pretty well," Shin said. "This brings me into tournament mode so I know what I need to do."
Also qualifying in the Girls Division, Sara Jackson of Sound Beach, N.Y., carded a 3-over-par 73 and Caroline Sweet of Bowie, Md., posted a 7-over-par 77.
Qualifying but opting to take a Tournament Exemption in lieu of playing in this week's event was Chloe Altchek of Rye, N.Y., posting a 7-over-par 77.
SRIXON Sports USA, Inc., based in Lawrenceville, Ga., has been distributing premium golf balls and equipment in the U.S. since 1997 and is a subsidiary of SRI Sports Limited. SRI Sports Limited is the number one golf club manufacturer in the world's second largest market, Japan, and is one of the world's leading patent holders in golf ball technology. SRIXON golf balls earned 26 tournament victories on multiple professional tours around the world in 2006.
AJGA alumni have risen to the top of amateur, collegiate and professional golf. More than 160 former AJGA juniors currently play on the PGA and LPGA Tours and have compiled more than 300 wins. AJGA alumni include Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk, Stewart Cink, Davis Love III, Cristie Kerr, Pat Hurst, Paula Creamer, Brittany Lincicome, Morgan Pressel and Julieta Granada.
First-round tee times will run from 7:00 — 11:48 off the No. 1 tee. For more information about the Lessing's AJGA Classic, please contact tournament headquarters at (516) 295-2500.


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Dragon Portals Review
If you lived in a world where colorful dragons flew through the sky, happy, harmless and beautiful, why would you want to wreck that? Sure, freedom sounds nice, but think about it. Wouldn't you rather have them hanging around Earth? Or would you help them escape this existence and go somewhere else? Maybe somewhere a bit more dragony?
That is exactly what you are asked to do in Dragon Portals, a new Match-3 title from MythPeople. You play as Mila, a girl who must free hundreds of Chinese dragons from dark magic that chains them to our world. This is done by creating chains of three or more similarly colored dragon orbs that line the dragon's sides.
Having a luck dragon with you is the only way to go on a quest.
The orbs and backgrounds are visually appealing, but nothing compares to the dragons themselves. In keeping with the mystical Chinese setting, these dragons are not the fire-breathing, green monsters of Europe, but rather the brightly colored, serpentine creatures known in Chinese legend. The music also does a good job keeping to the Chinese theme, with gongs and high flutes weaving interesting melodies that somehow avoid becoming repetitive.
The simple gameplay is the same in each level. The game board is made up of 4-5 dragons, flying side by side. Instead of scales, each dragon has a row of dragon orbs going down its side. You tap an orb to drop it down to the row beneath and make a string of three or more similarly colored orbs. Those orbs then disappear and new orbs slide down from the dragon's tail.
Dragon Portals has two modes: Adventure and Survival. In Adventure mode, you must destroy orbs to fill the progress meter at the bottom of the screen. Once full, portals open for the dragons who can now escape our world. You must fill the meter quickly, as the dragons' height off the ground is determined by your ability to make matches and combos. If you do well, the dragons fly up. If you perform fairly, or poorly, the dragons begin to fall, and will eventually crash into the ground.
Purple people eater?
Survival mode is easily unlocked by beating the first few levels of Adventure mode. In it, you select the power-ups you want, which are made available to you during the main game, and then begin matching up orbs, trying to keep the dragons in the air as long as possible.
Adventure mode also has a very simple minigame you can play every five levels. In it you are given a camera by the head of a naturalist organization that studies dragons. You must use this camera to take snapshots of certain dragons in the area. Though it is incredibly easy, this minigame does provide some much needed variety.
Unlike other Match-3 titles, in Dragon Portals you can only move the orbs in one direction: down. There is no movement horizontally or upwards, which makes it much harder than the average match three game. Later on, the dragons tend to fall quickly, and can be very difficult to keep in the air. It can get incredibly frustrating.
So many levels, so little variety.
There are 74 levels, each of which is almost exactly the same. If you really like the graphics and gameplay style, that could be a good thing. If not, then the game can be a real chore.
Dragon Portals is an interesting take on the classic Match-3 genre. It is very challenging, and at times can be a bit frustrating to play. The visuals are very good though, and the controls are both simple and spot on. We like dragons, and want to see more, not less, or them in daily life, so we can't endorse the ultimate goal of this game. But if you're looking for a Match-3 title that will really push you, Dragon Portals may be just the one.


