2,625 tweets, and 5,086 including replies.
2021
April
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Wrote this one a few months back, but forgot to post it here.
Stay optimistic about companies and technologies, but apply healthy skepticism as well — in almost every case, people (very unsurprisingly) leave out the bad stuff.
Apr 23, 2021 ( ♥ 7 )
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Inspired move by Patagonia — no more customized products with corporate logos because products with logos are more likely to end up in landfills.
Companies should embrace this and keep going Patagonia for swag. Brand T-shirts if you have to.
Apr 15, 2021 ( ♥ 63 )
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Just wanted to drop a blanket "thank you" for all the nice comments/messages/likes about my note yesterday. I expected a trickle of encouraging responses, and got a tsunami instead. You people are incredible.
Apr 12, 2021 ( ♥ 36 )
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Recently I had the hard realization that I've spent more years as a Mongo user than as a Postgres one, so I'm changing that this month. Excited to be joining the engineering team at @crunchydata.
A few more words on that: brandur.org/fragments/crun…
Apr 11, 2021 ( ♥ 194 )
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Sent 023 this morning on downward assignment, the evolution of properties in C#, and Japanese city pop.
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TIL: The “Re” we use in subject lines for email replies is a latin phrase abbreviated from “in re” (“in the matter of”). Hah, I always thought it was short for “reply”.
There’s an RFC of course:
tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#s…
Apr 6, 2021 ( ♥ 48 )
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Every time I wake up early enough to go see the sun rise, then walk around to listen to the early morning sounds of nature, I realize that it's completely unreasonable that I don't do this every single morning.
Apr 6, 2021 ( ♥ 34 )
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Reminder that it's worth glancing at the AWS bill every once in a while, even if it's not enormous.
The s-m-r-t idea of always invalidating all index pages in CloudFront on every build cost $8 of a total ~$13 bill last month.
Apr 3, 2021 ( ♥ 13 )
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Luckily a joke, but it got me. Right in line with Ruby's design principles (succinctly: "include _everything_").
bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17768
Apr 2, 2021 ( ♥ 9 )
March
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Complained to @keiko713 about the kanji for the word "carrot" — 人参, which makes it "person" + "participate" (?!?!). Was sent this image as a memory aid.
(Source: twitter.com/buromasa0423/s…)
Mar 11, 2021 ( ♥ 6 )
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I like the abstract romantic idea of a monorepo as much as the next person, but once one is so big that Git (one of the fastest and best-optimized programs every written) doesn’t really work anymore, the monorepo is too mono.
Mar 9, 2021 ( ♥ 21 )
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Stats from Canadian real estate.
Turns out, super inflationary policy has ramifications. $X,000 in free money today, but $X00,000 more needed to own a home tomorrow. Most Canadians are homeowners and profiting, but think of the children, seriously.
Mar 6, 2021 ( ♥ 7 )
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Last Nanoglyph — wrote about how, unsurprisingly, IDEs are a good idea, and how they make writing **even Java** (!!) pretty fun.
Title for next week: "Time and Entropy".
Mar 5, 2021 ( ♥ 11 )
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Impressive video on electric buses in Shenzhen. Imagine buses going from the loudest vehicles on the street to the quietest.
We’ve all internalized that big infrastructure upgrades are impossible, but remember some places in the world still make them.
February
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Can’t believe I agree with Facebook on anything, but this is the right move. Big tech isn't good, but legislative overreach and insider graft is worse.
Good for society too. Given the quality of today’s news, we’d all do well to consume less of it.
Feb 18, 2021 ( ♥ 4 )
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Excellent: Go 1.16 finally supports slurping up static files into binaries. 3rd party packages and extra build steps no longer required.
(Like Go, and this is good, but can’t give them _too_ much credit because it should’ve happened >5 years ago.)
Feb 18, 2021 ( ♥ 10 )
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Wrote a piece on ditching Google Analytics to run analytics over logs, like it’s 1999 (except now with hosted Presto, etc. bootable in seconds from the cloud ;).
I also estimate how inaccurate hosted analytics are due to adblocked scripts. Answer: very.
Feb 16, 2021 ( ♥ 70 )
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Periodic reminder that Vim has a built-in `:sort` command that works for an entire file and all the usual selections. Not something you need every day, but the days when you do, it's a _huge_ time saver.
thoughtbot.com/blog/sort-line…
Feb 15, 2021 ( ♥ 26 )
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Some nice people have bumped me on Twitter recently, so I'll take the opportunity for some self promotion —
You might enjoy my newsletter, _Nanoglyph_. It's like a Substack, but from the old school. I'll be shipping a new edition in the next day or two.
Feb 11, 2021 ( ♥ 9 )
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RT @thesephist: Since I found it 3 years, ago, @brandur's blog has stayed the best designed blog I've ever seen (obviously, a subjective take). So clean, minimal, without being generic. And lots of attention to detail everywhere.
It was a big inspiration for t.co/K3osrFdbV4's design.
Feb 11, 2021 ( ♥ 32 )
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As much as I dislike trading firms and financial institutions, for the sake of my own sanity, I for one am glad that GME didn’t become another Bitcoin — expensive because people say it’s expensive, not because it can it can be used for anything or has any inherent worth.
Feb 3, 2021 ( ♥ 10 )
January
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A little architectural inspiration: amazing house built underground, into the side of of a hill. Concrete and steel everything.
Come on billionaires, more Bond villain lairs like this please. Someone needs to do the volcano thing ("You Only Live twice").
design-milk.com/a-cave-like-ho…
Jan 27, 2021 ( ♥ 16 )
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Excellent take on social media.
Twitter leaders—with politicians and reporters being the worst offenders—tweet what plays best, and what plays best are divisive semi-truths and reductive caricatures of opponents. We just can’t help ourselves.
Jan 26, 2021 ( ♥ 4 )
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Programming in Java for a few hours sure makes you appreciate C#.
Java's like an alternate reality where all the nice quality of life features (properties, property init from constructor, option parameters, tuples, etc.) just never happened.
At least it finally got closures.
Jan 26, 2021 ( ♥ 14 )
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This is pretty niche, but I wrote Go API bindings for WaniKani.
Integrated the good parts of stripe-go, and left out the bad (global state, Java-esque iterators).
WaniKani is a microcosm of good API design. More details: brandur.org/fragments/wani…
Jan 23, 2021 ( ♥ 7 )
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For fun and (not so much) profit, cross-posting to Mastodon. Get in touch if you use it: mastodon.social/@brandur
Not super optimistic that federation will be the answer, but will try anything that might put a dent in Twitter.
Implementation detail: brandur.org/fragments/mast…
Jan 21, 2021 ( ♥ 8 )
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Sent Nanoglyph 018 about Ractors in Ruby 3.
A more faithful implementation of the actor model than something Goroutines/channels. Two styles of message passing to get whatever blocking/non-blocking semantics you want to have.
Jan 15, 2021 ( ♥ 24 )
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Yet another Gmail HTML/web oddity: it won’t display an SVG.
To this day the only reliable way of discovering what quirky subset of HTML Gmail supports is trial and error. I’m afraid to even look how my emails render on other even-quirkier web clients like Outlook or AOL.
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Played around with Ractors last weekend. Very happy there’s finally parallelism in Ruby.
Worth noting that they’re currently not much use because so much Ruby relies on ambient global state. e.g. Can’t parse TOML in a Ractor, can’t render Markdown. Mostly stdlib-only right now.
Jan 13, 2021 ( ♥ 5 )
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RT @gertjanwilde: What's good about offset pagination; designing parallel cursor-based web APIs — by @brandur buff.ly/3ovE4Nl #API
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A few romantic shots of Banff to help get your week started. Can't believe I'm still hiking in January.
Jan 11, 2021 ( ♥ 35 )
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Update on Homebrew on M1: Works great now, and I was able to get rid of the second x86 Homebrew install that ran some programs under Rosetta. For my money, there are no blockers left in these being great machines for development.
More detail: brandur.org/fragments/home…
Jan 9, 2021 ( ♥ 38 )
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Nice thinking around easing Ractors into the Ruby ecosystem from @kirshatrov.
Ruby relies heavily on global state so bringing them in at the "top" will be difficult initially, but they're more amenable at the "bottom" where less state needs to be shared.
kirshatrov.com/2021/01/06/rub…
Jan 8, 2021 ( ♥ 15 )
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RE WhatsApp Facebook-itzation: Baffled by the number of claims of “I left WhatsApp by “just” switching me and every person I know over to Signal!”
Very hard to believe, but they seem to believe what they’re saying. Not sure where the disconnect is, but installed Signal anyway.
Jan 7, 2021 ( ♥ 8 )
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RT @petervgeoghegan: Over 5 years ago my then-colleague @brandur wrote about problems with Postgres queues and the accumulation of garbage MVCC versions (see brandur.org/postgres-queues). Expect significant improvements in this area for Postgres 14: postgr.es/m/CAGnEbogATZS…
Jan 4, 2021 ( ♥ 61 )
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After a lengthy battle, my SEO’s been usurped by an IKEA hangar rail for the garage. (Looks pretty nice actually, might get one.)
Do I have any chance of taking it back, or is this the end.
Jan 4, 2021 ( ♥ 66 )
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Finally finishing S4 Mr. Robot. Felt less anxiety from the culminating plot than from the idea of hacking via smartphone.
Between autocorrect, no tab button, and half your shell symbols buried in keyboard menus two layers deep, this is the show’s most dystopian concept, by far.
Jan 3, 2021 ( ♥ 8 )
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Happy 2021!
A few pretty photos of the Rockies from the other day. Just gorgeous — lots of green, but now with a light layer of snow.
Jan 2, 2021 ( ♥ 27 )
2020
December
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Big Sur a few weeks in: Some things are worse (contrast, Finder), many things are different (fonts, menus), but nothing is _better_.
Imagine if a big new macOS version introduced new keyboard shortcuts, better multi-tasking, or the like. Innovation in desktop OSes isn’t done.
Dec 31, 2020 ( ♥ 10 )
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Go 1.16 beta1 for ARM-based Macs is a life saver so far. Ran into all kinds of problems with failures and zombie processes with 1.15 under Rosetta.
Dec 19, 2020 ( ♥ 6 )
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My closet is indexed on `(season, apparel_type, style, color) WHERE defunct IS FALSE`.
(And given half of those are `(summer, t-shirt, v-neck, black)`, de-duped on the backend ... ;) twitter.com/craigkerstiens…
Dec 15, 2020 ( ♥ 7 )
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Going through old tweets, found this 10yo ad for The Camera Store in Calgary. One minute long, no spoken words, pure inspiration. Best enjoyed by photography nerds.
(The ease/art of videography has advanced since then, but this is da Vinci for its time.)
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Life on WaniKani: wake up, underwater, to inbox(hundreds) every morning.
270 kanji in. Last week, from first principles, found that "ichiban" (一番) literally means "number one". Learned that word when I was five, and for the last 30 years thought it meant “noodles”.
Dec 5, 2020 ( ♥ 8 )
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After local businesses spent $10,000s they didn't have on outdoor infrastructure, city and state will now force a new, indefinite closure.
It’s been a long time coming, but that’s it — the death knell. Ten years from now, I’ll be able to describe the final days of San Francisco.
Dec 5, 2020 ( ♥ 27 )
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On the reasons why RDMSes trend toward glorified key/value stores at scale, and ideas to stop it — twitter.com/planetpostgres…
Dec 1, 2020 ( ♥ 27 )
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A living GitHub issue, and the best project management I've ever seen, in or out of industry.
(Note the 500+ hidden comments too so that it's easier to focus on recent events.)
Dec 1, 2020 ( ♥ 12 )
November
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Finally, a blank slate.
(Allowing me to start on one part of the surface and work inwards without breaking everything. Wayyyyy too many hours spent refactoring to get here.)
Nov 15, 2020 ( ♥ 5 )
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Trying a site redesign and man, a combination of poor CSS hygiene and CSS defaulting to a mess have caught up to me.
Now building "firebreaks" so changes in one place don't cascade into everything.
Lesson: Keep stylesheets highly encapsulated, even where sharing is convenient.
Nov 15, 2020 ( ♥ 10 )
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Apple's pulled an Rdio with Big Sur. As much as blown out, low-contrast interfaces with big white space gutters look great in portfolios, they are strictly worse for usability. Modern designers need the equivalent of editorial boards, or something.
andrewdenty.com/blog/2020/07/0…
Nov 14, 2020 ( ♥ 9 )
October
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Important development in web technology that'd be easy to miss: Very soon there will be no performance advantage to cross-site resource sharing via CDN.
Privacy aside, I like the idea of sites hosting their own assets — just seems simpler.
stefanjudis.com/notes/say-good…
Oct 26, 2020 ( ♥ 25 )
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I'm extremely jealous of people who can write succinctly, and still get plenty of ideas through.
I start intending to write 20 words. Before I know it, the project's ballooned into a high caloric word salad of 2,000+ words, most uninteresting, but none of which I want to cut.
Oct 20, 2020 ( ♥ 40 )
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Like most of everyone, I assumed that container images were our one and only future, but as of ~1 month ago, Heroku-style buildpacks are now quite ubiquitous.
On Digital Ocean App Platform:
digitalocean.com/docs/app-platf…
On Google Cloud:
cloud.google.com/blog/products/…
Oct 19, 2020 ( ♥ 26 )
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Planet Earth is one of the best TV series ever created, but a fair critique is how it goes to extreme lengths to gloss over human impact on these ecosystems.
Recommend Attenborough’s “A Life on Our Planet” (Netflix). Same sublime cinematography, but with sobering facts attached.
Oct 17, 2020 ( ♥ 24 )
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Maybe best small-ish Postgres improvement in years, 13 has a “force” option for dropping a database even where clients are connected:
$ dropdb --force
# DROP DATABASE my_db WITH ( FORCE );
That was probably PG's #1 development annoyance. I can feel all that saved time already.
Oct 16, 2020 ( ♥ 63 )
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Nanoglyph 015 is about type signatures in Ruby and my impression of how Sorbet’s helped stabilize Stripe. Not a big fan of Ruby 3’s `*.rbs`.
Oct 13, 2020 ( ♥ 15 )
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Today in writing on iPad: had to google the gesture for redo after accidentally undoing a whole paragraph by — I kid you not — "shaking" the iPad by placing it on a table. This certified-100%-undiscoverable touch/gyro input mystery meat buffet has to stop. More keyboards please.
Oct 12, 2020 ( ♥ 45 )
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It’s THE BEST feeling when after painstakingly learning readings of specific kanji like "previous" 先 (“sen”) and "life" 生 (“sei”), get to a word that combines them (先生), then suddenly realize you’ve known this word for decades (“sensei”), and now know it by first principles.
Oct 9, 2020 ( ♥ 17 )
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Opened Duolingo for the first time in years. Within 20 minutes I’d dismissed 50 modals on “hearts”, “gems”, notifications, etc. You can even buy indulgences — e.g. pay money to continue your streak if you skipped the day.
Sad/awful. We need better monetization models.
Oct 9, 2020 ( ♥ 15 )
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Nanoglyph 014 is about local first, diving in Indonesia, and being reminded how great software is when it runs without an internet connection. Also, for good measure, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
Oct 7, 2020 ( ♥ 19 )
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Twin Peaks now re-opened daily for car traffic, proving two core San Francisco principles:
(1) even a single street closed to vehicular traffic is one too many, and (2) in the vanishingly rare case that city leadership accidentally makes a good decision, it’s reverted posthaste.
Oct 7, 2020 ( ♥ 10 )
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Back at Heroku, wanted to do the $5 dyno _forever_. It looks like it's finally here, albeit from a different company.
I haven't tried it yet, but this could be the biggest win in internet infrastructure that hobbyists have had in years.
digitalocean.com/pricing/#app-p…
Oct 6, 2020 ( ♥ 33 )
September
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More misadventures in trying to learn (to read) Japanese: On the cruelty of kanji.
(Knew it was hard. Didn't know it was this hard.)
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Surprising how split popular sentiment is between siding with Apple vs Epic.
Imagine if the original PCs disallowed user-installable software, and IBM/Apple demanded 30%. Modern computing wouldn’t exist.
Mobile platforms are the future. Android/iOS are a duopoly. 30% is nuts.
Sep 11, 2020 ( ♥ 54 )
August
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Maybe the first and last time you'll hear me say good things about Mongo, but its TTL indexes are one of the most useful new database features in years.
They're an automated way to prune old data, which as it turns out, is something a lot of people need.
Aug 26, 2020 ( ♥ 35 )
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Quite a long hiatus for Nanoglyph. This week (or last week plus some time to jam DMARC into place) wrote about the origins of Postgres.
Aug 25, 2020 ( ♥ 7 )
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Great history on Firefox's journey from XPCOM to XUL to WebExtensions. Good information on this subject is hard to come by.
Convincing, but still a bit sad. With the diminished API of WebExtensions, Firefox lost its only major edge over Chrome.
yoric.github.io/post/why-did-m…
Aug 21, 2020 ( ♥ 5 )
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Development log where I describe DMARC, an email protocol which dictates accept/reject/quarantine decisions for received mail that can't be authenticated. Also learned about SPF and DKIM, which before now, have always been Greek to me.
Aug 19, 2020 ( ♥ 9 )
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Grilled a friend for an hour about Twitch "subs" and the culture around them; easy to understand when you're in it, not obvious when you're not.
