March 2012
1 post
Feynman on explanations (lesswrong.com) →
(via Instapaper)
January 2012
1 post
October 2011
6 posts
blog post by Yehuda Katz (Text Editors for... →
(via Instapaper)
Panic of the Plutocrats (nytimes.com) →
(via Instapaper)
2 tags
Incredible comparison between cameras in each... →
(via Instapaper)
The quality jump from the iPhone 3S and onward is pretty impressive. I’d like to see a nighttime shot comparison.
Inbound Hiring →
(via Instapaper)
Gabriel Weinberg discusses how he manages inbound hiring at DuckDuckGo.
Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we... →
“(Teachers in Finland) have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals.”
Our (USA) system of education is designed around the idea that teachers aren’t capable of teaching their students. That they are so incompetent their students must be regularly tested by an impartial level of standards.
There are perfectly valid reasons to have a standard test. For a...
Why don't developers dress better?
I’ve taken to wearing collared shirts and slacks to work. Why?
I have to admit that the biggest reason is to thumb my nose at social convention. People in “geek” jobs are simply expected to dress down. “Ha!” says I.
To my surprise, I found that dressing up is actualy much more comfortable than a t-shirt and jeans. The pants are the biggest difference, they just...
September 2011
14 posts
5 tags
What planes are overhead?
wolframalpha:
What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yup, it’s a plane, and it is currently 31,100 feet high and traveling to St. Louis from Chicago. Simply enter “planes overhead”, and Wolfram|Alpha will provide a list of flights overhead based on your current geoIP location.
You can also click on specific flights to learn more information, such as departure airport,...
2 tags
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
So I played it, I finished it, and it was pretty ok!
The story was pretty lackluster. I haven’t played the first game so maybe I’m missing out on some key character development.
The force powers were awesome. I highly enjoyed tossing various bits of the environment around in the midst of combat.
Darth Vader was imposing and a little scary at the start of the game, very...
4 tags
Get Flow
I’ve tried almost a dozen TODO list trackers over the years. From text based solutions like TODO.txt or Xavier Shay’s XTDO to fancy-pants GUI solutions like Appigo Todo or Pomodoro App for the iPad to web-based solutions like Toodledo. I’ve also tried enterprise solutions like Jira, or code-based solutions like github issues or redmine or trac.
None of them have ever lasted. I...
1 tag
2 tags
Broadband.com: third launch
Man, that was pretty much the roughest website launch I’ve ever had. You know it’s just perfect when the CEO happens to be pulling up your website in the three minute span of time that the new site is coming up. It’ll just be a few minutes we thought in our naïveté; who will notice? Ha ha!
CEO. Conference room. Pretty much all upper management. Our site. Broken rendering....
1 tag
“I am going to bring daddy a light at work and he’s gonna put it in the...”
– Edward, three years old
3 tags
Bring on the Robot Cars Already
It’s been almost a year since Google announced that they were testing robot cars in California, and that those robot cars had already logged over 140,000 miles of real-world driving. The program quickly expanded into Nevada where Google convinced the state to issue special licenses allowing the operation of the autonomous cars.
A few days ago a Google robot car rear-ended another car at...
This deadmau5 remix is a little more techno.
Another downtempo deadmau5 remix.
2 tags
A chill musical creation I made with the Deadmau5...
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
Tumblr?
Blogging is hard.
It’s very easy to just not write anything. Good blog software should provide as little friction as possible.
I’ve always held back writing on my blog because I’m always thinking about tweaking the site design, the code, the server, the framework, etc. Content, even after I tried to just set it and forget, has fallen by the wayside for quite a while now.
...
August 2011
1 post
2 tags
Simple Desktops
Got a computer? Got a window manager GUI? Want nice, clean, simple pictures to put up behind your windows? “Simple Desktops”:http://simpledesktops.com/
Some gems:
Sine by Kyle
Circuit by Saif Sajid
Good Morning by Axel Valdez
Tron Light Cycle Blue by Katie McCormack
Tron Light Cycle Orange by Katie McCormack
July 2011
2 posts
4 tags
A/Bingo in Rails 3.1
To add A/Bingo to a Rails 3.1 you can mostly follow the (Rails 2)
install docs, but you’ll might run into some slight differences.
For a full set of instructions to get up and running, head to Andy
Atkinson’s post Getting started with A/Bingo and Rails 3. I’ll just
cover some extra tidbits here.