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Q. My girlfriend and I just broke up. Seems she was spending more time at her ex's house than with me. This was all under the guise of "I am helping him move in." I was left alone to fend for myself while she would stay up there with him. The last straw came on Christmas, when she came home from his house, set out dinner for me, and went right back to his place. I was angry to say the least. The next day she said I needed to find an apartment, and I moved out later that day.
Although she complained that I do not trust her, she's been gone since he bought a house two blocks away from where we lived. I am hurt, angry, and devastated. We have a history together, and like a fool, I left her for another woman nine years ago, but we got back together. Most people tell me I should feel relieved that this is over, but I am still in love with her. Although I am not with her, I pay the bill for her cellphone hoping she'll realize what she did. How can I get over this and move on?
A. I'm reasonably sure she realizes what she did, so you may want to let her know the phone bills are now hers.
I have to say, you get the Good Schnook Award for 2013 — though the year is young yet. It might be payback, but nine years is a pretty long time to wait to get even. To hear she's "helping him move in," then staying up there, then sitting you down to Christmas dinner alone tells me you have given this woman license to walk all over you by tolerating extremely shabby treatment. If you thought nothing was going on while she "helped him move in," I have to trot out my favorite saying on the matter: That would be like imagining that a dinosaur died, in a standing position, at the museum of natural history. The way you move on is by concentrating on her callous behavior and being grateful that you are no longer being used.
Q. Growing up in a family of four girls and one boy, we girls had to "learn" how to make our brother's life easier, and everything was all about him.
Fast-forward to the present. Now this brother is very self-centered, and he married a woman just like him. Many times they have been invited to a sister's home for family events and agreed to show up with a dish, and then they didn't even bother calling when they decided not to come. We are so tired of this self-centeredness from both of them that they're no longer invited. I am already on their "do not talk to" list.
Now we hear from our parents: Why do you leave your brother out? They do not understand that for years and years he and his wife have been invited, yet they never show. Their world revolves around the brother and his family. Any suggestions as to how we sisters should deal with this mess?
Frustrated Totally
A. Yes, I do. Pick the best writer of the sisters to explain to Mom and Dad, in a letter, why the invitations have stopped. The self-centeredness on the part of the couple from the planet "I" should be emphasized. I hope the favoritism toward the only son in a family of girls will be mentioned, seeing no reason your parents should be spared having to think about this. All the sisters should sign the letter. Regular readers will be aware of my choosing the written form for communicating tough stuff. And I hope none of you feels any guilt about this, because it is not you who misstepped.All letters must be sent via the online form at www.creators.com/dearmargo.


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May 18, 2010 > Skin Cancer is a Growing Health Concern
Washington Hospital Seminar Offers Tips for Preventing Melanoma
As summer quickly approaches, bringing warm sunny days, many of us will be spending more time outdoors. But the sun can seriously damage our skin and increase the risk for melanoma, a potentially deadly form of skin cancer. The United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number of melanoma cases in the past few decades. According to the American Cancer Society, the number of new cases each year has more than doubled since 1973. "The incidence of malignant melanoma has increased more than 1,800 percent since the 1930s," said Dr. David Gorsulowsky, a Washington Hospital staff dermatologist. "Melanoma is increasing more rapidly than any other cancer. Newly diagnosed cases of melanoma are approaching nearly 70,000 each year." He will offer tips for preventing skin cancer at an upcoming seminar titled, "Skin Care and Prevention of Skin Cancer." The talk is scheduled for Tuesday, May 25, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the Conrad E. Anderson, M.D. Auditorium at Washington West, 2500 Mowry Avenue, in Fremont. To register online, visit www.whhs.com, or call (800) 963-7070. Skin cancer affects more people than any other cancer. Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form followed by squamous cell carcinoma. These two types are rarely fatal, according to Gorsulowsky. "Melanoma is really in a different category from other skin cancers," he said. "Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer, and one of the most deadly forms of cancer in the human body. We expect that when all the data is in for 2009, there will have been more than 8,000 deaths from melanoma in the United States alone." While scientists are investigating new treatments for melanoma, currently the only ways to treat it are through surgical removal of the diseased area and chemotherapy. Risk Factors Those with a family history of melanoma are at greatest risk, according to Gorsulowsky. Another major factor is sun exposure, especially early in life. "There is no such thing as a healthy tan, and those who had excessive sun exposure as