This seems to be one of the most successful non-ad monetization models for independent publishers in the history of the internet.
Aug 17, 2020 ( ♥ 13 )
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Very cool — RDS (and Postgres) now run on ARM. It's just a matter of time until ARM ignites in the data center.
I was hoping/expecting the $ discount to be greater, but AWS claims an r6g is ~40% more performant than its m5 counterpart, at ~20% cheaper.
aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what…
Aug 1, 2020 ( ♥ 41 )
July
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As if I could like Rick & Morty any more ... now there's an anime short, and it's as good as any existing episode, if not better.
For my money, there's never been another show in the history of TV that's been as consistent in quality.
Jul 30, 2020 ( ♥ 4 )
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Very cool about the coming resurrection of t.co/67aRwjbFGJ, a cornerstone of the good, old internet.
Didn't recognize the name of the new owner, but immediately knew him as the "guy with the fish drawing on his blog who writes about Antarctica".
Jul 29, 2020 ( ♥ 12 )
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GitHub has done it again — didn't like the new design at first, but it's growing on me.
I'm _inexpressibly_ happy that it still has a reasonable `max-width` to limit line lengths rather than going full GitLab.
Jul 14, 2020 ( ♥ 17 )
June
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Despite the demise of Olympus and the incredible progress in smartphone cameras, I'm optimistic about the camera industry.
All of Canon, Fuji, Leica, Nikon, and Sony are doing their best work ever in cameras/optics, and there's still plenty of interest.
Jun 25, 2020 ( ♥ 6 )
May
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Just read "GitHub Sponsors" as "GitHub Sopranos" (relatedly: a quarantine TV project since I missed the original run). Time for bed.
May 28, 2020 ( ♥ 7 )
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It's sometimes hard to convince Americans that we have technology in Canada. How about this:
My grandfather using Dictaphone "Time-Master" circa '50s. It used new "Dictabelt" tech to store audio to plastic belts instead of wax cylinders. Magnetic tape would come ~10 years later.
May 11, 2020 ( ♥ 8 )
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A (surprising?) leader in friendly packaging is ImageMagick.
Downloads page: Here are RPMs, Homebrew invocation, some other stuff. Not using those? Here's a pre-built binary that you can dump onto any Linux system and be up and running in 3 seconds.
imagemagick.org/script/downloa…
May 8, 2020 ( ♥ 11 )
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The evolution of code in a small, constrained project is beautifully elegant:
Throw quickly against the wall until MVP. Refactor. Harden. Refactor. Harden.
May 6, 2020 ( ♥ 13 )
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The only good thing about every desktop app in the world being a web-app-and-browser-in-a-box these days is that you can ⌘+- and ⌘++ to change the text size in practically everything.
May 3, 2020 ( ♥ 40 )
April
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Lockdown movie recommendation: Midsommar.
(If you like horror) but it's practically in a genre of its own: Almost entirely in daylight, ~zero jump scares, no monster. Clever, subtle dialog, amazing scene and costume design. Stress just keeps escalating.
Apr 25, 2020 ( ♥ 20 )
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It's not trendy to post about Ruby, but this is the best writeup on IO in the language that there is (gleaning this from Ruby's official docs is ~impossible).
Gets me every time:
• StringIO is not IO.
• Tempfile is not IO, and not even a File.
thoughtbot.com/blog/io-in-ruby
Apr 24, 2020 ( ♥ 21 )
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(On regression in GUI design.)
We've trended for two decades towards UIs that are prettier, but less powerful/discoverable. Even seemingly benign patterns like lavish whitespace, now present in ~every app, aren't good — information density matters.
Apr 24, 2020 ( ♥ 10 )
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The best piece on the background and current state of io_uring I've read so far — seriously exciting stuff.
(I wrote my own version for Nanoglyph a few weeks back, but this is better.)
thenewstack.io/how-io_uring-a…
Apr 23, 2020 ( ♥ 19 )
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stripe-go V71 released:
It goes all in on Go Modules (we held off a long time in the hopes Dep would build in basic Modules awareness).
Other changes: API responses now available on object structs, retries for intermittent failures now on by default.
Apr 17, 2020 ( ♥ 11 )
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A conversation with Alan Kay:
(Amused how ACM Queue's web edition is a nothing-but-the-text ultra-utilitarian scroll, but click the tiny PDF link and you're treated to beautifully typeset pages with full photographs. Can't tell which I like more.)
Apr 17, 2020 ( ♥ 12 )
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CloudFlare's COBOL support via WASM is such a perfect technical PR stunt.
blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-wor…
Scala's now demoted to second place in ugliest languages serving HTTP requests on the internet. A month ago, who could ever have thought it possible?
Apr 16, 2020 ( ♥ 7 )
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Ran an informal shootout to verify that MozJPEG is a good answer for web-optimizing JPEGs. (It is.)
And in general: Very worthwhile putting something like this into your site's toolchain. MozJPEG shrunk my images to an average of 40% their original size!
Apr 15, 2020 ( ♥ 6 )
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The GitHub Actions build images are provisioned with a surprisingly extensive catalogue of miscellaneous odds and ends.
I cut ~half a minute off build times by realizing there was a pre-installed `awscli` and using that instead of fetching it via `apt`.
Apr 14, 2020 ( ♥ 11 )
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I'm stealing the idea (found on the internet) of always leaving a Goodreads review for books, but boxing it down to 1 paragraph / ~3 sentences.
Leaves a useful trail for colleagues and/or your own reference, but prevents review-writing from turning into a major project.
Apr 14, 2020 ( ♥ 8 )
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Process for syncing doc via iCloud:
• Open app (e.g. Notes, iA Writer) on target device.
• Cross fingers.
• Wait 0-30 min.
Content syncs eventually, but it's incredibly non-deterministic/unreliable. Am I missing something, or is this just how our brave post-file world works?
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Two programming concepts that seem like good ideas until you have an inescapable tower of them, at which point you realize they're bad ideas: (1) Ruby blocks, (2) middleware.
I've recently taken to copying backtraces into Vim buffers to make them searchable.
Apr 1, 2020 ( ♥ 22 )
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Love this concept: A popup newsletter ("Year of the Meteor") — well written on a variety of topics, and will eventually disappear by design.
This sort of standalone push of independent content embodies the most aspirational aspects of the early web.
March
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Catalina developed such a notorious reputation that I put off the upgrade for ~5 months. Finally took the plunge.
Pleasantly surprised so far: EXIF information in Finder _alone_ is such a killer feature to easily have made it worthwhile.
Mar 25, 2020 ( ♥ 11 )
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GitHub Actions now makes caching possible (a small feature, but an important one). I'm not sure when this was released, but I swear it didn't exist a few months ago.
Mar 12, 2020 ( ♥ 9 )
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Great personal piece on Kojima —
Reading peoples' takes on Death Stranding over the last few months has been fascinating — it doesn't seem to have many qualities people actually like, but they review it well anyway, seemingly as a nod to its creator.
Mar 10, 2020 ( ♥ 6 )
February
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Picked up the advanced cert card this morning, and wrote a little about getting it in Monterey in the last week’s newsletter (along with a few choice software links).
Feb 11, 2020 ( ♥ 9 )
January
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Dove Monterey this weekend. Great experience, but even with 7mm wetsuit and two layers of it on the torso, yeesh that water is chilly.
Jan 13, 2020 ( ♥ 10 )
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Deployed a couple small things to Google Cloud Run finally.
First impressions: Cloud Build is awesome (totally avoided installing local Docker), excellent custom domain setup/TLS, way too expensive but may work for tiny projects, GCP TUI/GUI both underwhelming but functional.
Jan 5, 2020 ( ♥ 13 )
2019
December
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Favorite new Mac OS mini-productivity tip:
Copy the current path in a focused Finder window with ⌥ Option + ⌘ Command + C.
So good when a common action turns out to have an easy default shortcut.
(You may have to disable an Alfred shortcut in Features -> Clipboard History.)
Dec 30, 2019 ( ♥ 26 )
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Today: Writing, light coding, photo editing, whole pot of coffee. Interludes for calisthenics and running in the greenbelt. All in the quiet of the 'burbs (away from SF's natural soundtrack of heavy machinery/road noise).
Yep I'm boring, but practically a perfect day off.
Dec 29, 2019 ( ♥ 32 )
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Last week wrote about rain in SF, 70s space optimism (and the MOMA), mainframes, vectorized SQL execution, and the artistic philosophy behind "Under the Wave Off Kanagawa".
This week going out in ~1 hour.
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They're making "Wonder Woman 1984" and joining the 80s nostalgia train started by Stranger Things, It, Deutschland 83, etc.
Me: The present is so stylistically unremarkable that we're like an elderly generation reminiscing on a more vibrant past. Also me: sign me up.
Dec 22, 2019 ( ♥ 16 )
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Really neat to see that the runner that powers GitHub Actions has been open-sourced, but it seems like a missed opportunity in that the release was so light on context. Can any GitHubbers comment on the choice of C#?
Dec 20, 2019 ( ♥ 7 )
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I've been having trouble finding inspiring writing topics recently, so experimenting with a (not quite) weekly newsletter to help get some words flowing.
Last week's: an old Heroku eggnog recipe, and a dive into GitHub Actions.
Dec 19, 2019 ( ♥ 23 )
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And I shouldn't be too hard on the NeXT logo — it does have a great 80s vibe. Certainly more interesting than today's "just use sans-serif" school of design.
Dec 11, 2019 ( ♥ 7 )
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Re-read the Jobs biography and was reminded of Steve paying Paul Rand $100k, sight unseen, for the NeXT logo. There's some nice photos of Rand's booklet online, and even a reaction video — from 1986!
The logo is a little homely, but it's a *great* story.
logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul…
Dec 11, 2019 ( ♥ 7 )
November
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RE 16-inch MacBook Pro:
Thankful that Apple didn't lay it on _too thick_ with superlative rhetorical bullsh*t about "reinventing the keyboard" or anything like that after the new variant is clearly a revert of a Really, Truly, Worst-of-Apple-hubristic-design Bad Idea.
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Gmail's new-ish setting to not show external images by default is its best new feature in years.
I get an inordinate amount of pleasure examining tracking pixels from recruiters (in source) and knowing that they can no longer trust their surreptitious telemetry.
Nov 12, 2019 ( ♥ 22 )
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Ended up migrating my blog's build from Travis to GitHub Actions.
All in all, not too different, but really like the formalized build steps — output is a lot easier to read. Also, access to more modern packages via Docker.
Nov 7, 2019 ( ♥ 24 )
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I really like this piece suggesting thoughtfulness on runaway use of dependencies. (Quite a radical position by today's standards.)
e.g. If Apache Struts as disclosed three major remote execution vulnerabilities in four years, consider avoiding it.
Nov 3, 2019 ( ♥ 8 )
October
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A pod of dolphins swimming alongside our dive boat. Impossible not to love these animals.
Near Bunaken, Indonesia.
Oct 28, 2019 ( ♥ 13 )
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Git tip I wish I'd discovered ten years ago: if you `git config --global diff.noprefix true` it removes the silly `a/` and `b/` prefixes so that when you double-click select one to copy, you get a usable filename instead of a mangled path.
Oct 9, 2019 ( ♥ 2174 )
September
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Finished up the last of 14 dives in Roatan. A couple photos of the dive outfit — love the hand-painted signs (very “Life Aquatic”).
Highlights: eagle rays, sea turtles, mantis shrimp (!!), clouds of silversides, seahorse, lionfish (invasive species) hunting, diving 300 ft wreck.
Sep 29, 2019 ( ♥ 9 )
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Portrait of “Dr. Claw”, an after hours pool user at our local resort. Comparison of 11’s Night Mode (left) versus a 1.7 Leica (right).
3 years ago, not worth spending one second thinking about taking an iPhone photo in the dark. A year ago: possible, with bad results. Now: good.
Sep 27, 2019 ( ♥ 12 )
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Assumed the 11’s 0.5x lens to be a gimmick, but 24 hours in, finding it’s the wide angle I always wanted, but didn’t know I did.
Apple knocked it out of the park. In including it, but also the new Camera app design, which subtly shows what 0.5x might look like from the 1x view.
Sep 22, 2019 ( ♥ 49 )
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My sympathies for the immortal souls of those who eschew the ORM (or more importantly, anyone who has to maintain their stuff).
One of the most airtight models in software design: ORMs for basic fetches and persistence. SQL for the complicated stuff.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210311…
Sep 20, 2019 ( ♥ 46 )
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New docs on Stripe's rate limits:
We could stand to have more information on how to build code and patterns to work with limiting, so if anyone has specific requests, I'll try to integrate them over the next week or so.
Sep 13, 2019 ( ♥ 39 )
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Not wanting to be the last person using it, spent the morning trying to get "good" at VS Code.
Took 3 hours to get a setup better than a vimrc/plugin config curated over 10+ years, with the 80% of Vim people actually use, functional completion, jump to def, and "hover" docs.
Sep 8, 2019 ( ♥ 37 )
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Discovered that it's possible to hike from the hills of Richmond to the redwoods of Oakland, and thanks to a buried highway, only cross ~3 minor roads.
This is now the best long walk that I know of in the Bay Area.
Sep 3, 2019 ( ♥ 68 )
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RT @FranckPachot: an awesome explanation of PostgreSQL transaction and read consistency code: brandur.org/postgres-atomi… by @brandur
Sep 3, 2019 ( ♥ 30 )
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I've emailed in 79-char plain text for years as a courtesy to counter Gmail's propensity to never line wrap, but am increasingly cognizant that it's ~illegible on mobile, which is where a lot of mail gets read.
Should I stop? Are there any other great format tricks I'm missing?
August
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Hugely important. Infrastructure matters, but safety also requires laws to be followed.
Stopping at crosswalks, red lights, and stop signs is informally not required in San Francisco — dangerous norms blessed by the SFPD by comprehensive non-enforcement. twitter.com/hknightsf/stat…
Aug 30, 2019 ( ♥ 10 )
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Some texture shots of 3sixteen 16.5 oz unsanforized Japanese denim, indigo died, and slubby for fade contrast.
(Especially in California) Owning only one pair of raw denim is more than enough, but the feel/weight/heft on these is pretty satisfying.
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Learned today that Perl 6 won't be compatible with 5.
Luckily I have no skin in the game, but it's amazing that language designers made this mistake after the hard lesson of Python 2 to 3 — a division that will have taken 12 years to resolve (if the 2020 sunset works this time).
Aug 29, 2019 ( ♥ 18 )
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Tried Postgres' automatic partitioning feature — very cool stuff.
However, one limitation only raised given a thorough read of the docs is that because indexes are partition-local, there's no easy way to enforce a unique constraint across all of them, which hurts many use cases.
Aug 25, 2019 ( ♥ 13 )
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Coincidental with today's rest-client compromise, we released stripe-ruby v5, which among other things, moves to stdlib's Net::HTTP and brings total runtime dependencies to zero. (A micro-feature maybe, but a good one.)
We'd love it if you gave it a try!
Aug 20, 2019 ( ♥ 23 )
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Real-world code being converted from futures to async/await in Rust. Beautiful.
And in case you missed it: await was implemented postfix (`x.await` instead of `await(x)`) for chainability. Contentious at the time, but so obviously the right decision now.
Aug 12, 2019 ( ♥ 16 )
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This was a delightful Postgres mini-project.
Working in high-level languages almost all the time, it's been a _really_ long time since I had to think about pointer widths and re-arranging bits with shifts and masks.
Aug 7, 2019 ( ♥ 40 )
July
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A favorite operational trick from Stripe —
Metrics and dashboards are great, but despite its inefficiencies, logging will always have a place in operations — it gets you insight in tight spots that you'd never have otherwise.
Jul 30, 2019 ( ♥ 103 )
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LHI004: “Drive me back to the academy,” Buckman said.“I don't think I can drive; I'm shaking too bad.” He felt something on his face; putting up his hand, he found that his chin was wet, “What's this on me?” he said, amazed.
“You're crying,” Herb said.
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Knocked the Hornet off my Bay Area bucket list. Was pleasantly surprised by how much of the ship is open. e.g. You can walk the entire length of the flight deck, and especially later in the day, feels like your own private aircraft carrier.
Alameda’s view of SF is wonderful too.
Jul 14, 2019 ( ♥ 13 )
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CloudFlare's outage being caused by RE backtracking is fascinating (see appendix) — there must be so many similar bugs out there, and benign by luck because they haven't seen the right load/input.
(But ~none in Go or Rust, which don't backtrack.)
blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-the…
Jul 13, 2019 ( ♥ 18 )
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Birthday present to self: Osprey Duro 15 running pack. (Also, my last bag fell apart.)
Stabilizing straps are so good and the pack so light/breathable that commuting down/up the mountain to/from work with a 13” MBP feels like no trouble at all. Should’ve gotten one years ago.
Jul 12, 2019 ( ♥ 12 )
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Hate to see the 12” MacBook’s demise.
It was underpowered, but it turns out that was fine for 95% of what I actually want to do on a computer. And a form factor so tiny that you could throw it in your bag and forget it was even there.
Jul 10, 2019 ( ♥ 10 )
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In SF, people walking around with face glued to smartphone is an epidemic.