Using Redis as the data store
A/Bingo uses a cache layer for mapping sessions to...
1 tag
Putting the focus back on content
UPDATE (September 14, 2011): This blog is now on tumblr which is even better than a redesign. I can choose from thousands of designs with a click and I don’t have to think about the hosting or backend at all. Awesome.
For months now I’ve been meaning to design a new look for this site, but
I’ve only ever made partial and half-hearted attempts at actually doing
so. I’ve used the “it needs a...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
Launching the new broadband.com
I pulled my first late-late night at work Thursday night and Friday
morning this week to launch the new broadband.com. We actually had a
lot of fun coding pepped up on pizza and caffeine. I stayed until 4:30am
and was the last of the team to leave, but our (awesome) boss kept
working on content and ended up sleeping on a couch at work. I drove
home and slept for about three hours then headed back...
January 2011
4 posts
Free Website Load Testing
UPDATE (September 14, 2011): This site is no longer an EnkiBlog but hosted on tumblr.
Load Impact is a freemium web service for stress testing websites.
The free test gets you a test suite of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 concurrent
clients with an average user load time for each. Going up to the paid
service yields some cool features like viewing individual objects, more
states, higher load testing,...
3 tags
DuckDuckGo has replaced Google as my default...
If you haven’t tried the new web search engine DuckDuckGo, you should. I never thought I’d say it, but it actually has replaced Google as my default search engine.
Replaced Google? How?
Literally? Just go to DuckDuckGo and click the “Add to Whatever Browser You Are Using” link. Google doesn’t have to be ubiquitous!
Replaced Google? Why?
At first I just decided...
1 tag
mongodb: units in db.printCollectionStats()
This took far, far too long to find. Seriously. I was even digging into the source code.
The avgObjSize (and other data fields in the stats) returns the size in bytes.
3 tags
Dynamically loading thousands of markers in Google...
UPDATE (September 17, 2011): If you want to effectively handle many thousands of points in a Google Map then the only real solution is using Google Fusion Tables. I hit on that as a solution a few months ago and it’s been working perfectly for The Broadband Map and it’s over 400,000 loadable points. Blog post with details coming soon.
When you’re making a Google Map with more than...
December 2010
1 post
2 tags
Rails > Django
Thanks to the new job at bandwidth I’m reacquainting myself with ruby
and Rails. After a few weeks of cramming Rails books; I’ve come to a
conclusion: Rails is simply much better than Django for my development
style. Why?
Convention over configuration
In Django, you can configure everything about the web application but
you also have to configure everything. That makes the Django
powerfully...
November 2010
5 posts
3 tags
rvm > virtualenv
In my journey of computer languages I’ve gone from ruby to python and am now coming back to ruby (and rails) again.
In my python foray I became enamored with a little tool called virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper). What it allows you to do is create lots of mini virtual environments for python projects. The environments can have custom pip packages and even a specific (non-system) python....
3 tags
Ultima 6 in Minecraft
Ian Albert had already created a complete in-game map of Ultima 6. Now he’s imported that map data into Minecraft with his Ultima 6
Minecraft Conversion.
It’s the real deal. Every town, every castle, every dungeon. It’s
literally all the map data from Ultima 6, transformed into the Minecraft
world format.
It wasn’t just a simple conversion either. From the details in his post:
Gargoyle land....
2 tags
Videogame Nostalgia
This time of year always reminds me of Grim Fandango
That’s means it’s time for some videogame nostalgia.
Grim Fandango’s Opening
749 NES Games in Under 15 minutes
100 Super Nintendo games in 10 minutes
The CRPG Addict
The CRPG Addict started earlier this year and is one guy playing through all the old CRPGs: nethack, The Bard’s Tale, Ultimas, etc. Well...
3 tags
Practical netcat
via Hacker News | Cool stuff you can do with netcat
# ssh to host2 via an ssh session on host1
$ ssh -oProxyCommand="ssh host1 nc host2 22" host2
# Check if a port is open
$ nc -p 8080 host
# Proxy an HTTP request
$ nc -l 12345 | nc www.google.com 80
2 tags
Replacing simplexml_load_file with PHP cURL
The PHP XML data loading function simplexml_load_file has a very short timeout which apparently isn’t controllable (or documented). Replacing it with cURL and simplexml_load_string is relatively straightforward, but for reference:
Original simplexml_load_file
<?php
$path = 'http://example.org/path/to/xml';
$xml === False on failure
$xml =...