children or in their teenage years face a higher risk," he said. "Unfortunately, the risk doesn't go away, even if it's been years since you sat in the sun." While fair-skinned people are more likely to get skin cancer, there is a misconception that those with darker skin are not at risk. "People don't realize those with dark skin are not protected from melanoma and other types of skin cancer," he said. "In fact, darker-skinned individuals have a higher incidence of a type of melanoma that occurs on the hands and feet, and they face a high rate of serious complications from it." The good news is melanoma and other skin cancers are often preventable. Gorsulowsky recommends getting an annual checkup by a dermatologist; more often for those who are at high risk. "We think that around 50 percent of the time melanomas start in preexisting moles," he said. "We can remove some of those high-risk moles at an early stage before they turn into melanoma." That's why it is doubly important for people with a large number of high-risk moles to get a regular checkup and follow the ABCDEs, Gorsulowsky said. A is for asymmetry, B is for irregular border, C is for a color change, D is for a diameter greater than six millimeters, and E is for evolution. So if a mole is misshapen, changes color, or gets bigger, it needs to be checked. "We believe by watching moles and educating people about what to look for, we can detect many melanomas early, giving us a better chance of curing them" he said. Another way to reduce your risk is to protect yourself against the sun's harmful rays by covering your skin, wearing a hat, and staying out of the sun during peak hours. According to Gorsulowsky, it's good to wear a sunscreen of SPF 15 or higher, but sunscreen only protects against two types of ultraviolet rays and a few other wavelengths of light. "Sunscreen is not a panacea," he said. "And don't be fooled by the current push to get more sun for vitamin D. There are healthier ways to get vitamin D. You can get it through diet and vitamin supplements." Gorsulowsky will present selected melanoma case studies at the seminar and answer questions from the audience. "By educating yourself about melanoma, you can significantly reduce your risk," he said.


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so you think THEY will surrender to FRANCE?!...can't imagine them putting up too much of a fight...
So, does anyone find StreetView genuinely useful enough to be worth all the privacy hassle?
I would/will find it useful if/when it covers German cities. I'm not a native of this country (or Europe, or even the Northern Hemisphere for that matter) and sometimes a map just isn't enough. The satellite view on Google Maps is handy, but still not quite good enough, since rooftops can look quite different to the view from below.
The problem comes when I have a hard time identifying something that I see with my own eyes as being a street or not. That's a lot more common than you'd think here! Espec
Yes, and current French law would actually have made it difficult - if not impossible - for French photographers such as Cartier-Bresson to practice their art, no? What about Doisneau and Ronis? Boubet? It seems like an entire period of French public life is going to be recorded but not published or displayed the way much of the 20th century was - due to fear of lawsuits. There are limits in the US, but generally anything that is taken in public, and is for editorial purposes (including artistic) is legal - commercial use (like advertising) requires a release. Sure, France can pass any law - but it's unfortunate that something like French street photography - which has had a particularly lyric quality to it - should be limited now. I would have enjoyed seeing what that tradition, reinvented with today's technology, might've been able to show. Bringing that humanist tradition to bear on the spontaneous moments of everyday public life would be especially welcome in today's world. I guess future generations will have to settle for mass-media portrayals of today's life, and news coverage of spectacle and tragedy. That's ok, if it's actually what the people of France want. It seems like something is being lost, though.
I thought of this, too. In addition, does that make journalistic photography a non-existent profession in France? You can't legally take a picture of a crowd at, say... a protest against the war in Iraq... without getting explicit permission from everybody on the street? After all, the street is a "private place" and all.
California has a similar law, Civil Code section 3344 [findlaw.com]. This covers "publicity rights". Each person's "publicity right" in recognizable images of themself is by law worth at least $750, if used in any manner related to advertising or selling. If you're famous, the price goes up, to cover "actual damages".
So if you're in California and recognizable in Google StreetView, you could put in a claim. It's not worth it unless you're a major celebrity.
Est puni d'un an d'emprisonnement et de 45000 euros d'amende le fait, au moyen d'un procédé quelconque, volontairement de porter atteinte à l'intimité de la vie privée d'autrui
1 En captant, enregistrant ou transmettant, sans le consentement de leur auteur, des paroles prononcées à titre privé ou confidentiel
2 En fixant, enregistrant ou transmettant, sans le consentement de celle-ci, l'image d'une personne se trouvant dans un lieu privé.
Lorsque les actes mentionnés au présent article ont été accomplis au vu et au su des intéressés sans qu'ils s'y soient opposés, alors qu'ils étaient en mesure de le faire, le consentement de ceux-ci est présumé.