It’s apparently even worse in South Korea — they’re now experimenting with ground traffic signals to save smombies (“SMartphone zOMBIES”) from walking into traffic.
Truly awful.
Jul 5, 2019 ( ♥ 7 )
June
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Great content on building a fast rule engine for ad blocking. Even better: it's in Rust.
Original implementation assumed that most requests aren't blocked, but found that on 250k reqs across top 500 domains, _39%_ were. Almost half going to ads/tracking!
Jun 27, 2019 ( ♥ 8 )
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Comments on new rent controls in Berlin are great. Thoughts:
* A gov’t that rivals SF in dysfunction. Defies physics.
* Policy should (but never does) respect market forces.
* Can’t stop there. Rent seeking too easy. Housing as investment needs curbing.
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My accidental discovery of the day: Park auf dem Nordbahnhof — originally a rail line that fell into disuse after the wall was built alongside it, and now a wilder version of New York's High Line.
Jun 17, 2019 ( ♥ 14 )
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Amazing parks and trails in Leipzig. Head far enough south and you find yourself on old roads through old forest, shockingly devoid of people. It all smells heavily of wild garlic.
Jun 14, 2019 ( ♥ 16 )
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003: A short stint down in Leipzig, a city which is home to some extraordinary old music venues. Today: doom metal performed under a dome inspired by Rome's Pantheon.
Jun 13, 2019 ( ♥ 4 )
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002: It's a _really_ hot month in Germany. I may have found the single positive use of jet lag: letting me get up early to go running before it becomes unbearable. This is a favorite Berlin route down the Spree.
Jun 10, 2019 ( ♥ 13 )
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Great comment on actix-web 1.0 (a fast HTTP server for Rust), which notably is no longer powered by the actix actor framework.
One of Rust's best-maintained projects, and just as importantly, targets stable instead of nightly (unlike most alternatives).
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201046…
Jun 5, 2019 ( ♥ 10 )
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In Berlin for a few weeks, and publishing a small photography/writing project while I'm here.
(And if you have ideas for amazing things to see while I'm here — send them my way!)
Jun 4, 2019 ( ♥ 8 )
May
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Fell in love with Huge's live reload feature, so I put together a bit of a writeup on how to build your own on various Go primitives, and with changes streamed to clients via WebSocket.
Also: Vim file saving trivia including unusual case of file “4913”.
May 28, 2019 ( ♥ 28 )
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Jonathan Blow makes the case that software is in decline, and been free riding on hardware improvements for a long time. “We don't expect it to work anymore.”
So many great points — I'm 100% convinced. Most important talk of the year. Maybe the decade.
May 27, 2019 ( ♥ 59 )
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Walked out to the Hunter Point's Shipyard for the first time and was surprised by the area's serene beauty.
I now have a recurring urban fantasy that the navy finishes radiological cleanup and turns it over as a national park with ~no redevelopment — San Francisco's Tempelhof.
May 22, 2019 ( ♥ 14 )
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I link only the very occasional music discovery on YouTube lest I be tweeting the all day, but it's rare to find a new favorite — this song and video are perfect in pretty much every respect.
It's in Swedish, but luckily, there are no lyrics.
May 15, 2019 ( ♥ 4 )
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My money's on Go for the most productive language — a winning combo of speed, brevity, correctness, and strict-but-not-too-strict types.
This morning I wondered how difficult it would be to implement graceful restart with exec on usr2. Went from idea to refined impl in < 30 min.
May 11, 2019 ( ♥ 129 )
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Wish I'd figured this out years ago:
By setting Gmail on Vimium's exclude list, but then excluding almost every key, you can have get both Gmail shortcuts *and* Vimium's "F" function.
("F" = keyboard link following; possibly the greatest browser plugin feature ever created.)
May 7, 2019 ( ♥ 5 )
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A common mistake from industry laymen is that running software is "shelf stable". Like a bridge, once you build it, you can leave it in place for years.
Especially for large/complex projects, the opposite is true. Without human care, most would last days, or with luck, weeks.
May 2, 2019 ( ♥ 50 )
April
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I'm periodically reminded of this great little page: areweasyncyet.rs
The format may have started as a joke, but this site goes above and beyond by providing the ultimate executive summary, and linking relevant PRs, RFCs, and projects. Excellent way of staying apprised.
Apr 30, 2019 ( ♥ 7 )
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A very short fragment of thought about iPhones, HomePods, falling orchids, and button design.
(Admittedly, mostly just self-satisfying complaining, but trivial flaws amplified by constant, around-the-clock use compound into slightly-less-trivial flaws.)
Apr 27, 2019 ( ♥ 6 )
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Looking for some alternate UI inspiration — what are your favorite fictional computer/human interfaces?
Here are a few of mine: Tron Legacy, Oblivion, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible (the good one).
Apr 27, 2019 ( ♥ 20 )
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Only a few days in, I really look forward to these little bursts on walking and Japan (even thinking I was getting paged when the first arrived at 5 AM).
More off-Twitter tiny indy web content please! Playing with some ideas of my own for future trips.
Apr 25, 2019 ( ♥ 8 )
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Having walked by it for years, I’ve always wondered about this tiny dive shop in the center of SOMA a stone’s throw from HQ of half the major tech startups of the last decade.
Finally did a course there last night, and although compact and aged in very SF ways, it’s a delight.
Apr 24, 2019 ( ♥ 16 )
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As a user, I can't overstate how much of a game changer Sorbet by @darkdimius and co. is — you get totally, wonderfully, can't-ever-go-back captivated by it after just a few hours of use. The extra type annotations cost a little, and return *a lot*.
Apr 19, 2019 ( ♥ 59 )
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Some exciting progress for Stripe client libraries: stripe-java v9 now has typed parameter classes for API inputs, and they're code-generated for accuracy.
This is something the team's been wanting to do this for *years*. More info and migration guide: github.com/stripe/stripe-…
Apr 10, 2019 ( ♥ 14 )
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This map of Berlin's transit is beautiful pragmatism: berlintransitmap.de
Speaking as a somewhat colour-impaired person, the old/current map (2nd image) has always been borderline unintelligible because of heavy reliance on adjacent colours.
Apr 9, 2019 ( ♥ 15 )
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Some of the first crocuses starting to flower in the foothills of Alberta.
So soon after the end of winter the province is a monochrome landscape of lifeless brown, and these little splashes of colour are a delight.
Apr 8, 2019 ( ♥ 17 )
March
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Maintaining good status pages is an important discipline.
The update to isairpoweroutyet.com was expedient, accurate, and definitive.
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Fastly's recent open sourcing of Lucet prompted me to go back and read about Terrarium, WASM-based computing on the edge.
So much positive signal even from just the initial list of supported languages: Rust, C, TypeScript. Someone there has good taste :)
Mar 29, 2019 ( ♥ 10 )
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RT @pganalyze: "Atomicity states that for a series of operations performed against a database, either every one of them commits together, or they’re all rolled back; no in between states are allowed. "
As so very often, a great article by @brandur: ed.gr/beehb
Mar 27, 2019 ( ♥ 11 )
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China is destroying the west in terms of made up tech/startup lingo. You need to get to book three of the trilogy to even understand this reference.
Mar 27, 2019 ( ♥ 10 )
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The National Geographic article about Tokyo that's been heavily featured in the screenshots of the launch of Apple News+. Includes an amazing map that gives you a feel for the proportions and relative density of the city and its metropolitan area.
nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/…
Mar 27, 2019 ( ♥ 6 )
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For more complex aggregate operators like `$lookup` (a lackluster left outer join), Mongo's official docs actually use SQL examples to illustrate what they do because it's so much more clear than their own pseudo-query language.
Why are we supposed to be using this thing again?
Mar 26, 2019 ( ♥ 28 )
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Reading Wiki's “Difficulties of plot summary” on Finnegan's Wake is great:
It's one of the best known classics and Joyce gave interviews after publication, but still, not even the most pre-eminent literary critics have a clue what happened in this book.
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At Stripe we switched to a GUI-driven deploy process for services.
I'm a die-hard terminal person for life, but it's so much better. Especially during the duress of an incident, there's nothing like being able to click boxes to resolution instead of looking up obscure CLI flags.
Mar 21, 2019 ( ♥ 891 )
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Sending away to China to get new hardware modded into an old ThinkPad is the most practical part of old hacker culture that we have left.
(And looking forward to experiencing this myself when the 2022 MacBook refresh brings in an all-Touch Bar keyboard.)
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Tried out the ACME/Let's Encrypt `autocert` package for Go, and it's astonishing.
One line of code in your app and CA valid HTTPS just works. No magic load balancers, no Nginx. We should hope that the future of all server-side programming is this simple.
Mar 10, 2019 ( ♥ 35 )
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Finished “Bad Blood” on Theranos/Holmes. Knew the story was extraordinary from the few WSJ articles I'd seen, but the details are even more crazy/grisly/disgusting.
Excellent writing, and better than fiction. Worth hoisting to the top of your read list.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood…
Mar 6, 2019 ( ♥ 19 )
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Kakoune is probably the Dvorak of Vim-like text editors, but it's inspiring to see people trying to make human/computer interactions more efficient instead of less. (i.e. Through more slow JS, more apps based on web browsers, inefficient touch UIs, etc.)
Mar 5, 2019 ( ♥ 8 )
February
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Haven't been a huge fan of the term "fearless concurrency", but I'm warming up to it. It's been a while since I included "pthread.h", but it's worth remembering that the crudity of its primitives mean that programs fail by default, rather than vice versa.
sites.google.com/a/athaydes.com…
Feb 26, 2019 ( ♥ 7 )
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Red Dead Redemption 2 is breathtaking. Acting, writing, and polish all A++.
But is there a point where a game pulls in too much real life? This one was a few design calls from having me brush Arthur’s teeth before bed, trim toenails weekly, and do 45 min/day on the elliptical.
Feb 20, 2019 ( ♥ 12 )
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After a 30-minute run in torrential rain, I open my backpack and find its contents bone dry. The future hasn't yielded flying cars, a moon base, or the happy demise of JavaScript, but our technical fabrics are just incredible.
(Context: it's really coming down in SF right now.)
Feb 13, 2019 ( ♥ 18 )
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Getting a patch reviewed on the Postgres hackers mailing list floors me every time — just at the next level in terms of attention to detail, effort invested, and thoughtfulness. I'm 10+ years into working in software professionally and I've never seen anything else like it.
Feb 9, 2019 ( ♥ 206 )
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RT @PostgreSQL: Sorting is an essential feature of databases, but can also be a bottleneck. How does @PostgreSQL help to make sorts fast? @brandur describes one method called "SortSupport" that helps speed up @PostgreSQL Sorts in a lot of cases: brandur.org/sortsupport
Feb 4, 2019 ( ♥ 59 )
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Finally published something in 2019 —
SortSupport is a really neat optimization in Postgres that makes sorting fast even for data types that are large or arbitrarily-sized. Here we take a look at the details.
Feb 4, 2019 ( ♥ 35 )
January
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And alternatively, from the journal of C horrors:
Wasted literally 45 minutes debugging because unlike any sane language, the bitwise `&` operator has lower precedence than comparisons like `==` (so guess what happens when you evaluate `a & b == 1`). Fuuuu.
Jan 29, 2019 ( ♥ 29 )
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Working on my first Postgres patch since 2017.
With more dangerous pointer casts than lines of code, C is terrifying, but there's also satisfaction working so close to the metal. Before this, I hadn't had to think about how values look in binary or endianness since university.
Jan 27, 2019 ( ♥ 38 )
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“World of Tomorrow” (short film) is the craziest, weirdest, most original thing I've seen in a long time.
Also comes with uncomfortable levels of insight: “That is the thing about the present, Emily Prime. You only appreciate it when it is the past.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_…
Jan 24, 2019 ( ♥ 12 )
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Unfortunately, I ran into a problem yesterday that required reinstalling Rust —
Fortunately, ripping out and reinstalling the entire toolchain including nightly, rustfmt, and clippy took < 5 min (there's even `rustup self uninstall`). If only all software were so well behaved!
Jan 20, 2019 ( ♥ 21 )
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“All Along the Watchtower” is one of the best songs ever written, and Bear McCreary's composition for Battlestar Galactica is the best variant of it.
Pause for a moment. Turn up the volume (not generally, but for some temporary extra detail). Listen.
Jan 18, 2019 ( ♥ 32 )
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I love the faded look and character of these old fitness installations around the track in Golden Gate Park (remember how cool wooden playgrounds were when they still existed?).
Did the vault bar and push ups.
Jan 13, 2019 ( ♥ 9 )
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Even having read about them a hundred times before, I still need to refresh my memory on the different SQL JOINs once a year or so (doing application development, `INNER JOIN` isn’t just the common case — it rules supreme).
Here’s a novel take on them:
Jan 12, 2019 ( ♥ 47 )
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How to add a home screen link in iOS with an arbitrary URL, involving activating airplane mode to trick iOS into giving you the link you want.
(Normally, Safari chooses a URL for you even if you're at the exact location you want.)
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Even after all these years, the Bow is still my favourite river. It looks its best in the winter.
Jan 1, 2019 ( ♥ 19 )
2018
December
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The only accomplishments I can claim for the last couple weeks are inhaling ~45,000 Calories worth of excessively rich food and reading 300+ chapters of Naruto.
I can't think of a better time to set some more ambitious goals for 2019.
Dec 31, 2018 ( ♥ 18 )
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To this day, one of my favorite pieces of independent software is still Plex —
Built by a small shop, but more refined, flexible, reliable, and beautiful than competing products from ~trillion dollar companies, despite having a much broader problem to solve.
Dec 20, 2018 ( ♥ 24 )
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Lovely writing on the beauty of rain (and why some of us like it so much).
“Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a thousand times more sexy than a sunburnt palm, and more primal and contemplative, too.”
Dec 15, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
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Hah, genius :)
We most often talk about what features a programming language has, but just as important are what features it *doesn't* have. It is possible to write good C++, but the odds are way against you.
Dec 14, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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Just checked, and I'm a few months away from having owned Air Pods for two years.
Given the nature of the hardware (wireless, tiny batteries), I'm **astonished** at how reliable and durable they've been over that lifespan. Quite possibly the best product Apple's ever shipped.
Dec 14, 2018 ( ♥ 25 )
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A few shots from SF's botanical garden in Golden Gate Park.
Contains, amongst other things, the most peaceful redwood grove within city limits. (And it's always free with proof of a local address).
Dec 9, 2018 ( ♥ 24 )
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This account from an ex-Oracle engineer on what it's like to work on Oracle is tooth-gnashingly painful.
Fast unit tests and a suite that runs in minutes locally (or less!) is productivity manifest. Making CI the dev feedback loop embraces the opposite.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184429…
Dec 8, 2018 ( ♥ 74 )
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I retooled sorg to decouple from Flickr yesterday. I like the service, but not enough to justify a pro account.
The new implementation is a YAML file + Dropbox. Good for fewer moving parts, but still a little sad — Flickr must have been my oldest still-in-use internet service.
Dec 2, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
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RT @simonw: As @brandur points out in this excellent article, a big benefit of Redis Streams is it lets you use Kafka-style primitives without first spinning up a Kafka cluster brandur.org/redis-streams
Dec 1, 2018 ( ♥ 19 )
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A nice update in where Rust is at today with async/await in nightly, including how to get backwards compatibility with “old” futures.
My favourite part is how new futures return just a single type so you can use `Result` and all its furnishings like `?`.
Dec 1, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
November
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The coming decades will show that trusting the free market to do the right thing with respect to housing is one of our civilization's greatest errors.
The wealthy maximize ROI (and housing is a great asset). Land owners maximize rent (and that's AirBnB).
theguardian.com/cities/2018/no…
Nov 29, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
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At a sale from Self Edge bought Pure Blue Japan, known for their raw denim's "slubby" texture (thick, uneven weave).
Unsanforized (sanforized = treated to minimize shrinking) and not prewashed, they're expected to shrink on 1st soak. These shrunk ~2 sizes and from baggy to slim.
Nov 28, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
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Rewatched Oblivion (2013): Amazing narrative structure that reveals little pieces throughout, and you don't have the whole picture until the final few minutes. Epic soundtrack too.
Its only mistake in not being considered a sci-fi classic was that it wasn't made in the 80s.
Nov 27, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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Great notes on HTTP/3 aka QUIC: I'd feel tepid on the idea of throwing away such a well-proven protocol as TCP, but am comforted that QUIC is probably what TCP would've looked like if its inventors had the benefit of seeing 30+ years of practical use.
blog.erratasec.com/2018/11/some-n…
Nov 27, 2018 ( ♥ 21 )
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Perspective out of loss: If one good thing comes out of weeks of living under a hellish cloud of smoke and ask — when (if?) it clears, it'll be a long time before any of us in California take clean air for granted again.
Surreal how much of 2018 has been defined by forest fires.
Nov 20, 2018 ( ♥ 7 )
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Jaw dropped reading this piece on Ruby fibers — EventMachine and its "fork the ecosystem" model all over again, 10 years later.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184840…
For a more pragmatic solution, consider using a language that cares enough about concurrency/performance to make it standard.
Nov 19, 2018 ( ♥ 9 )
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Trying to leave my realm of custom software by moving content to Hugo —
It's been surprisingly painful. Hugo's core is Go, but all user-space coding is done via markup/tags, so that nice compile-time checking vanishes. When you do something wrong, it's rarely obvious what it is.
