That’s not actually true. People ask me “What should I do to remove the virus on my computer?” I wish they would ask me the first question.

Here’s the answer to the first question. Everything on this list is free.

• Don’t use any music sharing applications. Music sharing applications such as LimeWire are a top source of virus infection. Just don’t use them.

• Install [McAfee SiteAdvisor][1] – It’s free, and it provides dramatically more protection than any other single piece of software. Malicious websites are another common source of infection. SiteAdvisor protects you. /About the author: McAfee provides the AV for my workplace. They do a decent job, too./

• [Mozilla Firefox][2] – It’s free, and it’s much safer than Internet Explorer.

• [Gmail][3] – Email is the #3 source of virus infection. Gmail scans every incoming email for viruses.

• Install [Ubuntu][4], Apple OSX, Windows Vista or Windows 7. Install any operating system that is not Windows XP. Some viruses literally just call up your computer and ask it whether the computer is stupid enough to install the virus directly. Windows XP falls for this attack the most often, and is the most common target of this attack. Every virus knows many ways to break into a Windows XP computer.

• Turn on [Windows automatic updates][5]. Viruses are getting smarter every hour. Your computer needs to keep up.

[1] www.siteadvisor.com/ “McAfee SiteAdvisor” [2] www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ “Mozilla Firefox” [3] mail.google.com “Google Mail” [4] www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/why-use-ubuntu “Why use Ubuntu?” [5] windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/help/windows-update “Help with Windows Automatic Updates”

Balsamiq for Mockups

Balsamiq is a very fast interface mock-up tool that has been making my life easier lately.

I could talk your ear off about it’s features, but your time would probably be better spent trying their live web demo.

Umlet for Flow Diagrams

I feel that I’ve tried everything for making flow diagrams. I once thought I hated doing application flow diagrams; but when I met Umlet, I learned that I just hate spending more time doing flow diagrams than is necessary.

There are other nice things about Umlet: It’s free, it runs everywhere and it uses an open file format. But I’d be lying if I said than any of that was as important as the speed. Umlet is really, really fast.

Vim for Editing

Vim is incredibly difficult to learn, but the speed makes up for it. It does everything any other editor can do, but with twice the learning curve and a tenth the time. If you’re only doing a bit of light editing, give it a pass. But if you’re going to spend a significant amount of time editing, learning Vim pays off in spades.

Developer Toolbar for Testing

Developer Toolbar is another tool that no one gives up once they’ve discovered it. You’ll learn it faster by just installing it than you would by reading about it here. Suffice to say, it tells you everything you could want to know about a webpage. It’s also now available for Google Chrome

My personal opinion is that Python has a lot more “power under the hood” than Ruby – a more active developer community, better standard libraries, and more maturity in the third-party libraries that really count toward the bottom-line.

But what it hasn’t had until now was a really fast way to prototype applications. Some people might say Django fill this need, but I disagree. Django is built for marathons, and makes some sacrifices to meet that goal.

I’ve finally found a good ‘sprint’ framework for Python in Bottle.py. Like anyone doing a first project, I decided to create a dice roller.

The problem is that the ‘Citizens demand a stadium’ news item is much more frequent than the ‘Here’s a stadium for you to accept’ petition.

What’s the difference you may ask? Well, without finding the ‘petition’ version, you can never build a stadium.

Normally that’s not a problem, because for most special buildings, the news item is either attached to the related ‘petition’ or alternates with the petition often enough that you’ll come across the ‘petition’ version in the news ticker eventually. But for some reason the ‘build a stadium petition’ never appears in your news feed.

So if you are tired of your citizens endlessly requesting an impossible stadium, follow these instructios:

1. Click the ‘…’ button on your map, then select the ‘advisors’ button (it has a speech bubble); on the ‘advisors’ page, click the ‘petitioners’ button (it has a clipboard). You should now be on the ‘Petitioners’ page.

2. Now scroll through your many open petitions until you find one with the word ‘stadium*’ in it. On the petition itself click the ‘Accept (thumbs up)’ button.

3. Now go to your city buildings menu and select ‘Gifts (wrapped present)’ and then scroll back and forth until you see a huge $75,000 stadium.

Now you can finally shut those stupid citizens up satisfy those voters with their stadium!

*If someone will comment with the exact wording of the petition title, I will gladly update this article.

mustBlock = next((True for rule in rules if rule.block == True), False)