It is punishable by one year's imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros to intrude on the private life of others by any means
1. In capturing, recording or transmitting, without the consent of their author, their words spoken in a private or confidential context;
2. In capturing, recording or transmitting, without the consent of the subject, the image of someone situated in a private place
When the acts mentioned in this article have been in sight and with the knowledge of the interested parties, without any opposition from them, even though they were able to oppose it, the consent of those parties is assumed.
Please forgive the rough translation.
In fact it says that you do not have the right to take or transmit pictures without people's consent when they are 'in a private place'. It doesn't say anything about public places (there may be another article of the law about that, I don't know). Like you I'm not a lawyer, but this law doesn't say what you said it does about photography in *public* places, and thus doesn't apply t
Streetview is content shown by google to get viewers for their advertisements, When you are part of that content, why shouldn't you have rights to part of the income? Or at least have the right to be removed.
While Google has defended the project, the internet company baulked when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group's key figures to allow the paper's photographers to take pictures of their homes. "Providing those details would be completely inappropriate," said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.
Google Street Maps was not welcome in Australia, too. But the newspaper "The Australian" had an interesting idea: the asked Google for the addresses of the Google managers.
It wasn't an interesting idea, it was the typical non-story media beatup our Australian news papers love to do. It's not even bloody comparable, it's not like I can type in "Jeff Blackmore" and it shows me his house and address or something like that. I guess Australians [me being one of them] don't realise that *gasps* people who drive
The trend, and the goal, is to be able to read more people, at greater distance. We don't know how far this technology can go, but some of the things already being tested are capable enough to give one pause. If you are not allowed to think unauthorized thoughts (to question the state; to remember a song without paying royalties), do you have a personality? Do you have free will? It seems to me that at that point, consciousness would be a curse.
Gene Wolfe wrote, I believe in Soldier of the Mist, that "A man without a sword is a slave." I would contend that today it's more relevant to say that a man without privacy is a prisoner; a man without private thoughts is a slave.
It's nice to know that some places still maintain the concept of a right to privacy.
Receiving a million dollars tax free will make you feel better than being flat broke and having a stomach ache. -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"


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1. "Both of Me" by Mary Stuart
2. "Eight Years in Another World" by Harding Lemay
3. "From the Raven to the Dove" by Sharon Gabet
4. "The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler" by Ruth Warrick and Don Preston
5. "Please, Spell the Name Right" by Jed Allan
6. "I'm Just Sayin'!: Three Deaths, Seven Husbands, and a Clone! My Life as a Daytime Diva" by Kim Zimmer
7. "As My World Still Turns: The Uncensored Memoirs of America's Soap Opera Queen" by Eileen Fulton, Desmond Atholl and Michael Cherkinian
8. "Like Sands Through The Hourglass" by Bill & Susan Hayes
9. "Changing Shoes" by Tina Sloan
10. "Mommie Dearest" by Christina Crawford
11. "The Quality of Mercy : An Autobiography" by Mercedes McCambridge
12. "Uncommon Knowledge" by Judy Lewis
13. "The Kids Are All Right: A Memoir" by Diana Welch, Liz Welch, Amanda Welch and Dan Welch
14. "The Days of My Life" by Macdonald Carey
15. "All My Life: A Memoir" by Susan Lucci
16. "Whistling Girl" by Ann Marcus
17. "The Days of our Lives: The True Story of One Family's Dream and the Untold History of Days of our Lives" by Ken Corday
18. "Forgiving Troy: A True Story of Murder, Mental Illness and Recovery" by Thom Bierdz
19. "The Bennett Playbill" by Joan Bennett and Lois Kibbee
20. "By Emily Possessed" by Mona Bruns Thomas
21. "Tune in Tomorrow" by Mary Jane Higby
22. "Did I Miss Anything?: Memoirs of a Soap Opera Star" by Terry O'Sullivan
23. "Forever Female" by Pat Crowley
24. "Inside Inside" by James Lipton
25. "Minabelle : The First Glamorous Soap Opera Queen" by Ralph Hutchins
26. "Arlene Francis: A Memoir" by Arlene Francis
27. "The Bunny Years" by Kathryn Leigh Scott
28. "Playing With Fire" by Robert LaSorda
29. "Late, Late at Night" by Rick Springfield
30. "All The Days Of My Life (So Far)" by Alison Sweeney
BONUS: (updating with reader recommendations)
"Not That Man Anymore: (A Message From Michael)" by Susan Hufford & Michael Zaslow
"Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life" by Donna McKechnie
"On Stage & In Shadows: A Career Memoir" by Marie Wallace
"Big Lou: The Life and Career of Actor Louis Edmonds" by Craig Hamrick
"Grayson Hall: A Hard Act to Follow" by R.J. Jamison
"As My World Turns" by Eileen Fulton
"Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway" by Farley Granger & Robert Calhoun
"The Cancer War" by Anthony Herrera
Now that you've seen our list, what do you think? Add your own recommendations in our Comments section below.