Nov 18, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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Regardless of the complexity/cost added by an abstraction to guarantee distributed consistency, it will still be strictly less than that of the messy (and wrong) alternative to compensate for its absence at the application layer.
(Or, duct tape is more expensive than you think.)
Nov 12, 2018 ( ♥ 17 )
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Dropbox on scaling transactions between shards using a two-phase commit. Like Google, they've concluded correctly that the answer to scaling consistency isn't to throw it out, but rather to build a substrate to make it possible, even if it's difficult.
blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/11/c…
Nov 12, 2018 ( ♥ 60 )
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Maybe I'm romanticizing the past, but I swear to remember a time when A/V was easy.
These days (since 4k?) buying new technology is step 0. The next week is guessing at problems by reading underinformed arcana online, non-deterministically troubleshooting, and upgrading cables.
Nov 9, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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Of minor interest: implementing a stateless form of CSRF protection to allow a cross-site submission using the `Origin` header.
(Maybe noteworthy if you've never heard of a forbidden header before.)
Nov 4, 2018 ( ♥ 15 )
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Cautiously optimistic for this tiny book format.
I like paper better, but read ~entirely digitally these days for usability: size, portability, one-handed use. For 10+ years now, US paperbacks have been optimizing shape for the most exotic/awkward.
Nov 2, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
October
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Porto, which as it turns out, as the city on the outlet of the Duro River, legitimately exports as much port as the name suggests.
The number in the upper right on the sign on the huge barrel in the last photo is the holding capacity. 32,275 litres (with the largest being ~50k).
Oct 31, 2018 ( ♥ 10 )
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Some photos of a pair of bobcats shot by my dad in the neighborhood where I grew up. Just incredible.
Naturally, in the first shot he slowly walked up to the bobcat until he was at ~3m distance. As you do, (in Canada).
Oct 29, 2018 ( ♥ 19 )
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Great talk. TIL the Postgres B-tree will try to avoid a page split by opportunistically vacuuming an index page of dead tuples. Normally visibility lives only in the heap, but an exception is made for tuples unreachable from *any* possible transaction.
Oct 26, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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On the incompleteness of C:
Postgres is a database, but also a runtime (fully custom memory management infrastructure), a standard library (custom string builder, linked list, hash map, sorting, ...), and even language (custom longjmp-based try/catch/raise mechanisms).
Oct 24, 2018 ( ♥ 74 )
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Happy to report that Lisbon looks and feels exactly like you’d expect Lisbon to look and feel. Fascinating architecture, lots of colour, and steep hills.
Oct 24, 2018 ( ♥ 29 )
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In 2018, Make's error if you accidentally prefixed a command with four spaces instead of a tab is `*** missing separator. Stop.`, presumably because user hostility is a core design tenet.
Stop romanticizing Make/old Unix commands/shell scripts, and help make them die.
Oct 19, 2018 ( ♥ 61 )
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RT @PostgreSQL: Why is it important to manage client connections to your @PostgreSQL database? @brandur explains the effects of many connections on your database, as well as how to use connection poolers to help: brandur.org/postgres-conne…
Oct 15, 2018 ( ♥ 70 )
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Hitting connection limits in Postgres is a common problem to have (and a surprising one when you first run into it).
This piece covers a few ways to make efficient use of available connections through techniques like pools and minimum viable checkouts.
Oct 15, 2018 ( ♥ 43 )
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RT @sdw: One of the best photo collections I've seen in years of an overland trip traversing the old Silk Road. Suddenly very eager to visit Uzbekistan. imgur.com/gallery/5jOAsH0
Oct 13, 2018 ( ♥ 596 )
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In case you missed it: modern coupon sites are mostly fake deals. They do it because when you click a link, they redirect you to your target in a background tab and install a referral cookie.
Never even consider using one outside of an incognito window.
blog.usejournal.com/how-one-affili…
Oct 12, 2018 ( ♥ 12 )
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After the Banksy news last week I rewatched "Exit Through the Gift Shop".
Today, it's still not clear if it was a documentary or mockumentary, or who Banksy is.
In 2018, especially with the ubiquity of the WWW, this rare under-information is weirdly frustrating and tantalizing.
Oct 8, 2018 ( ♥ 10 )
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Upgraded to Mojave.
Apple knocked it out of the park with dark mode — just beautiful, and being integrated into all the default apps makes it real this time (as opposed to the idea's long history of hacks). The double night and day default wallpapers are such a nice touch too.
Oct 7, 2018 ( ♥ 16 )
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Between SB 827, CA net neutrality, public transport and street safety funding, extended parental leave, and even 4AM last call, there's rarely been a politician in history with Scott Wiener's track record for good taste.
(And he's right on this one too.)
Oct 5, 2018 ( ♥ 7 )
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Great take on the excellence of Go's concurrency model (and my sentiments exactly).
Green threads might not be as fast as a perfectly implemented async model, and they need a runtime, but they're still the right compromise between speed and usability.
eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/go-hits-t…
Oct 5, 2018 ( ♥ 19 )
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I have never been so afraid for GitHub in my life.
More integrations is generally good, but Jira is the exception. When software is this irredeemably bad, don't integrate with it, replace it. Remember GitHub Projects? Good idea. Now finish the other 50%.
blog.github.com/2018-10-04-ann…
Oct 5, 2018 ( ♥ 48 )
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An interesting post on using LLVM-based JIT compilation coming in Postgres 11.
Editorial: In practice Postgres w/ JIT + partitioning may outperform traditional data warehouses for those willing to keep data size in check. Hope to one day ditch Redshift.
Oct 4, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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A profile on the creator of Stardew Valley, who built the game solo — gameplay, art, story, music.
Staggering dedication, and a reminder of what's possible without organizational overhead. This guy ships more than entire departments of some companies.
Oct 2, 2018 ( ♥ 31 )
September
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`dbg!`, a tiny upcoming shortcut in Rust to print a value to stderr and through the power of macros, the line and expression that emitted it.
I love this kind of language nicety. It'll save ten seconds at a time, and thousands of hours in aggregate.
Sep 20, 2018 ( ♥ 11 )
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Every thread like this one it reminds me how much pent up demand for pedestrian-friendly urban environments there is out there. And yet, we've failed to produce even one in all of North America.
Our urban planners should be replaced. We need new blood.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180142…
Sep 19, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
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A correction from my piece on fast column defaults in Postgres is that `now()` is *not* volatile. When used with `DEFAULT` existing rows pick up that tx's `now()`, new rows get a current `now()` as they're added, and it's all fast. I'm even more amazed.
Sep 14, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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Mongo satirizes Mongo better than its critics ever could!
There are two paths in data architecture: use a relational database, or build a pale shadow of one in your app layer as you desperately try to shore up data integrity on your non-relational store.
Sep 11, 2018 ( ♥ 122 )
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My grandmother didn't want an internet connection because she was afraid that with textual communication possible, people wouldn't call anymore.
It seems silly on the surface, but she was absolutely right. In the age of text we speak with more people, but at lower fidelity.
Sep 11, 2018 ( ♥ 44 )
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“What kept me from doing that was a calm voice in my head telling me that I’m here to write a book, not a preprocessor. ... Now I have written two books and zero tools, which I consider a success.”
Amen. The Achilles heel of the developer/author.
Sep 6, 2018 ( ♥ 12 )
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I'm following Mojave and trying out a dark mode landing page.
Light text on black rendered poorly on screens for decades, which was frustrating because it looks *incredible* in print. Retina has since improved things a lot, even if I still wouldn't push it for long text pieces.
Sep 2, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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Had an interesting couple of days with Git LFS (Large File Storage).
GitHub's integration with it is impressive, but the subtleties around its magic ended up causing a lot of trouble by the end. I also burnt through GitHub's meager/not-well-advertised data quota in < 1h of use.
August
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I don't work on the frontend often, but when I do, I'm continually impressed by ~recent progress in browser APIs to make historically hard things easy.
e.g. Intersection Observer for lazy loading images. After a copy/paste I had this working in 10s flat.
developers.google.com/web/fundamenta…
Aug 31, 2018 ( ♥ 16 )
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Creating columns with DEFAULT values will now be fast in the upcoming Postgres 11 release. It seems like a small feature, but it's a *huge* improvement operationally.
I put together some background on why it's important here —
Aug 28, 2018 ( ♥ 102 )
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ACID transactions are the most important primitive for building large, robust systems there is. Bake them into your system from day one. Never, ever use MongoDB.
I like when I'm not the only saying this stuff. Here's FoundationDB's transaction manifesto:
apple.github.io/foundationdb/t…
Aug 27, 2018 ( ♥ 224 )
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A nice writeup on the development of Unix-like pseudo console infrastructure for Windows.
Prior to this, services like SSH on Windows servers would spawn off-screen consoles which were fed keystrokes and scraped for output to send back to clients. Crazy!
blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/20…
Aug 24, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
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A great Nginx feature I learned about recently is the `X-Accel` family of headers. They allow you to say, generate a temporary S3 URL, hand it off to be efficiently served by Nginx, and all masked under your own hostname.
Aug 24, 2018 ( ♥ 24 )
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A packaging system that doesn't allow classes and features to be definitively private so *no* outside access is allowed is one that's not complete.
A key problem in software is that as it grows absent strong controls, interfaces widen until everything is exposed to everything.
Aug 22, 2018 ( ♥ 12 )
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LHI003: He knows she tried to be forgiving, but who can just shrug away a guilty lie, a stab in the back? Such a mistake will change a relationship irreversibly, even if we have learned and would never repeat it. The princess's eyes grew narrower. She became more distant.
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A little daily inspiration: Muse, a 90-second video through an imaginary world with cyperpunk/Bladerunner vibes.
The quality of work produced by solo artists these days is a little terrifying because I don't completely understand how it's possible.
Aug 18, 2018 ( ♥ 16 )
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Monorepos are a really bad idea disguised as a good idea, and the mirage only evaporates once it's too late.
Shared tooling is nice, but there is no stronger downward force on software quality than tragedy of the commons, and a pervasive nihilism that stems from it.
Aug 15, 2018 ( ♥ 29 )
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An entertaining bug that I worked on recently: how enabling HTTP/2 and a subtle change in net/http's contract broke some existing Go clients. Hyrum's Law reigns supreme.
Aug 10, 2018 ( ♥ 18 )
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Barcelona's superblocks are an ingenious way to retrofit healthy urban design.
In San Francisco, we have exactly zero streets that are safe for walking/biking/play, and precious few places to escape traffic noise. We could stand to learn from Europe.
Aug 9, 2018 ( ♥ 24 )
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Over the years I've burned a lot of time arguing with people who can't accept that the word "literally" has a second definition — one that means figuratively.
Next time you use it, know that you're in the good company of Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Dickens: merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/…
Aug 6, 2018 ( ♥ 15 )
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RT @handmade_net: “We’re conditioned ourselves to think that waiting 30+ seconds for an app to load, or interrupting our workflow to watch a half second animations a thousand times a day, are perfectly normal.” -@brandur
#programming #ui
Aug 4, 2018 ( ♥ 41 )
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Happy to see the reactions to my article on minimalism. It's critical to stay inspired, and ideas like simplicity and ephemeralization inspire me.
At one time I saw them as common values, but now know well they're not, so I'm glad to help nudge them along, even if just a little.
Aug 3, 2018 ( ♥ 35 )
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RT @tambryantbutow: "Nothing operates flawlessly once it hits production. Every component in the stack is a candidate for failure, and with sufficient scale, something will be failing all the time." #neverforget -- @brandur brandur.org/minimalism
Aug 2, 2018 ( ♥ 88 )
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Happy to report api.stripe.com now supports HTTP/2 after dropping support for old crypto unlocked an upgrade path for us.
Go integrations on 1.6+ will start using HTTP/2 automatically. Upgrade stripe-php to get it. Support in other languages is more complex, but coming.
Aug 1, 2018 ( ♥ 80 )
July
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Reading the history of the Bay Area often brings about a nostalgia for a time and place long gone — one more interesting, and more optimistic.
I’ve never felt that as strongly as reading this thread on the Metreon.
Today, a cultural abyss. Yesterday, an ode to techno utopia. twitter.com/MaxKriegerVG/s…
Jul 30, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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The next time someone says that a test suite is slow because it's a big project, point out that you can build Postgres from scratch on a fast machine in ~30s and run its test suite in ~15s.
Test suites are slow because their progenitors were sloppy, not because they have to be.
Jul 27, 2018 ( ♥ 411 )
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LHI002: “I'm talking about cooperating. Favors. You do a favor for me, I'll do one for you. Get it?”
“Do one for me,” Yossarian requested.
“Not a chance,” Doc Daneeka answered.
Jul 27, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
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Issue a physical artifact by way of an API.
(And very excited to say that we'll have full support for Issuing across Stripe client libraries in seven languages and in stripe-mock on day one.) twitter.com/patrickc/statu…
Jul 26, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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Bad: broke iPhone screen trail running.
Good: used credit card fringe benefit for phone damage, and after some bureaucracic navigation, they paid. Apple botched repair, so I ended up with a new phone ~8 months after purchase.
Credit cards are kind of evil, but kind of great.
Jul 25, 2018 ( ♥ 9 )
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LHI001: The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
Jul 21, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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LHI000: I put together a few words on what we can learn in software about resilience and long term thinking from the design principles of a 10,000 year clock.
Jul 20, 2018 ( ♥ 15 )
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I don't always compliment Go, but we just looked into enabling HTTP/2 across our seven supported languages. In Go you get it automatically for both clients and servers using just `net/http`.
Excellent end user experience — 10x better than anything else and 100x better than most.
Jul 19, 2018 ( ♥ 138 )
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The newest episode of Hardcore History is on Japanese history and culture, and starts with the story of Hiroo Onoda, who held out alone in the Philippines and continued to fight WWII until 1974.
As per Dan Carlin's usual, it's excellent work.
Jul 18, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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The sun setting over Yosemite Valley.
(Seen through the smoke kicked up by yet another wildfire raging through California.)
Jul 17, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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There's nothing quite as nefarious as a technical decision made via Slack: stakeholders miss it if they're not around, points are poorly stated as they're strung across 50 half-baked thoughts, context exists across pages of jumbled noise, *and* it's time consuming.
I miss email.
Jul 12, 2018 ( ♥ 1033 )
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One of my favourite natural effects in San Francisco: morning sunlight filtering through the mist and eucalyptus of Mount Sutro.
Jul 7, 2018 ( ♥ 128 )
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I finally got around to reading “Vipassana for Hackers”.
Other books on the subject tend to contain (1) too much mysticism, and (2) too many words (more is said than necessary to reach book length). This short book is neither; it's practical and concise.
Jul 7, 2018 ( ♥ 18 )
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Nearly abandoned a project this morning after rediscovering the nightmarish quality of Twitter's API.
Four different mechanisms for authentication, none general. OAuth 2 supported, but only for appearance's sake — OAuth 1 still needed to say, post a tweet. Kafka would be proud.
Jul 6, 2018 ( ♥ 11 )
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A photography project for portraits of taxi drivers in Tokyo — there's already something magical about neon lights, and the bokeh and color in their reflection off glass makes them even more so.
olegtolstoy.com/whos-driving-t…
Jul 5, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
June
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iFixit's rigor in long term thinking is a refreshing counterpoint to modern Apple's "form over function" ethos.
“This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.”
Jun 28, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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The best Bash advice.
(Bash (or sh, zsh, etc.) is objective garbage as a programming language, but it’s garbage that’s ubiquitous, and that’s valuable. Just don’t let a Bash program grow beyond trivial size or you’ll pay for that low bar to entry later — in blood and tears.) twitter.com/copyconstruct/…
Jun 27, 2018 ( ♥ 101 )
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Excellent piece on Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong (among others).
Miyamoto attributes his creativity to being surrounded with nature when he was young. The story begins and ends with stumbling on a cave.
Jun 26, 2018 ( ♥ 9 )
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Interesting thread on whether people are deploying anything important on serverless.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that if there were a lot of large serverless deployments out there, we'd be seeing many more data points, and more notable ones too.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173787…
Jun 23, 2018 ( ♥ 28 )
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I finished my third Haruki Murakami book ("A Wild Sheep Chase") of the last couple years, and his brand of weird surrealism continues to delight.
I'm still thinking about "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" months after finishing it — surely the sign of a great book.
Jun 20, 2018 ( ♥ 9 )
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Submissions for National Geographic's Travel Photographer of the Year contest is a never-ending carousel of the most incredible photography you'll ever see — on everything from the most pristine nature to the densest urban environments. Here's 2018.
travel.nationalgeographic.com/photographer-o…
Jun 17, 2018 ( ♥ 28 )
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I tried to tell a story last night about camping out near a decommissioned nuclear reactor over the weekend, but no one at the table was event remotely impressed – apparently half of America grew up within spitting distance of one.
Still, I thought it was cool.
Jun 12, 2018 ( ♥ 15 )
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Even while REST is perfectly adequate as a modest baseline, I put together a few words on why I think GraphQL has the promise to lead to a generation of APIs that are more powerful, more discoverable, and most importantly, more adaptable.
Jun 8, 2018 ( ♥ 139 )
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Unpopular opinion: considerable restrictions on AirBnB are probably the right thing. The service is ultimately good for travelers (including me, many times), but *mostly* bad for locals, with the major exception being a wealthy rent-collecting class.
cntraveler.com/story/nearly-8…
Jun 8, 2018 ( ♥ 10 )
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We just released stripe-go v32 — a major overhaul that refines the implementation, fixes a lot of naming, and produces an API that can distinguish between a value that wasn't set from one that's explicitly empty.
Migration guide: github.com/stripe/stripe-…
Jun 6, 2018 ( ♥ 17 )
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I'll be championing Markdown in Git repositories until the day I die, but wow, Dropbox Paper is a near perfect WYSIWYG implementation —10x better than alternatives.
Tools like this exist, and yet companies pay real money for Confluence. Enterprise software is total madness.
Jun 5, 2018 ( ♥ 35 )
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Backyards in San Francisco are on average, more vibrant than most places in the world. A lot of that is climate, but there’s also a dose of tight constraints breeding creativity.
The boring facades you see along a street often don’t give you a feel for the quiet oases out back.
Jun 4, 2018 ( ♥ 10 )
May
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Some legitimate reasons to miss San Francisco: (1) running up mountains a few blocks from your front door, (2) car-free days in Golden Gate Park.
May 27, 2018 ( ♥ 19 )
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We're about to make a large-ish change to how API parameters are sent in stripe-go so that we handle places where zero values of types are meaningful. I've opened a small RFC, and would be interested in hearing from you if you have an opinion on it.
May 24, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
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The KVB at Volkspalast.
Sometimes the venue really helps make a show, and Leipzig is full of big, old, interesting places. Seeing one here is like what it would have felt like to hold a rock concert in an ancient Roman temple (but with a sound system from 2018).
May 22, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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Juniper (Rust GraphQL) just merged a “lookahead” feature making efficient data fetches possible by composing queries based on request introspection.
Calling DataLoader (the usual implementation) just “inelegant” is generous. This looks to be much better.
May 21, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
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A favourite part of Leipzig is the abundance of peaceful trails running through largely undeveloped greenery.
This is really close to what an optimal city should look like: dense residential surrounded by lots of natural space. Minimal roads. No parking lots.
May 21, 2018 ( ♥ 23 )
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And serendipitous running exploration find of the day: wild boar (not literally wild).
Not pictured: piglets scurrying around in the background. Boss boar so big that he might know a thing of two about the assassination of Robert Baratheon.
May 20, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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The Monument to the Battle of Nations, built on site 100 years after the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s decisive defeat that led to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It towers over you at 300 feet tall.
(Morning runs here are a little more interesting than home.)
May 19, 2018 ( ♥ 9 )
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Somewhat ironically given its content, 1984 sure manages to inspire some tremendously well-designed book covers.
(And imagine how many hundreds of editions of this book have been printed since it was published in ‘49.)
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`impl Trait` lands today in Rust 1.26. Its utility isn't obvious, but what you had to do before (trait objects) was a huge pain while learning.
Between that, Result from main, 128 bit integers, and async/await in sight, Rust stays the most exciting happening in software, by far.
May 10, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
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Only the most critical or widespread projects will make meaningful advances after their original authors leave, and only through incredible effort and tenacity by their inheritors after so much context is lost.
Be a good citizen: don't throw half-baked software over the fence.
May 10, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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Some images are powerful enough to pull you away from where you are now and take your mind to a fantastic place far away.
These “Forest of Liars” renderings are some of them. Absolutely gorgeous. twitter.com/sylvainsarrail…
May 8, 2018 ( ♥ 7 )
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An ingeniously-designed kit for pour-over coffee on the road.
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(I try to find something inspiring to look at in the morning. Here that is in the form of) some gorgeous Swiss mountainscapes.
May 2, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
April
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Compare an efficient keyboardist to a fast phone/tablet user and you’ll see a 10x+ productivity difference, yet the majority of R&D goes into touch UIs, or the exotic frontier.
There’s still many advances to be made in interface design, and they’re closer to home than we expect.
Apr 29, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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Another month in, I'm finally starting to feel semi-literate in Rust. It's the hardest programming language I've ever learnt, but it pays off.
Apr 27, 2018 ( ♥ 103 )
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A short story about moving a very hot rate limiting stack from a single standalone Redis to a 10-node Redis Cluster. Maybe the smoothest production rollout I've ever seen.
Apr 26, 2018 ( ♥ 44 )
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Great talk from @antirez yesterday on Redis streams.
A lot of thought has gone into this feature — not just in algorithmic efficiency, but space efficiency (radix tree + only one bit is used if an item's fields match its predecessor's), usability (consumer groups), and testing.
Apr 26, 2018 ( ♥ 25 )
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I find some inspiration in the About page for Offscreen, a magazine with no digital version.
All content online gets mixed together, and the asymptote of its perceived value is zero. 280 characters will be ever more normal as target content length.
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The fruit of the labor of the Bonsai associations from in and around San Francisco, gathered for the day in Japantown. Happy cherry blossom season!
Apr 23, 2018 ( ♥ 15 )
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Inspiring Rust moment of the day: my test suite takes ~8 s to run. `time` reports "user" as ~46 s.
With `time`, if user > real, you're seeing time spent on multiple cores.
If user >> real, you're seeing huge parallelization. My suite, using only Rust's normal tooling, shows 9x.
Apr 21, 2018 ( ♥ 16 )
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On Rust compile times: I was worried they’d trend out of control as code grows, but they’ve been fine.
For a big project, incremental is on par with a fast Ruby test suite, a fraction of a normal one, or an infinitesimal slice of a degenerate megasuite (found at Big Ruby shops).
Apr 20, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
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RT @dcurtis: In order of importance for San Francisco government—possibly the worst major city government in the country—to address:
1. Drugs/homeless/safety
....
99999. Scooters.
Apr 18, 2018 ( ♥ 307 )
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I read PEP 492 (async/await) and PEP 484 (type hints) for Python, and was impressed to see they've been implemented for years already.
(Probably don't use interpreted languages beyond scripting, but) Python is really moving.
Apr 17, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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I have a hard time not thinking about the tens of thousands of human hours lost rescuing state in systems that aren't safe at rest.
Here’s a tiny spark of a thought on baking resilience into online services. The 500 test: brandur.org/fragments/the-…
Apr 13, 2018 ( ♥ 23 )
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It looks like there's a good chance that a native form of async/await will be coming to Rust's core (as opposed to existing in packaged layers of macro spaghetti above it). This is really, *really* good news.
Apr 11, 2018 ( ♥ 59 )
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It was a tremendously beautiful rainy morning in San Francisco today. It's rare to ever see the city this lush.
Apr 7, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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The more I play with GraphQL, the more it seems like the obvious way forward for web APIs.
Strong conventions, introspection (GraphiQL is amazing), and improved change resilience (explicit field requests). You can still design great APIs minus the mystique/dogmatism of REST.
Apr 5, 2018 ( ♥ 43 )
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For all the silly platitudes thrown around in our field, the exaltation of refactoring isn't one of them — aggressive and continuous refinement is the only path to beautiful, sustainable software.
Any code that ossifies after being first written is almost certainly bad code.
Apr 3, 2018 ( ♥ 28 )
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Having lived in San Francisco’s SOMA district for five years before finally getting out, I’ll never again underestimate the value of silence.
It’s the most minute luxury in life. When you have access to it, you think nothing of it. When you don’t, you miss it dearly.
Apr 1, 2018 ( ♥ 57 )
March
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I spent some time building a toy web service in Rust and wrote about some of the best parts. This piece explores a type-safe actor framework, Postgres-friendly concurrency model, and middleware with compiler-enforced modularity.
Mar 27, 2018 ( ♥ 120 )
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Patriot (on Prime Video), a dark comedy about a nihilistic spy whose work in Europe leaves behind an ever more fragile web of loose ends, is some of the best TV made in years. Beautiful writing and cinematography. Highly recommended.
Mar 24, 2018 ( ♥ 10 )
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For those who made it here by way of HN — I want to clarify that despite my occasional critique, Rust is my favorite programming language, by far.
No project gets everything right, but Rust (and its great core + community) has consistently been more right than anything else.
Mar 23, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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RT @heinrichhartman: "Suddenly, the absurdity of the thought hit me like a ton of bricks: I was sitting in an Onsen looking forward to the next time I’d be able to sit in an Onsen. It was hard to imagine a more pathological example of cognitive degeneracy." -- @brandur / brandur.org/fragments/mind…
Mar 23, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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Application-level validations are optimistic — they work as long as you're 100% bug-free, and at low concurrency.
Database contraints are the only way to move from hoping data is valid to *knowing* it is. Use them. Don't use a database without them.
Mar 21, 2018 ( ♥ 47 )
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It's always surprising to see how bad most people are with docs, even when they're often the ones suffering for it.
You see countless of these in a day:
factory.create_widget() # creates a widget
But comments explaining what a widget is and why it's there? ~Non-existent.
Mar 20, 2018 ( ♥ 27 )
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Mocks and stubs are a powerful idea, but they're the unstable box of ancient dynamite of software engineering — more dangerous than they're worth.
There's nothing quite like tests that are 90% mocks and succeed at nothing but testing a specific internal implementation.
Mar 15, 2018 ( ♥ 34 )
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Really impressed by Google Cloud Platform so far. It's like AWS minus the obfuscated Amazonspeak, and with a better console.
The only service I miss is ACM — zero-hassle HTTPS is *such* a killer feature. A Kubernetes/Let's Encrypt Rube Goldberg machine just isn't the same.
Mar 13, 2018 ( ♥ 37 )
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Internal software frameworks are usually bad because they’re write-once refactor-never affairs.
Tragedy of the commons plays a big part — it’s easier to slather on a new layer of mud than to go back and apply a fix to the core, and future maintenance is everybody’s problem.
Mar 8, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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The HomePod sure makes a gorgeous room accent. The first Apple product in ages that I've willingly ordered in white.
Mar 5, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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These days when I move from a modern TV show to a modern game, like from “Altered Carbon” to “Horizon Zero Dawn”, paradoxically the latter feels more lifelike despite having no live actors. Far more immersive anyway.
(And wow, what a beautiful game.)
Mar 2, 2018 ( ♥ 9 )
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To balance my Rust enthusiasm with the occasional dose of cold reality: I've not once been able to use a crate to a meaningful extent without looking at its source code.
Docs are rich in type annotations, but useless. `examples` dirs are a great idea, but almost always trivial.
Mar 1, 2018 ( ♥ 7 )
February
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redis-cell 0.2.2 is released, with some great contributions from the @CartoDB team for correctness at very fast replenish rates. Its code has also been modernized, Clippy (lint) integrated, and the latest Rustfmt conventions adopted.
Feb 28, 2018 ( ♥ 23 )
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So good to see someone with a high profile talking about this. When a state loses its ability to build capital infrastructure, it loses agency over its own development. California's is long gone.
Feb 28, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
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Habits are frustrating. It’s so easy to break a good one and so hard to break a bad one.
Bad habits are on autopilot, but good ones, even if you have them going for weeks, easily turn one missed day turns into two, then three, and before you know it, are gone.
Feb 26, 2018 ( ♥ 18 )
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Running `kubectl apply -f kubernetes/` on a directory of (versioned) configuration files and watching an entire service mesh converge to its new target state is downright magical.
Feb 23, 2018 ( ♥ 17 )
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A connection pool that releases connections on `Drop` (i.e., destructor) when they leave scope like r2d2 in Rust opens up a new paradigm for connection management that is *so much* more resource efficient.
N workers can plausibly share << N connections. github.com/sfackler/r2d2
Feb 21, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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Here's Actix, a web framework for Rust, edging its way to the top of TechEmpower's lists to sit soundly alongside the highly optimized C/C++/Java code that's normally found there.
(Don't put too much stock in benchmarks, but this is pretty cool.)
Feb 20, 2018 ( ♥ 5 )
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v1.10: Builds are a little faster and more reliable, tests can cache results, runtime and the GC are faster, minor API tweaks, no significant language changes.
This is what I like about Go — you don't need a flashy new language feature to cut a release.
Feb 16, 2018 ( ♥ 11 )
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The more I think about the idea of no GC in production, the more I like it — memory growth that's almost perfectly bounded.
Here's my Rust service's memory use over ~5 hours running a periodic workload. The footprint is tiny, and baseline so flat that you could us it as a level.
Feb 14, 2018 ( ♥ 15 )
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"5 Centimeters per Second" has a slow, subtle beauty that I doubt anything in western film will ever approach. Makoto Shinkai (see also "Your Name" which is even better), is a genius.
Feb 13, 2018 ( ♥ 27 )
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My first Rust service with Diesel/Cloud SQL backend running on managed Kubernetes.
Lots of cool technologies to get there including cross-compilation to a musl target, multi-stage Docker build with a final tiny ~12 MB Alpine-based image, and binary-embedded Diesel migrations.
Feb 11, 2018 ( ♥ 23 )
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Interesting musings on the price of art from a musician who earlier in his career was selling $20 albums and now makes a few bucks from internet streaming.
The old model of buying a CD for a few songs was pretty broken, but the new one seems to be too.
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The experience reminded me that language tooling is as important to developer experience as syntax.
It's a new idea to offer integrated package and SDK version management as a core part of a language's distribution. When you've seen the light (e.g., Rust), it's hard to go back.
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After realizing that the SDK I'd downloaded from Microsoft was for .NET Core 2.0 and I needed 1.1, I looked up how to install a new target framework via the `dotnet` command before realizing that of course you can't do that.
I am so spoiled by `rustup`.
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Clippy is hands down the best linter ever built. By far.
With stylistic concerns automated away with Rustfmt, the linter's job becomes one to catch real problems. Clippy is so good at it that I was actually learning better Rust by fixing its warnings.
Feb 9, 2018 ( ♥ 9 )
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Explicitness (especially around type annotations) is a value widely and consistently held by people who've written a lot of code.
Reading someone else's code, or your own a year from now, you *always* wish that they/you'd taken the time to type a few extra characters.
Feb 7, 2018 ( ♥ 19 )
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When you create your API's /v2/, you have a choice between keeping /v1/ online forever or deprecating it and off-boarding users.
The former slows you down and latter exhausts you. This reason alone is why public APIs with non-negligible users should have only one version.
Feb 6, 2018 ( ♥ 13 )
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Impressed that Google Cloud will give you a 2-node HA Postgres cluster for ~$15/mo; the same as the cheapest single-node RDB.
Sustained use pricing is also more user-friendly than reserved instances — true elastic computing minus capital costs and math.
cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postg…
Feb 6, 2018 ( ♥ 18 )
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Watching rustfmt reflow code to satisfy maximum line width has got to be the most satisfying (small) thing in programming.
This is exactly how styling tools should be built: strong default conventions, but changeable via a conf file that's checked in with the project.
Feb 5, 2018 ( ♥ 13 )
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Somewhat ironically, my building's main noise problem (aside from cars) isn't young people with stereos, but an old guy who watches network TV at full volume ... 24 hours a day. This medium seriously cannot die soon enough.
Feb 3, 2018 ( ♥ 12 )
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One of the ideas for the High Line in New York was to make it a 7,920-foot-long swimming pool.
I’m happy with how it ended up, but what a great concept!
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RT @interfluidity: American politics now boils down to a contest over who can describe sets of events in the most nefariously conspiratorial light. Good decisions are sure to result.
Feb 3, 2018 ( ♥ 98 )
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The best kind of new feature — a common (and critical) database operation gets much better, and users don't have to do a thing. The little Oracle <-> Postgres disparity that's left continues to shrink every year.
Congrats @petervgeoghegan! twitter.com/petervgeoghega…
Feb 2, 2018 ( ♥ 23 )
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There's been a grace period of 10 years since the TLS 1.2 spec was published, and the time has come to make sure you're upgraded.
(PCI providers need to start shedding requests come June to stay compliant, so it's for real this time.)
Feb 1, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
January
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EDB’s building a new table storage backend in Postgres that uses a technique akin to Oracle’s undo log for MVCC (named “zheap”). No more table float or stalled VACUUMs. Fascinating.
rhaas.blogspot.com/2018/01/do-or-…
Jan 31, 2018 ( ♥ 6 )
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A fun aspect of production scale is that you don’t just hit your edge cases, you hit them often enough that they’re reliably reproducible.
Jan 31, 2018 ( ♥ 21 )
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The Dark Forest is even more interesting than its prequel — I’m still thinking about its ideas whenever I look up at a night sky.
(It’s also really nice to see hard science-fiction bubble to the top of the popular culture every once in a while.)
Jan 29, 2018 ( ♥ 12 )
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The story of why we don’t build powerful tooling for humans is told by common escalators.
Used correctly, they convey superhuman ability to climb stairs at double speed. In reality, people stand on them. Getting between floors is half as fast, but we can be five times as lazy.
Jan 26, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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RT @antirez: Blog post: “An update on Redis Streams development”: antirez.com/news/116
Jan 25, 2018 ( ♥ 51 )
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The world is really going to suffer deprived of those crappy two minute smartphone videos taken from thirty rows back with no optical zoom that literally no one has rewatched ever.
Jan 25, 2018 ( ♥ 4 )
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Saw a service go down yesterday. Likely cause was an upgrade in minor version of one gem made it incompatible with another gem that was patching its internal API.
There’s an argument for “responsible” Ruby, but a programming language that lets this happen is not a good one.