Some of these items might be great Christmas gifts for the soap fans on your list.
- WLS Interview Archive: Harding Lemay
- AS THE WORLD TURNS ON DVD: Eileen Fulton Reminisces
- INTERVIEW: Kathryn Leigh Scott Reflects On DARK SHADOWS and Tells Us About Her New Book, "Dark Passages"
- WLS Interview Archive: Bill And Susan Seaforth Hayes
- WE LOVE SOAPS TV 3.01 Kim Zimmer Tells All In New Book "I'm Just Sayin'" (Season 3 Premiere)
- Judy Lewis Dead At 76; Starred in THE SECRET STORM & GENERAL HOSPITAL; Produced TEXAS; Wrote SEARCH FOR TOMORROW, Daughter of Loretta Young & Clark Gable
- INTERVIEW: GL's Tina Sloan Talks "Changing Shoes"
- WE LOVE SOAPS TV 2.48 Susan Lucci "All My Life" Book Signing


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He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece.
late 14c., "act of giving way and falling down," from Old French ruine "a collapse" (14c.), and directly from Latin ruina "a collapse, a rushing down, a tumbling down" (cf. Spanish ruina, Italian rovina), related to ruere "to rush, fall violently, collapse," from PIE *reue- "to smash, knock down, tear out, dig up" (see rough (adj.)). Meaning "complete destruction of anything" is from 1670s. Ruins "remains of a decayed building or town" is from mid-15c.; the same sense was in the Latin plural noun.
1580s (transitive), from ruin (n.). Intransitive sense "fall into ruin" is from c.1600. Financial sense is attested from 1660. Related: Ruined; ruining.


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CAIRO — Officials at Cairo's international airport say a flight to London was delayed after security services received a tip concerning a possible bomb attack on the plane.
The officials said an anonymous caller told state security by telephone that two passengers on the EgyptAir flight were suicide-bombers who had planned an attack.
They said the flight's passengers were being searched in the boarding area, and that the delay should last one hour. All luggage was taken off the plane to be checked by sniffer dogs, they added.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Earlier today, authorities defused three mortar rounds placed on railway tracks near the Suez Canal. On Thursday, the Interior minister escaped an assassination attempt.


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AUSTIN (AP) – Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are to address the influential Texas Association of Business as the Republicans continue pressing for spending some of the state's reserves on water and transportation projects.
Perry and Dewhurst are to speak Wednesday afternoon to the association's annual conference in Austin. Both have called for using part of the state's Rainy Day Fund for water and transportation. In his state of the state address Tuesday, Perry said Texas should spend $3.7 billion for those efforts.
Perry also has called for about $1.8 billion in tax cuts, saying Texas' robust economy should allow that. He also wants to amend the Texas Constitution so the state may refund tax money collected but unspent. About 64 percent of state revenues come from sales tax.
(© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
Also Check Out:


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After three weeks, search for Hailey Dunn continues
About three weeks have passed since Colorado City teenager Hailey Dunn has been missing.Even as time passes, the search remains strong. Law enforcement officials and even groups of volunteers continue searches daily locally in Colorado City, the small town of Dunn, and in various nearby counties.Hailey was reported missing on December 28th by her mother, Billie Jean Dunn. She was reportedly last seen by Shawn Adkins, Dunn's former boyfriend, the afternoon of December 27th.The search has even extended into Taylor county. On Friday afternoon, reports surfaced that a search for Hailey was being conducted at the Abilene Environmental Landfill, where Colorado City waste is brought. Law enforcement officials, wearing hazardous material (hazmat) suits, were on hand to assist in the search. Cadaver dogs from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, used to detect the smell of decomposing bodies, were used as well.The announcement of the search came up after Colorado City city manager Pete Kampfer stated on Friday that Adkins had been upgraded from a primary person of interest to a suspect in the disappearance. Adkins is still under constant surveillance by law enforcement, and no arrests have been made. The search in the landfill, which began on Thursday, wrapped up Friday night. Throughout the weekend, continued efforts have taken place in Hailey's honor. A candlelight vigil was held Saturday afternoon at the Church of the Nazarene in Snyder. On Sunday morning, the Taylor County Sheriff's Posse lent a hand in the search efforts. The volunteers, which numbered to around 35, rode on horses to scour the land in parts of Scurry county, in an attempt to cover more area in contrast to a search on foot. The five-hour search concluded with no evidence found.