Jan 24, 2018 ( ♥ 46 )
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RT @PostgreSQL: Curious how atomicity happens in Postgres? @brandur explains it for you here - brandur.org/postgres-atomi…
Jan 23, 2018 ( ♥ 44 )
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Stunning photography of Chinese aquaculture. I'm sure those waterscapes have a healthy dose of inherent beauty, but the composition on these shots is pure genius; huge credit to the photographer (Tugo Cheng).
theguardian.com/artanddesign/g…
Jan 23, 2018 ( ♥ 7 )
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Recently got access to Safari, and was baffled to find that O'Reilly has eliminated downloadable formats for its books — it's hard to imagine a more hostile (distracting, poor ergonomics, etc.) reading environment than a web browser on a laptop.
Jan 22, 2018 ( ♥ 18 )
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I got one comment on HN today (intended unironically, but ironic at the meta level) explaining that it's wrong to be complimentary of Go because Turbo Pascal on DOS did it sooner, better.
My mistake. By way of apology, I've attached some beautiful Pascal syntax for admiration.
Jan 18, 2018 ( ♥ 21 )
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Go on Lambda is *really* compelling. It's fast, highly concurrent, is batteries included, but its most interesting features for serverless might be API stability and easy, robust deployments. A few more words on the subject:
Jan 17, 2018 ( ♥ 98 )
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After yesterday's events, I'm trying my first Twitter poll (even if I don't think the end is quite nigh).
What will the end of cryptomania look like?
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I'd missed that HHVM has permanently and irreparably fractured from PHP.
Maybe it's just me, but supporting a custom PHP-like lang/VM forever, ~alone, is such a morose idea, even if you're Facebook. OSS is good. Shared community effort is even better.
Jan 16, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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Random thoughts on Rust:
So much is amazing, but my god, I spent two hours today trying to figure out how to make a trait imply cloneable (and failed — see E0038). This is pretty normal, with huge swaths of time getting sunk into problems that are appallingly uninteresting.
Jan 16, 2018 ( ♥ 13 )
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Great to see Google writing in support of strongly consistent databases. Building on transaction-less databases (Mongo, etc.) is a great way to spend eternity desperately shoring up brittle code against a trillion edge cases caused by concurrent access.
cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/01/why-yo…
Jan 15, 2018 ( ♥ 92 )
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If you thought Go's `close(chan)` was cool:
(Rust) A control thread injects work and workers receive it by channel. Control waits for them to join after it finishes sending work and the channel closes automatically (and safely) as it `Drop`s from scope.
Jan 13, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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I just added another two years to my Nautilus subscription. I don't know of another magazine published with such consistently good and innovative content, and the print and PDF editions beautifully built — a project well worth supporting.
Jan 12, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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The design document for Redis' upcoming consumer groups is well worth the read. A complicated feature implemented in understandable terms.
gist.github.com/antirez/68e67f…
Jan 12, 2018 ( ♥ 14 )
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Love the shift in San Francisco’s usual sterile California weather. Just a little eerie and the most perfect temperature possible for running/walking.
(Pictured: Salesforce Tower and the Financial District from Tank Hill.)
Jan 9, 2018 ( ♥ 8 )
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RT @PostgreSQL: An example of building an idempotent API utilizing keys with @postgresql by @brandur
Jan 8, 2018 ( ♥ 22 )
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RT @Benoit_Tgt: (..) distinction between “simple” and “easy”: simplicity meaning the opposite of complex, and ease meaning “to be at hand” or “to be approachable” (...). Schemaless databases are not simple; they’re easy.https://t.co/64xwPA9vhM (by @brandur)
Jan 8, 2018 ( ♥ 7 )
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The best, totally unexpected improvement to smartphones over the last few years is their waterproofness. It’s nice being able to run in the rain minus the ziplock bag.
Jan 6, 2018 ( ♥ 7 )
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A week and a half into daily Rust programming:
Every line is a new death struggle with the compiler, but once that's done, you're done — the runtime confidence is freeing, even compared to other compiled languages like C#/C++/Go (Haskell is comparable, but less sane).
Jan 3, 2018 ( ♥ 24 )
2017
December
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The iPhone X’s ultra-wide aspect ratio isn’t so good for 3:2 photos anymore, but with it + AirPods (+ a lot of help from Plex) Apple’s accidentally created the best mobile home theatre setup of all time. Very close to flawless.
Dec 31, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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The icy Bow.
(Calgary, hovering between -25C and -33C, has reached a special kind of cold.)
Dec 30, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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(Also, I've sunk so many hours into Rust this holiday season that its error messages around moves/borrows/lifetimes are actually starting to make sense. God help me.)
Dec 29, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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Rust's `slog` is the most elegant logging I've ever seen: Its "compact" format will show structured log lines in a hierarchy so that you can actually read them. A few tiny helpers of your own keeps invocation succinct and clean. An async drain ensures perf.
Totally beautiful.
Dec 29, 2017 ( ♥ 28 )
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Here's Rust/Diesel's type system preventing me from loading a `BIGINT` into an `i32` (it needs an i64) at compile time. A little annoyance today to prevent horrific bugs tomorrow.
Dec 26, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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Hit 100 days on Headspace and now changing to new(ish) Oak meditation app.
Excellent so far — especially the configurable background noise. You’re not always in a quiet environment, and ambient noise can be a big help for focus.
Dec 24, 2017 ( ♥ 15 )
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Mongo zealot on HN: “It’s nice that Postgres supports JSON, but I’d like to see it come with a custom, non-standard form of JSON with timestamps like Mongo’s BSON.”
I’ll explain the concept of data types and typed schemas right after I’m through explaining the concept of irony.
Dec 23, 2017 ( ♥ 22 )
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GitHub's approach of providing few, powerful features that are extensible is much better than carpet bombing 1,000 non-distinct ones, 98% of which are left unused (JIRA).
Better for big projects, _way_ better for small and medium-sized projects.
Dec 21, 2017 ( ♥ 37 )
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Always impressed looking at the Kubernetes tag/CI/bot setup. github.com/kubernetes/kub…
Especially the tags.
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"Atomic Blonde" won't be remembered for its depth, but anything that takes place in Berlin with an 80s soundtrack this extensive is at the very least fun to watch.
Dec 21, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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Excellent piece on Tokio, Mio, futures, and tasks in Rust. Great detail and great depth. I didn't understand it all the first time around so I'm reading it again.
Dec 21, 2017 ( ♥ 11 )
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I was loving the iPhone's "raise to wake" feature until I tried running with it. Combined with the engorged power button, you're waking it up by accident once every ~5 seconds.
120,000+ employees at Apple and no one jogs?
Dec 20, 2017 ( ♥ 13 )
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Two recent LED acquistions. 7W and 36W respectively; both roughly as bright as the sun.
Flying cars, a moon base, and world peace have been frustratingly elusive, but the future has yielded amazing lighting technology beyond what anyone could have dreamt even as late as the 80s.
Dec 18, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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The Starry Expanse is rebuilding Riven from scratch and making it fully 3D this time around. The project’s been in progress since 2010 already. What a heroic effort.
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I ran my first deploy to Amazon's Fargate — it worked, but I'd been hoping for something ... simpler.
Despite Docker, containers, and Kubernetes, the world is still looking for a deployment and operational experience on par with Heroku in mid-2011. There's lots of room to grow.
Dec 13, 2017 ( ♥ 105 )
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RT @bitfield: The new Redis 'stream' data type (XADD/XRANGE) will provide a neat way of implementing the unified log pattern for distributed systems (with a little help from our friend Postgres) twitter.com/brandur/status…
Dec 12, 2017 ( ♥ 31 )
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Nice analysis of the High Sierra root exploit: objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x24…
Some blame the programmer and/or QA, but the problem was an unchecked pass-by-ref in a function that looks like it should return its result. Once again, the real culprit is a dangerous programming language.
Dec 8, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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It's fun looking at photos I took 10 years ago. I'm only a 10% better photographer since then, but technology is up 100x.
My first camera phone, a Motorola Krzr, took 2 megapixel images and they were *terrible*. These days, my dedicated camera is harder to justify every year.
Dec 7, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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I'm so happy to see that Terraform supports Datadog. I've been trying to figure out how to get plaintext-configured and versioned dashboards and alarms since literally the first time I saw a dashboard and alarm.
Dec 6, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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Very platform specific, but `-webkit-font-smoothing` and its brethren do *wonders* for text rendering on Mac OS. (In the bucket of "things I just found out about".)
If you have a lot of users on Macs, this ~2 line change might be easiest design win you ever make.
Dec 6, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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I hate the idea of reading books on phones, but we’re at the point where it’s the best option: always with you, line and page lengths let you read quickly, and pages turn instantly.
The iPhone X’s OLED and bigger screen makes it even better. iBooks night theme looks amazing.
Dec 6, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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This is cool: 99%+ bottles of Yebisu look like the one on the right. One in a few hundred look like the one on the left.
In these “Lucky Yebisus” the lucky god has an extra fish: look for the tail in the basket on the very left.
A tiny, yet ubiquitous, easter egg. Love it.
Dec 3, 2017 ( ♥ 19 )
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Last night in Japan. We didn’t want to pay for a hotel, so we’re hanging out at the Disneyworld of Onsens — complete with sleeping room and open until 9a.
Located on Tokyo’s artificial island Odaiba, also notable for having a 1:1 scale model of a Gundam.
Dec 3, 2017 ( ♥ 16 )
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Amazon knocked it out of the park this year at re:Invent: multi-master Aurora, Nitro (close-to-the-metal hypervisor) on new c5/m5 types, bare metal i3, EKS, Fargate.
So much to look at. Downloading talks for the flight back to SF (and on that note, still love `youtube-dl`).
Dec 3, 2017 ( ♥ 25 )
November
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Rust being injected into mainstream software in a significant way (and the proportional reduction in C++) is one of the most positive developments in software of the last decade. I'm optimistic that we see Servo go live in the next few years.
blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/1…
Nov 29, 2017 ( ♥ 18 )
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Excellent piece on first contact, a journey to China’s new observatory, (now the largest in the world by far), and speculation from Liu Cixin’s (author of The Three-Body Problem) on dark forest theory.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
Nov 28, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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Back issues of Brand magazine are simply not available in most of the world, and injuriously expensive to order online.
In Tokyo, you walk into a bookstore and pick any one of them up off a shelf. The sheer variety of products available in brick and mortar is hard to believe.
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This is probably overcompensation from living in dry climates all my life, but I love the moss out here. Such vibrant greens.
Nov 25, 2017 ( ♥ 22 )
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I _just_ realized that iOS 11’s Control Center is customizable and includes a low power mode toggle and quick launch for alarms.
(Tweeting just in case I’m not the only one because I’ve been wanting this for years.)
Nov 24, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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Sad (even if my feet are happy) to have finished our last day’s walk on the Kumano Kodo. What a magical place.
Nov 24, 2017 ( ♥ 15 )
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Yesterday we hiked into Yunomine, an Onsen discovered 2,000 years ago, and considered to be Japan’s oldest.
2nd image: Tsuboyu, an ancient (and quite modest) bath house carved into bedrock. 3rd: eggs for sale to cook in the 90C water bubbling out of the ground.
Nov 23, 2017 ( ♥ 15 )
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Workers along the Kumano Kodo taking a layer of bark from Japanese cypresses for use as traditional roofing on Shinto shrines — no power tools involved.
Pretty amazing watching these guys in action. I’d be happy to be half this good at anything.
Nov 22, 2017 ( ♥ 11 )
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Hiking the Kumano Kodo with a 14 L Mission Workshop Hauser. Luckily it’s not the most rigorous of treks, but I’m probably still forgetting a thing or five.
Nov 20, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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Woke up on Mount Koya to find its temples covered in a soft sheet of snow. At sunrise, trail ran from the Daimo gate to the top of Bentendake. Absolutely gorgeous.
Nov 20, 2017 ( ♥ 18 )
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Enjoyed this sober take on Bitcoin from The Economist: economist.com/blogs/buttonwo…
The tower’s going to fall, but with so many incentivized in keeping it standing, it’ll take a sizeable tremor to start the cascade. One day this is going to make history’s greatest case study.
Nov 18, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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Osaka. Sunday ~5 am. Thousands of people on the streets. I can’t tell whether most of them are waking up or going to sleep.
Nov 18, 2017 ( ♥ 22 )
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RT @olivierlacan: Scaling Postgres with Read Replicas & Using WAL to Counter Stale Reads brandur.org/postgres-reads
I’ve seen academic papers with less detail, context, and quality than this amazing piece from @brandur.
Nov 18, 2017 ( ♥ 28 )
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The best Google Maps trick ever (thanks @leinweber): "areas of interest" are shown in a subtle orange color around certain blocks. When traveling to unfamiliar cities, you can use them to find great places to stay and visit.
For example, here's Valencia/Mission in San Francisco.
Nov 17, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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RT @craigkerstiens: So I think I might quit writing blogs and just start pointing people to @brandur’s posts: brandur.org/postgres-reads
Nov 17, 2017 ( ♥ 31 )
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Japanese macaques (or snow monkeys; who live in the coldest environment of any nonhuman primate) warming up in one of Nagano’s hot springs.
There are ~100 of these guys, and they run by just inches from you — by far the most personal wild experience I’ve had in recent memory.
Nov 17, 2017 ( ♥ 22 )
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A great Japanese version (or at least as far as a non-Japanese speaker like myself can tell) of my article on how Ruby's memory allocator works. Translated by @hachi8833.
techracho.bpsinc.jp/hachi8833/2017…
Nov 16, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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Japan’s a “point a camera in any direction and the photo comes out beautiful” kind of place. Here’s the garden of a local shrine during a mild downpour.
Nov 15, 2017 ( ♥ 24 )
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There’s a room that you can walk into in the contemporary art museum in Kanazawa that’s open to the sky. Combined with the city’s natural propensity for rain, it’s quite a beautiful effect.
(And the piece is by James Turrell who did the skyscape at the de Young in SF.)
Nov 15, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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This looks like an orb floating in midair. It’s actually the view down the barrel of a WWII gun 68 feet long (and which fired a projectile weighing 2,100 pounds).
There’s some pretty interesting history lying around the parks of California.
Nov 11, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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Film photography, fine wine, and vinyl — all hobbies that are deeply irrational, and yet ... pretty cool.
(Having enough expensive vices already I have no intention of picking up any of them, but it's fascinating talking to passionate people who have.)
Nov 11, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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I'm about to visit Asia for a few weeks, and expect to publish issue no. 2 of my newsletter when I get back. It's sent only a few times a year, and may be of interest if you're into travel or software.
It's titled "Passages & Glass": passages-signup.herokuapp.com
Nov 10, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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RT @romainhuet: Did you know @stripe offers OpenAPI 2.0 & 3.0 specs? 📚📃✍️ github.com/stripe/openapi
You can now benefit from the whole OpenAPI ecosystem, and use tools like Paw by @luckymarmot or @postmanclient to explore our API and make your first requests without writing code! 🚀
Nov 10, 2017 ( ♥ 99 )
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Yesterday's toy project for Redis streams needs a prerelease branch of Redis to run. I like CI, so I had Travis build it from source before running tests.
The Redis download + unzip + make takes < 1 minute:
C (minus the ++) is pretty awesome.
Nov 9, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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The unified log is an inspiring idea in distributed architecture. Redis streams are the perfect foundation for one in most cases — user-friendly, ubiquitous, and cheap.
A little commentary and a unified log demo built on the prerelease branch: brandur.org/redis-streams
Nov 8, 2017 ( ♥ 94 )
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A podcast recommendation: I've been enjoying "Hurry Slowly".
On the importance of nature for mental wellness with Florence Williams: hurryslowly.co/002-florence-w…
On attention, creativity, and the nefarious effects of technology with Craig Mod: hurryslowly.co/003-craig-mod/
Nov 7, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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I missed some beautiful shots of the most friendly and photogenic trio of raccoons _ever_ because I couldn't figure out how to disable my AF-assist lamp in time (naturally, the toggle was hidden in a submenu of a submenu).
Lesson: know how to find every setting on your camera.
Nov 7, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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A tragedy of a drowning road system is that it takes every other mode of transport with it as crosswalks, bus/bike lanes, and sidewalks all become additional parking.
SF is slipping under and wishful thinking isn't going to save it — a serious congestion tax is the only way out.
Nov 7, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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I never got the appeal of Muji, but @keiko713 showed me today that its American prices are ~30-100% higher than its Japanese ones (which are still on the label).
Design and quality is good on any continent, but in Japan, prices are good too — making it a smart place to shop.
Nov 6, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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A little project for the weekend.
One of the few books I’ve ever seen that can’t be had for a good price from Amazon, with a range of offers from $120 to $200+. Our trusty local Japanese bookseller has it for $55.
Nov 4, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
October
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50 consecutive days of meditation. (The minor accountability provided by Headspace’s streak tracker helped a lot to get here.)
Oct 29, 2017 ( ♥ 21 )
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Implementing idempotency keys and cultivating passive safety in APIs built on Postgres.
Oct 27, 2017 ( ♥ 53 )
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Here's a photo shoot of small animals in various scenes like micro squirrels parked on vintage cameras and Indian star tortoises sitting on walnuts. Terrific work.
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One of my lovely neighbors broke their key off in the building's door and said nothing about it so that I could get out, but not back in.
Currently soliciting ideas for a George Bluth Sr. "And *that's* why — you *always* leave a note" lesson.
Oct 21, 2017 ( ♥ 12 )
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Really liking iOS 11 so far. You can have both the player *and* notifications from the lock screen. Everything on one page in control center! Reduced motion mode has *gasp*, (almost) no motion.
All very simple improvements, but infinitely better.
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RT @keiko713: Wrote a blog post about phantom WAL and Heroku Postgres follower hole issue: Battle With A Phantom WAL segment blog.keikooda.net/2017/10/18/bat…
Oct 18, 2017 ( ♥ 38 )
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Twitter's move to 280 characters is an interesting case study in the extreme. With the right conditions, even changing the length of a response field is a backwards-incompatible API change.
Oct 17, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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A neat public art installation in Glen Park in SF: A lens focuses the sun to burn a line in a redwood log. It's advanced every day, creating a new line.
After a year, it's moved to a new log. When complete, the trio will be an archive of three years of sun and weather.
Oct 15, 2017 ( ♥ 2667 )
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A boring story: For years my laptop had an SD card reader and I forgot it was there. I finally started using it a few months ago and it was great. Then I upgraded to a new MBP and that fleeting moment of convenience was gone.
Today, I use a dongle like Ives Himself intended.
Oct 15, 2017 ( ♥ 11 )
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Got my first Touch Bar Mac yesterday. Usefulness and usability-wise it's garbage, which isn't surprising.
What is surprising is that with its low-res display it also *looks* bad. Given their aesthetics-trumps-all mentality, quite out of character for Apple to ship this.
Oct 13, 2017 ( ♥ 14 )
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An experience I share here in California with relatives in Alberta/BC is that we all wake up to the drifting smoke of burning forests. Trends are sobering: iii.org/fact-statistic…
Humanity will eventually take its environmental impact seriously, but it'll be far too late.
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I'm jealous of GitLab's database setup.
about.gitlab.com/2017/10/02/sca…
The "sticky connections" section is especially interesting — operations are scaled out to followers, but *only* if current for a user (tracked by WAL position). Horizontal balancing minus the misery of stale reads.
Oct 10, 2017 ( ♥ 11 )
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Is there any chance we can just replace the SFMTA with the @SFMTrA? Only one of these organizations is ambitious enough to actually save lives. twitter.com/SFMTrA/status/…
(By their own admission, the city's progress on Vision Zero is ... zero visionzerosf.org/about/how-are-….)
Oct 7, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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The terrifying things even smart people will do when inheritance is available is consistently amazing; e.g. ancestry ~10 levels deep. Multiple inheritance is worse, but only by a step.
Abolishing all inheritance is a hallmark of a great modern language. Nice one Go and Rust :)
Oct 6, 2017 ( ♥ 19 )
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RT @romainhuet: So excited that @stripe now supports both the @w3c Payment Request API and Apple Pay with a single integration. 💳✨👌 stripe.com/docs/elements/…
Oct 3, 2017 ( ♥ 153 )
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Redis streams are great: antirez.com/news/114
Perfect for modestly-sized apps who don’t want to shell out $100+ for basic Kafka.
Oct 2, 2017 ( ♥ 31 )
September
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A few words on whether webhooks are still the right technology for a streaming APIs.
Sep 29, 2017 ( ♥ 29 )
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An astute point made in a fitting medium. Tools should be hard to learn, but the effort should pay off.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153566…
Sep 28, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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Gorgeous views from a hidden valley and unnamed ridge near Massive Mountain in the Rockies.
Sep 28, 2017 ( ♥ 16 )
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Brevity is nice, but Twitter's austerity so extreme that little of interest or meaning can be expressed.
This totally nails it. twitter.com/poniewozik/sta…
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Has Rick and Morty even had a single dud episode yet? Feels like every one is better than the last.
Sep 25, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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Long, but excellent writeup on Java 9’s new module system. A huge win for the maintainability of Java software.
openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsa…
Sep 24, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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This convinced me that the notch is bad. Reams of complexity so Apple can pretend it has an end-to-end display.
Sep 22, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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Not novel, but took a stab at formalizing the idea of staging jobs within transactional boundaries in an ACID store. brandur.org/job-drain
Sep 20, 2017 ( ♥ 17 )
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There’s nothing good about its characteristics in production, but Ruby is my go-to for pseudocode every time. Beautiful. Clear. Expressive.
Sep 20, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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Haha, this is some hard truth. From “Spec-ulation”, Rich Hickey’s take on semantic versioning.
Sep 20, 2017 ( ♥ 13 )
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This was a fun foray into optimizing our new form-encoding package in stripe-go.
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RT @philipbrown: Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency phlp.be/2ldqEE2 via @brandur
Sep 13, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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RT @craigkerstiens: Managing database migrations better in Postgres: craigkerstiens.com/2017/09/10/bet…
Sep 13, 2017 ( ♥ 19 )
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iPhone X: “… enable an entirely new experience that’s more fluid, more intuitive.”
As if the button wasn’t removed to make it look cooler.
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TIL that poor email etiquette, colloquially “top-posting”, has another name: TOFU (text over, fullquote under).
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This is cool. Containers serving lambda requests aren’t immediately discarded and can be reused.
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Some detail on CVE-2017-9805, which seems like a likely candidate for the Equifax breach in Apache Struts.
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RT @simonw: Hard to express the emotional reaction I had while reading this. Utterly horrifying. An amazing human story. twitter.com/inthefade/stat…
Sep 9, 2017 ( ♥ 13 )
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RT @craigkerstiens: Another great one from @brandur on atomic transactions to power idempotent APIs brandur.org/http-transacti…
Sep 9, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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RT @javisantana: reading every single article in @brandur 's blog. I don't remember seeing so much common sense in the same place: brandur.org/articles
Sep 9, 2017 ( ♥ 60 )
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Legitimately curious to see if Apple's upcoming event produces something I want to buy. Every recent product has been a Pyrrhic compromise.
Sep 8, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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We now have an OpenAPI 3.0 spec for Stripe. More supported JSON schema means that it’s far more accurate than 2.0.
Sep 8, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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Disturbing how public offices insist injury is tragically accidental. Our roads are built to trade safety for speed. twitter.com/benrosstransit…
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Aside from Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Watchmen, Wonder Woman is by far the best movie that DC’s ever produced.
Sep 7, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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As Canada raises rates infinitesimally from 0.75 to 1%, some discussion on the effect on real estate and inflation.
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Published a short piece on how to use transactions to build an idempotent API hardened against race conditions.
Sep 6, 2017 ( ♥ 43 )
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RT @bufo_alvarius: Building Robust Systems With ACID and Constraints by @brandur brandur.org/acid
Sep 5, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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Libraries for building CLI tools in Rust. Hope to start seeing more of these techniques in the wild.
-
Here's a quick recommendation of _Black Science_ which has some of the most gorgeous imagery to ever come to comics.
Sep 4, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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Lots of talk of math/bits and test helpers, but little of Go 1.9’s best feature: vendor no longer included in ./…
Sep 1, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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There’s a `position: sticky` in CSS now?! And just like that, more JS disappears. I need more designer friends.
-
CSS variable support is at 70+% already. If you’re willing to jettison IE users, you can plausibly use them today …
August
-
I’m just going to pitch this one more time before shutting up and sending the first copy.
-
Deferrable constraints so you can (for ex) insert two rows that reference each other despite FKs on both relations.
-
In light of the soon-to-come movie, it’s a great time to get better acquainted with Philip K Dick’s work.
theguardian.com/books/2017/aug…
Aug 30, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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A cautionary tale of rational engineering trumped by hardline marketing for a product with no technical merit.
Aug 29, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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RT @yukihiro_matz: link: The Limits of Copy-on-write: How Ruby Allocates Memory — Brandur Leach:
Aug 29, 2017 ( ♥ 40 )
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RT @tenderlove: The Limits of Copy-on-write: How Ruby Allocates Memory — Brandur Leach brandur.org/ruby-memory
Aug 28, 2017 ( ♥ 54 )
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On the internals of Ruby’s heap, copy-on-write, and why Unicorns inevitably bloat to the size of their parent.
Aug 28, 2017 ( ♥ 23 )
-
In 12 years not once did I notice that the Gorillaz made up a word in ”Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head”.
definitions.net/definition/cas…
Aug 27, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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Go 1.9 release Q: Is sync.Map typesafe? A: Yes, it uses interface{}.
Possibly why people have trouble with Go dogmatists ...
Aug 26, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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I’m loving WAL-G! Better throughput is good. Killing that taxing Python runtime dependency is even better.
Aug 24, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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I wonder if anyone will use logical replication to upgrade from PG 10 to 11 when the time comes. Possible in theory. No tooling in practice.
-
I'd be curious to hear about your system for supporting favourite independent content creators. (I don't have one.)
-
A++: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/wha…
Async/await is a better model than callbacks or promises, but still forces code to be designed around it.
Aug 23, 2017 ( ♥ 37 )
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On failing noisily and entrenched flaws becoming de facto standards. The subtle side effects of Postel's Maxim.
tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tho…
Aug 23, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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RT @schneems: ACID + humans means a chemical burn or hearing colors. ACID + postgres means consistent persistence find out how: brandur.org/postgres-atomi…
Aug 18, 2017 ( ♥ 12 )
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RT @craigkerstiens: Yet another awesome Postgres all about how Postgres and transactions work by @brandur - brandur.org/postgres-atomi…
Aug 16, 2017 ( ♥ 21 )
-
I published “How Postgres makes transactions atomic” which closely examines snapshots, xlog, clog, and the heap.
Aug 16, 2017 ( ♥ 82 )
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RT @romainhuet: We think of @stripe’s API as economic infrastructure. Learn from @brandur how we safely manage API versioning. stripe.com/blog/api-versi…
Aug 16, 2017 ( ♥ 54 )
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Put off learning lldb for the last five years. Spent one hour writing a reference and using it to trace Postgres. Now I feel like a Jedi.
Aug 15, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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I tried lldb’s `gui` mode for the first time today too. It needs a lot of work, but it’s pretty fun.
-
gdb + lldb have some of the most inscrutable UIs ever created, but you have to appreciate that keystroke frugality (b, br l, f, fr s, l, …).
-
This new bike parkade in Utrecht is mind blowing. Every country on Earth should be trying to learn from the Dutch.
Aug 11, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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Precious little left over for homes, parks, and people. Imagine how beautiful a well designed city could be.
Aug 11, 2017 ( ♥ 16 )
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Nice piece on partitioning from Citus. A bad key decision might take years to unwind, so think deeply in advance.
Aug 9, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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A list of major projects to improve pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure in urban centers around the world.
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I find AirBnB as convenient as anyone, but full time units and increasing local rents are as natural as gravity.
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There's also an attached stationary boutique that sells Midori. This building has the most interesting set of shops in San Francisco.
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And Heath News Stand is great. Easy place to find the best magazines like Nautilus, Drift, and the Surfer's Journal.
-
It’s a great day to rewatch Alan Kay’s excellent talk “Is it really complex? Or did we just make it complicated?”
Aug 4, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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We just added request traces to Stripe’s Ruby library for dead simple operational visibility. Please try them out!
Aug 3, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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Put together a few words on what it’s like to publish an HTML email newsletter in 2017.
Aug 2, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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Best guide I could find to understanding today's Bitcoin Cash fork. In short, yes it's a fork, but a modest one.
blog.bridge21.io/before-and-aft…
Aug 1, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
July
-
TIL that HTML5 added `placeholder` for <input>. Love seeing clumsy JS replaced with good, standard implementations.
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RT @hunleyd: #Postgres Job Queues & Failure By #MVCC — Brandur Leach j.mp/2uFT7so t.co/1f0FGOiAxB
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RT @mschoening: Dynamically typed languages...
Jul 26, 2017 ( ♥ 14 )
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Ensuring only one copy of a running program with abstract sockets (and no filesystem garbage).
blog.petrzemek.net/2017/07/24/ens…
Jul 25, 2017 ( ♥ 11 )
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eprintln! is a great idea. In practice, printing to stdout/stderr is what pretty much everyone really wants to do.
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Implementing a decoder for “Rack-style” forms (map[key][]=…). Complicated enough to be the best argument for JSON input that I’ve ever seen.
Jul 20, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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Stumbled across B's Berlin issue at Kinokuniya. Beautiful work. The city's is so amazing that even magazines on it are inspirational.
Jul 16, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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We used to envy Riak’s technology. It was probably never a good idea, but even so, the future seemed brighter.
-
Bitcoin is better than HBO. Still priced at $2400, but the cliffs are starting to materialize out of the fog.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147587…
Jul 13, 2017 ( ♥ 11 )
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In Chrome you can paste a screenshot into a GitHub issue/PR using the “Ctrl series” of shortcuts like ⌘-Ctrl-Shift-4 (for clipboard copy).
Jul 2, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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The landscape photography in the “Fortitude” TV series is just ridiculously beautiful. (Filmed in Iceland of course!)
Jul 2, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
June
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cmark2jira: A tiny Vim-pluggable program so you never have to type in JIRA’s needlessly divergent markup again.
Jun 26, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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Amazing. Again and again, the SFMTA demonstrates how to be committed to Vision Zero by way of hollow rhetoric only.
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The soundtrack for Interstellar is exactly as epic as you might expect.
open.spotify.com/track/3wa4t4bc…
Jun 24, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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I got a good chuckle from this piece on the confining shackles of relational data.
Jun 20, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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From Pillar Point, where the Mavericks occur off the coast in winter. Beautiful area for day exploration.
Jun 18, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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Great article on our bad habit of pushing problems into the future. Ask not when governments will default, but how.
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I spend more time formatting text in Confluence than writing it. It’s amazing how a tool this dull can become an industry standard.
Jun 13, 2017 ( ♥ 13 )
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Compilation in Rust 1.18 is 15-20% faster; not bad for a point release.
blog.rust-lang.org/2017/06/08/Rus…
Jun 8, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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Lets just hope that Wirth’s Law doesn’t catch up before release in December. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_l…
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Yesterday’s Mac refreshes were the most encouraging thing to come out of Apple in years; hopefully a sign of return to undistorted reality.
Jun 6, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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Gaiman's “Norse Mythology” is beautiful. Dark stories of gods who are heroic and wise, but also vengeful and childish.
Jun 6, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
May
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RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome summary of modern advanced cloud database: brandur.org/cloud-databases
May 31, 2017 ( ♥ 36 )
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In Mongo, you can’t have model validation. If it fails after state has been changed elsewhere in an operation, your DB is now inconsistent.
-
RT @easiestnameever: A Comparison of Advanced, Modern Cloud Databases — thanks @brandur brandur.org/cloud-database…
May 29, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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A month on Headspace: meditated 29 of the last 32 days. Even the light accountability from an app seems to work.
May 27, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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Rust’s inclusive range operator will be `..=`.
`..` vs `…` was always unintuitive at best, and dangerous at worst.
-
New York 2140 was the best sci-fi I’ve read in a while. Neat premise and interesting prose.
May 27, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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It looks like we can expect faster Spanner operations to come! This is some very cool technology.
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Exactly what gridlocked SF needs: public transit even less competitive with private parking and Uber/Lyft.
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RT @jasondmoss: A Comparison of Advanced, Modern Cloud Databases
A non-exhaustive primer of modern cloud database solutions
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RT @grescoe: Need a vacation from traffic? 11 gorgeous car-free places around the world (incl. Leonard Cohen's Hydra). bit.ly/2qVHNK0
May 18, 2017 ( ♥ 17 )
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When talking databases, we spend a lot of time on surface veneer when we should be focusing on the foundations for operable software.
May 16, 2017 ( ♥ 5 )
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RT @craigkerstiens: Always enjoy what @brandur writes, another nice read on ACID and constraints - brandur.org/acid
May 16, 2017 ( ♥ 9 )
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Very exciting progress on Rust’s incremental compilation towards a faster edit-compile-debug loop.
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An aspirational piece on reducing moving parts, retiring things, and KISS at Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
May 13, 2017 ( ♥ 21 )
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The Atrium under LinkedIn is such a beautiful space. The walls slide open around midday and it becomes open air.
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Postgres is now available with HA on all three major clouds. No excuses left for using questionable databases.
azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services…
May 10, 2017 ( ♥ 18 )
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Fun walk up Mount Diablo last weekend. Looking forward to returning for tarantula season.
May 10, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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I tried to summarize how Mongo came into its reputation of losing data (and how it can be durable today).
May 7, 2017 ( ♥ 42 )
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Excited to say that Stripe webhooks are now signed and most of our libraries provide helpers to easily verify them.
May 5, 2017 ( ♥ 12 )
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The chasm between the places we all understand to be beautiful and the smoggy hellscapes we build is fascinating.
May 5, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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At this point a collapse of Canadian housing is preferable to today’s rough trend — a generational caste system based on real estate access.
May 4, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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TypeScript is an obvious improvement over JS, but why set the bar so low? Is it just for backwards compatibility?
May 2, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
April
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I’m interested in OS packaging, but clueless about it. Here’s the patch to get Alacritty building into a .app/.dmg.
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Partitioning, indexes, a short anecdote of Mongo v. Postgres, and choosing good databases.