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Massachusetts Wants To Make Surveillance Easier, While Texas Is Making It Harder
from the two-different-states,-two-different-views dept
1) Remove the requirement that an electronic wiretapping warrant be connected with organized crime, or indeed with serious crimes more generally. Potentially, even minor crimes like marijuana possession could become eligible for wiretapping by state authorities.All of them are deeply concerning, with the last one being potentially unconstitutional. But that first one may have the most immediate direct impact, since it would basically give law enforcement the ability to go after anyone they suspect of almost any offense and hit them with a wiretap. If you think that wouldn't be abused, you haven't been paying attention to how law enforcement (especially local law enforcement) has abused all sorts of powers in the past.
2) Double the length of an authorized wiretap, from 15 to 30 days.
3) Legalize mass interception of communications at telecommunications switching stations, rather than through individual wiretaps on individual phone numbers.
The EFF has put together a petition to try to get Massachusetts lawmakers to realize what an incredibly bad idea this would be.


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CellHut Can't Understand That You Didn't Order The iPhone, Thieves Did
UPDATE: CellHut disagrees with this version of the events, writing, "Mr. Laurence has played this dirty game to cheat small businesses and to get away from a sudden price drop on the iPhone, which are sold as final sale at Cellhut.com." They threaten various legal hijinx.
Last Friday, I arrived home from work to discover a mysterious package waiting for me. Upon opening it, I found… trash bags. Lots of them. Puzzled, I rifled through the box and discovered, to my amazement, that they had been used as packing material for a brand new 4 Gb Apple iPhone!
At first I assumed that it was a gift from a particularly generous friend. As much as I would love to own an iPhone, I am not generally an early adopter and had no immediate plans to buy one.
Further exploration of the box revealed an invoice from a company I had never heard of called Cellhut.com. To my shock, the phone had been charged to my Chase Visa card to the sum of $663!
The credit card was one I rarely used, usually only for places that didn't accept American Express. I had used it exactly twice at restaurants the previous weekend while on vacation in Montauk, Long Island. Someone had obviously gotten hold of my credit card number.
I immediately called Chase's Credit Card department. They told me that the charge was pending, and I would have to wait for it to clear before they could do anything.
Next I called Cellhut.com (also located in Long Island… hmmmm) but was unable to get through to their voice mail. No help there.
A visit to their web site revealed this:Notice the "interesting" pricing scheme?
I am a Mac geek. I use a Mac exclusively in my job as a web developer. I'm the guy people call when they have a Mac-specific problem. More importantly to this story, I set up and maintain the custom online Apple Store for the college where I work.
I knew bloody well that the 4 Gb iPhone was retailing at $499, not $849. That is, it was until Steve Jobs killed it off a few days earlier that week. And just about every man and his dog heard the howls of outrage around the country from early adopters as the price of the 8 Gb phone dropped to $399. In addition, they are bizarrely charging $100 less for the 8 Gb model!
The next kicker is the line "All iPhone sales are final **No Returns**".
I then contacted Chase again and explained the situation. This time, they were far more helpful. I was able to cancel the card immediately. Fortunately, the transaction was still pending, and I was able to stop that as well. A representative from their Fraud Department told me that I would not be responsible for the charge, and that I should return the phone to the company.
Repeated phone calls to Cellhut.com over the weekend went nowhere, so I tried to get an RMA number from their web site. The site claims that there is a 15% restocking fee for returning nondefective products. I emailed their customer service, explaining the situation, and that I was planning to return the phone, but I did not expect to be invoiced for any "restocking fees".
A few days later, I got a call from a representative from Cellhut.com, who claimed that the order had been placed over the phone on Sept 6th and verified by Chase. I told him that I had not made the call, that no one had called me to verify any charges and that my cell phone records show this. He said he would talk to his supervisor and email me an RMA. I had to give him my email address, as the one used for the order was fake.
A few minutes later, I received this:
Subject: CellHut.com RMA # 5731
Dear Brad Lyons,
This email is in reference to your last purchase from CellHUT.com on Thursday, September 06, 2007 EST.
We are sorry to hear that the product you ordered is not functioning properly. Sorry for inconvenience. Your RMA number is 5731.
Please send the item back to us at the following address:
275 7th Ave (Street Level)
New York, NY 10001
Please send your order in its original packaging with the copy of the invoice and indicate the reason for return on the invoice. We recommend you to use service of UPS or FedEx, so that you have tracking number for the package. Please insure the package, because we will not be responsible for the loss or damage of the package.
We must receive the item within 3-4 business days to process your RMA. The RMA will be processed within 24-48 hours after we have received the item.
Problem solved, right!?
Not quite. Only a few minutes after the first email came this gem:
Subject: CellHut.com RMA # 5731
Dear Brad Lyons,
This email is in reference to your last purchase from CellHUT.com on Thursday, September 06, 2007 EST.
We are sorry to inform you that your RMA request is declined as it does not meet the Terms and Conditions of CellHut for an RMA to be issued.
By now I was sick of this entire business, so I wrote them back:
I sincerely hope that this email is in error.
Let me reiterate. I did not order this phone. I do not want this phone. It was apparently ordered with a stolen credit card number.
I have already contacted the fraud department of my credit card company and canceled both payment and the card.
To date, I have carefully documented every detail of my dealing with your company. If you do not accept return of this product, with no so-called "restocking fee", I will file reports with the fraud department of my credit card company, the Better Business Bureau and the Office of the Attorney General.
In addition, I will contact the popular Consumerist.com web site and make sure every detail of your company's practices are made publicly available to the entire Internet.
I await your response.
Brad Lyons
Yeah, that'll learn 'em!
The next day, I returned the phone as per the instructions in the first email. Happy to be done with the whole ordeal, I sat down at my keyboard to find this sitting in my inbox:
Dear customer,
Before shiped any order we verify order by bank and customer, our rep talk to you about this order and you agree and also your credit card verify charge then we process this order and shiped.ok why sombody process a order with your stolen credit card and has shiping address to your home i really dont understand this. now you telling us you will go to BBB and fraud dept. there is no refund on this and no return on this.
My response:
I did not verify any order. I had never even heard of Cellhut.com until the phone arrived in the mail. I certainly did not speak to any representative. Again, the order was made illegally with a stolen credit card number. I have explained this already over the phone.
I have no idea why the phone was sent to my address. That motive is known only to the criminal who placed the order.
I have returned the phone as per the original RMA #5731 that was emailed to me. The tracking number is xxxx xxx via DHL.
That was yesterday. Today I received an email informing me that they have already shipped me another iPhone!
I can't understand their behavior — the card they had on record no longer exists, so I don't know how they plan to charge me. Can they bill me for a phone I don't want and didn't order? Has anyone else received an unordered iPhone from this company?
If the card has been canceled, they shouldn't be able to charge you for any additional merchandise. Just to be safe, call Chase and confirm that the card is in fact canceled, and that no new charges are pending.
Call your Department of Consumer Affairs and explain the situation; state law governs whether or not you can keep the iPhone on the way as a gift for your troubles.
(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.


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REPUBLIC Challenger Brian Dansel leads Sen. John Smith in the 7th Legislative District senate race, preliminary election returns tallied Tuesday night show.
"The first thing I have to do is thank all of my supporters," Dansel said.
Smith, 40, could not be reached for comment.
Dansel, 30, said the election results "look good," but he wanted to hold off on claiming victory until results are finalized.
He received 12,362 votes, compared to 10,617 for Smith.
Dansel said the preliminary response from the voters shows that "people are ready for something new. They resonate with a working-class guy, somebody that's never really been a politician."
Both candidates are Republicans.
Dansel had large leads in both candidates' home counties. In Ferry County, where Dansel is a county commissioner, he has garnered 73 percent of the votes cast (1,476), compared to Smith's 27 percent (546).
He also leads Smith's home county, getting 57.6 percent of the votes in Stevens County (4,183), compared to Colville resident Smith's 42.3 percent (3,070).
Smith has slight leads in Okanogan, Spokane and Pend Oreille counties.
In Okanogan County, Smith has 1,387 votes, versus Dansel's 1,250. Smith leads Spokane County by 111 votes and Pend Oreille County by 50 votes
Dansel was elected Ferry County commissioner in 2010.
Smith was appointed to the state senate in January when Sen. Bob Morton retired.
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Shawn Marion had 20 points, and O.J. Mayo and Vince Carter scored 15 apiece as the Dallas Mavericks fought off a late Orlando surge and beat the Magic 111-105 on Sunday night.
ORLANDO —� If the Dallas Mavericks are going to make it out of the early-season pit they dug, it will require a lot more nights like Sunday.
Two days after seeing a four-game win streak snapped in an overtime loss to Oklahoma City, Shawn Marion scored 20 points, and O.J. Mayo and Vince Carter added 15 apiece as the Mavericks fought off a late Orlando surge and beat the Magic 111-105 on Sunday night.
The Mavericks led by 13 in the fourth quarter, before the Magic pulled within a basket in the final minute.
Dallas hung on, with a combination of late stops, timely free throw makes, and a boost from a bench that outscored Orlando's 40-28. Carter and forward Elton Brand combined for 29 of those 40.
"Me and Vince joke about that," Brand said. "If it's not going well for the starting unit, that's our job, to come in and clean things up. That's what we did...and kind of righted the ship a little bit. Yeah, it's a new role, but I've kind of adjusted to it."
The Mavericks earned their seventh straight road victory in their series against Orlando and now have five days off before hosting division-leader San Antonio on Friday.
"It's good to start winning again," Brand said. "We didn't want to go into our break without winning again."
In his fourth game back since returning from a sprained left shoulder, Glen Davis had his strongest offensive output and led Orlando with 24 points. He was followed by Jameer Nelson with 20 and J. J. Redick's 18.
But familiar turnover and defensive issues plagued the Magic as they lost for the third time in four games. They also fell for the seventh straight time to an opponent with a sub-.500 record.
"We'll continue to work," Magic coach Jacque Vaughn said. "That's the best part of it is we've got games ahead of us and we'll continue to work and that's our best approach. We've been there so we know that this team is capable."
Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle said Dirk Nowitzki, who played in his 15th game following offseason knee surgery, may need until February to get back to full strength.
The former MVP had a modest game, finishing with 12 points (4 for 11 from the field) and seven rebounds. He scored six points in the first half, but was remained active with some early assists as Dallas built a small cushion after digging out of an early hole.
Still at other times his offensive game showed continued signs of rust, as he misfired on a handful of his trademark step-back jumpers. He found his game in some crucial moments in the fourth quarter, though.
The Magic closed to 89-81 on a 3-pointer by Nelson. Nowitzki then hit on back-to-back jumpers and blocked a layup by J.J. Redick that led to a 3-pointer on the other end by Carter.
Orlando still was within striking distance with 2:31 left, though, after a pair of free throws by Arron Afflalo and a basket by Redick cut the Mavericks' lead to 104-100.
Nowitzki came up short on a jumper with just over a minute to play, giving the ball back to the Magic.
Davis then promptly found Nikola Vucevic coming out of a timeout for a 17-footer along the baseline that cut the deficit to just two.
Dallas' Darren Collision hit a 3 on the ensuing trip that pushed the cushion back up to five, but Redick responded in kind on Orlando's next touch to trim it to 107-105 with 25.6 seconds remaining.
Nelson tied up Carter on an inbounds' play following a Dallas timeout, but the Mavericks retained possession after the jump ball.
Nowitzki was fouled and calmly made two free throws to end the threat.
"He's just missed some shots," Marion said when asked about Nowitzki's progress. "Everybody bases this thing on missing some shots. He's Dirk. Like if he ain't hitting his shots he ain't himself. He's been playing well. ... He's back to himself. He feels good. His body feels good. His wind is back right.
"He's just missing some shots he normally hits. That's all."
Magic guard Arron Afflalo said it's up to them to get a handle on their recent late-game and defensive issues.
"I've been in winning environments before and guys will figure it out in time, get tired of losing," he said. "When it pisses you off enough, you'll start to make that adjustment mentally to your own game and apply the team to help win."
The Magic zoomed out to a 20-8 lead, prompting a Dallas timeout.
While the Mavericks gathered around Carlisle during the break, Nowitzki became briefly agitated. He left the huddle and walked off to the bench, where he remained for the rest of the first quarter.
Without him, the Mavericks went on a 15-0 spurt over the next three minutes to erase the Magic's fast start. Orlando turned it over three times during the run, leading to several easy transition baskets by Dallas.
When Nowitzki returned, the momentum continued as Dallas took a 57-48 advantage into halftime, closing the half making 22 of 32 shots.
"We need everything," Carlisle said. "It's been tough the first 41 (games). I think we're three back, we're in the hunt for the playoffs. That's going to be our motivation. We've got three quality practice days coming up. We've got to make the best of them and we have to keep improving as a team."