Apr 30, 2017 ( ♥ 13 )
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Zeit's CLI-based domain purchasing is neat. We talked about that at Heroku since circa 2011, but didn't execute.
Apr 29, 2017 ( ♥ 22 )
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A few words to disspell the common misconception that GraphQL APIs are inherently non-performant.
Apr 25, 2017 ( ♥ 17 )
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And a great conversation about how apps exploit human weaknesses to hijack our attention, and what to do about it.
Apr 24, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
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Great long form piece on why cascading makes CSS incredibly painful to scale (2016).
-
gpg-agent/ssh-agent and shell env var injection, in theory: elegant example of the Unix philosophy.
In practice: configuration nightmare.
Apr 20, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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I started using ctrl-py-matcher for CtrlP matching in Vim. It’s a quantum leap forward if you’re in big repos.
-
Masterpiece from The Economist on how minimum parking rules and parking subsidization mandate terrible cities.
Apr 8, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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This 5-line POC was worth $10k. Lots of interesting lessons on why to avoid an overly permissive language in here.
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After paying ~$480k for MRuby bug bounties, Shopify gave up, rolled out kernel sandboxing, and cut bounties 10x.
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Apparently at some point I took a wrong turn in life.
Apr 6, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
March
-
I’m obnoxiously proud of my first patch to Postgres. Thanks @petervgeoghegan for some serious assists!
Mar 31, 2017 ( ♥ 12 )
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RT @johnsheehan: This is required reading. Couldn't agree more with every bit of it. twitter.com/brandur/status…
Mar 31, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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A few words on GraphQL and how to build the next frontier of compelling web APIs.
Mar 31, 2017 ( ♥ 68 )
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Does anyone have an easy/fast way of getting new content like PDFs to iOS devices? I’ve been using Dropbox, but so many steps involved.
-
cURL’s author claimed that C wasn’t the cause of past security vulnerabilities.
But then someone fact checked.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139669…
Mar 27, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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Excellent discussion on maintaining an independent blog in the age of social media.
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Built my first flexbox layout today. Still can be painful to debug, but good enough that I never want to touch a “float” or a “clear” again.
Mar 24, 2017 ( ♥ 14 )
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So hard to say how to handle this. The wealthy have no right to the city, but I’m not sure just being incumbent is as virtuous as portrayed.
-
Genius, Zapier. A few years in the Bay with a net worth under 7 figures is enough to give anyone existential angst.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138947…
Mar 17, 2017 ( ♥ 10 )
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Instead of lowering the bar everywhere to egregious WYSIWYG interfaces, we should be raising it by teaching the world Markdown.
Mar 14, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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Confluence is a perfectly bad example of optimizing for a little discoverability over any possibility of being able to use it productively.
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To the detriment of us all, time will show that Wirth’s law is more robust than Moore’s.
-
I’m embarrassed to admit how much I learnt from this article on unicode. It’s so good that I read it twice.
Mar 5, 2017 ( ♥ 36 )
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This level of self-awareness and reflection is vanishingly rare amongst programming language designers. Bravo Rust.
blog.rust-lang.org/2017/03/02/lan…
Mar 4, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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RT @anildash: Another excellent recent writing on tech architecture, @brandur on idempotency: stripe.com/blog/idempoten… Lucidly explains key concepts.
Mar 4, 2017 ( ♥ 60 )
February
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Writing Ruby without tests is like doing 120 km/h on the highway with a blindfold on.
Total catastrophe isn’t a question of if, but when.
Feb 28, 2017 ( ♥ 11 )
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On the rare days that I wake up at 4 and experience the hour’s calm and clarity, I realize how stupid it is not to do it every day.
Feb 25, 2017 ( ♥ 15 )
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RT @Runscope: Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency by @brandur: stripe.com/blog/idempoten…
Feb 23, 2017 ( ♥ 7 )
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“Innovation” is the wrong word given prior art like EC2 client tokens. Thanks for keeping me honest @danfarina :)
Feb 22, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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RT @happywebcoder: Another great API technique from @stripe: Idempotency keys stripe.com/blog/idempotency If I could, I'd pay @brandur to write…
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Idempotency keys in particular are a favorite HTTP API innovation from Stripe.
Feb 22, 2017 ( ♥ 30 )
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Advice for the 99%: don’t use the tech du jour. Do use an RDMS with ACID guarantees. Probably just use Postgres.
blog.sagemath.com/2017/02/09/ret…
Feb 9, 2017 ( ♥ 206 )
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Your database is the most important decision you’ll make in a tech stack. It will be a source of incredible leverage or profound sorrow.
Feb 9, 2017 ( ♥ 39 )
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Foundational software written in software that’s safe, approachable, and extensible is an important idea, and Rust is making it a reality.
Feb 6, 2017 ( ♥ 8 )
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I just landed my first patch into Alacritty, a Rust terminal. There are so many reasons to like this project.
Feb 6, 2017 ( ♥ 6 )
-
Unreasonably excited about plugins, sort.Slice, and server.Shutdown in Go 1.8. All solutions for real problems.
January
-
(Last Saturday) Beautiful terrain on the way up to Fort Point.
-
RT @mattgreenrocks: Superb. We squander tons of technology and the user's time for eye candy. twitter.com/brandur/status/825362681657831425
-
I wrote a contrarian piece arguing for user interfaces that are more like terminals, and less like the web.
Jan 28, 2017 ( ♥ 74 )
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It’s sad to see such a vibrant ecosystem go. Once Firefox is on WebExtensions, you may as well just use Chrome.
-
Great talk on why lauding violence and silencing minute differences in opinion isn’t good liberal policy.
-
RT @leinweber: @brandur look how many slack channels I’m in!
-
Timely article on the nefarious effect of modern technology on attention span. Don’t romanticize interrupts.
backchannel.com/how-i-got-my-a…
Jan 23, 2017 ( ♥ 12 )
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I’m really jealous of Paris’ mayor. SF would be a better place with someone even half as progressive at the helm.
-
My brother doing some Canadian sunbathing near Hidden Lake. Ambient high: -15C.
-
Some great timelapses of the new 35,000 metric ton Chernobyl sarcophagus being built and carted 300m into place.
Jan 8, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
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My dad managed to capture the one second all day that my parallel looked decent too.
Jan 1, 2017 ( ♥ 4 )
-
Glad to not the only one that notices this. I don’t go to movies in Canada anymore because the ads are so extreme.
2016
December
-
Browser-based interfaces like Electron and co. are being billed as the future, but they’re a future that’s distinctly worse than the past.
Dec 29, 2016 ( ♥ 11 )
-
I’d pay money for a Spotify client as fast and responsive as Winamp 2.* running on a 200 MHz Pentium in 1998.
Dec 29, 2016 ( ♥ 25 )
-
I’m very excited about Rocket. It’s Sinatra/Ruby with years more thinking to refine it to a far more perfect form.
Dec 27, 2016 ( ♥ 14 )
-
This would be an incredible tragedy for the interestingness of SF. I, for one, have resolved to spend more money.
-
Now that we’ll have AirPod reviews in about a week, here’s my prediction: they’re not very good.
Dec 16, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
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It just hit me, but podcasts are now my vastly preferred media format when measured by consumption time. TV and books aren’t even close.
-
I’m somewhat comforted by the nearly universal tepid reactions to the new MBP. Even Cupertino might have to pay attention this time.
-
It’s a huge honor for redis-cell to have been selected as the winner! What a fun project. Thank you Redis labs!
Dec 7, 2016 ( ♥ 19 )
-
”Team Tetris” and “success theater” are my new favorite organizational anti-patterns.
hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre…
Dec 5, 2016 ( ♥ 7 )
November
-
Was pleasantly surprised to discover that rclone’s crypt module is powered by NaCL.
-
RT @simonw: Smart description of great logging practice - I also learnt Heroku-style key=value logging has a formal name, logfmt brandur.org/logfmt twitter.com/brandur/status…
Nov 26, 2016 ( ♥ 14 )
-
Wrote a piece on “canonical log lines”, a cool idea for operational visibility at Stripe.
Nov 26, 2016 ( ♥ 61 )
-
5+ years into programming Ruby. Still awed by the sheer number of and breadth of ways this language lets you shoot yourself in the foot.
Nov 23, 2016 ( ♥ 14 )
-
“No Escape”, killing the Esc button habit in Vim: brandur.org/fragments/no-e…
(I went with Ctrl+C after all.)
-
Retraining Vim muscle memory to use Ctrl+L to leave normal mode in case the no-Esc phenomena spreads. Stockholm syndrome dialed to 11.
-
RT @itamarhaber: redis-cell: an API rate limiter as a Redis module - news.ycombinator.com/item?id=129797… by @brandur <- first module to written in #Rust, totally cool
-
Microsoft dominating the front page right now. What an upset compared to five years back.
Nov 16, 2016 ( ♥ 5 )
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I put a few old Star Trek scenes through Primitive. This program is incredible. github.com/fogleman/primi…
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Also, I’m loving the improvement in visual hygiene conveyed by the new `?` operator: github.com/brandur/redis-…
-
A site dedicated to tracking compile time performance in Rust. This work is as important as tuning runtime speed.
-
For anyone on stripe-ruby: I’d recommend upgrading to 1.56.1. We just squashed a pretty vicious memory leak.
-
The ~30 lines of code that bootstrap a Rust program that’s about to be run. Quite succinct and readable.
-
Cross-compiled binaries and automated CI-based releases to GitHub going in < 2 hours with rust-everywhere.
-
rustfmt check on line length is such a killer feature. It’s barely even possible to deviate from language conventions.
Nov 1, 2016 ( ♥ 5 )
October
-
The Esc key gets bumped and the Fn key gets to stay and continue eating prime real estate. Most disappointing Mac refresh of all time.
Oct 27, 2016 ( ♥ 10 )
-
Great seeing Rust take fast edit-compile-debug seriously. Of paramount importance day-to-day, but so often ignored.
Oct 25, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
It’s a little depressing how hard it is to make columns look good and be pragmatic on a screen. Not even The New Yorker will go near them.
-
Just watched ”Oblivion” (2013). Maybe a little heavy on the sci-fi tropes, but still an A+ movie.
-
Why walled gardens are bad: Mozilla changes APIs, breaking add-ons, then takes a week and half to approve a fix.
-
Learn more about Redshift gotchas in 30 seconds than the official docs will tell you in 3 hours.
Oct 11, 2016 ( ♥ 7 )
-
Imagine if Andromeda focused on native performance over web-based everything and function over form (animations, copious whitespace).
-
Just finished Mr. Robot S2. I can no longer tell whether this show is genius or just preposterously dramatic.
Oct 1, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
September
-
I totally missed that CloudFront added support for HTTP/2. That’s awesome.
-
I’m absolutely loving GitHub’s new code review feature. Easily the best implementation of this idea I’ve ever seen.
Sep 16, 2016 ( ♥ 8 )
-
The new “Projects” feature is really fun to use too. With just a little luck, this could be the end of Trello and JIRA.
Sep 14, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
GitHub Universe’s announcements were a lot more exciting than anything Apple did in September.
Sep 14, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
DB migrations at scale (20 PB!) are nearly impossibly difficult, but laudable when pulled off. Bravo Yandex!
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124890…
Sep 13, 2016 ( ♥ 5 )
-
The problem with being at home: too many treats. Even with a daily 10+ km I can’t stay calorie neutral.
-
From the bucket of things I never expected to see, the Magic: The Gathering World Championship final.
Sep 4, 2016 ( ♥ 12 )
August
-
Living through years of Monday to Saturday (and often Sunday) 8 AM to 7 PM next door construction is enough to NIMBYize anyone.
-
And the (currently hypothetical) talk of replacing libpq and pg gem in Rails with a Rust package is exciting to say the least.
-
There’s a great discussion on the Postgres wire protocol in this episode of ”The Bike Shed”.
-
Another eel: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123758…
But seriously, I hope good alternatives appear before I end up rolling my own NaCL-based vault.
-
Repost of a 2014 article on housing in the Bay Area. Though slightly dated, it’s still the best ever written.
-
GItLab’s slash commands are a game changer.
More of this and less clicking on little boxes please.
Aug 23, 2016 ( ♥ 5 )
-
Around here, you can tell that a new Tartine has opened without even looking at the sign.
-
Goroutines and channels are perfect primitives, but there’s room for a worker queue abstraction in the language.
-
“taxpayers are subsidising housing borrowers to the tune of up to $150 billion a year, or 1% of GDP”
-
Check out our new docs: stripe.com/docs
Features a great new design, fast XHR loading, rich code snippets, and contextual API keys.
Aug 18, 2016 ( ♥ 10 )
-
Building a robust state machine to run cloud servers by @danfarina.
-
I just realized today that Splunk uses Highcharts for their visualizations. What a great library.
-
Had a great run across the bridge today, then immediately undid by getting a fully loaded coffee at Philz.
Aug 7, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
The only reason we don’t have drivers doing this in San Francisco is that there aren’t any pedestrian-only paths.
-
Very sloppy indentation from Mr. Robot. They didn’t quite manage to capture the OCD of real hackers.
Aug 4, 2016 ( ♥ 15 )
-
RT @leinweber: Problem: I want to add/drop/change a column or index on a live db
Aug 2, 2016 ( ♥ 106 )
-
The best pro-Postgres article you’ll read this year: githubengineering.com/gh-ost-github-…
Aug 2, 2016 ( ♥ 26 )
-
I get nostalgic when reading engineering documents written as Gists. Their page layout and formatting is perfect.
Aug 2, 2016 ( ♥ 8 )
July
-
Like you needed another reason to never use Comodo, but here’s one anyway.
thehackerblog.com/keeping-positi…
Previously: letsencrypt.org/2016/06/23/def…
-
A measurably more informed meta-explanation of Uber’s Postgres article earlier this week.
-
Picked up the idea of verifying env vars in CLIs (liked Etcd) off a CoreOS talk at HeavyBit’s DevGuild this week.
-
A few words on the unbalanced nature of hype when it comes to new technology.
-
Proof that it’s possible to build a compelling case for any idea. Jar Jar Binks is Supreme Leader Snoke:
-
Beautiful magazine of the week: “Cereal”, a travel and style publication out of the UK.
Jul 18, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
Great article on Lionhead.
”Molyneux's other directive: Fable 2 must have a dog. And that dog must die.”
-
Imagine a city built with pedestrian paths through protected tree-lined groves. Not conventional, but possible.
-
Wow, collapsable comments on Hacker News. I never thought I’d live long enough to see the day.
Jul 15, 2016 ( ♥ 5 )
-
Interesting take on underlying Marxist themes in “Spirited Away”.
-
A beautifully laid out page for Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design.
-
The SF dilemma: don’t really want to carry around a coat all day, but kind of want one for later tonight.
June
-
An example of a C to Rust rewrite largely for reasons of security. Hopefully the first of many.
-
An Apple employee tried to convince me today that the Watch was a big surprise when it landed. Reality distortion field still at full power.
Jun 30, 2016 ( ♥ 6 )
-
Catching up on what’s possibly the only series more epic than “A Song of Fire and Ice”.
-
AFK while I go get my Icelandic flag and Brennivín.
-
“Roy Hodgson, who gets paid £3.5 million a year, just lost to an Iceland manager who is a part time dentist.”
-
Picked up “Amazing Layout Design” today. It’s an absolutely amazing resource for design inspiration.
Jun 26, 2016 ( ♥ 7 )
-
Totally understandable though.
Who could’ve known that putting up “we live here” ads in SOMA wouldn’t be an effective speed deterrent!
-
Two dead bicyclists in two separate incidents in SF today due to excessive speed.
Vision Zero is just a hair’s breadth out of reach!
-
I enjoyed “Food Rules“. If there were rules this succinct for all good habits, we’d all be a lot more healthy.
-
8 years of < 0.5% interest, yet all but one member calls for +1-2% in 2017. Fantasy or dishonesty; take your pick.
-
It took four years to make even minor incremental progress on this deranged behavior.
-
Do members of the Java community have feelings about Lombok? We’re considering its use in Stripe’s Java bindings.
-
I’m convinced that many savvy couples are buying artificial diamonds for each other and no one else has a clue.
Jun 18, 2016 ( ♥ 5 )
-
It turns out that like many other things, drawing up a meditation calendar was the easy part. Actual meditation has so far been elusive.
Jun 15, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
Just what the world needed: annoying effects on text messages.
Next up Apple will be announcing the revival of the <marquee> tag.
Jun 13, 2016 ( ♥ 9 )
-
Ran a short Calorie counting experiment last week. Conclusion: my eating habits are terrifyingly bad.
-
Apple, don’t totally compromise usability for perceived aesthetics. There’s still time to avoid this catastrophe.
-
One day I hope to see even _one_ North American city making efforts on this scale.
-
Japan is going to show the world the limits of debt-fueled growth. It’s more of a question of where the ceiling is.
-
With masterful use of promises and callback abstractions, you can almost get back to readable source code.
Jun 1, 2016 ( ♥ 11 )
May
-
RT @paulg: How journalism became "Go troll Twitter for something to get mad about." goo.gl/IBTCxH
May 29, 2016 ( ♥ 155 )
-
A dozen Lambda users; a dozen different frameworks to manage it.
-
RT @Michiel_DeWilde: Nice article of @brandur about static sites on AWS buff.ly/24OhXlu
-
“You are no longer half-human half-camera … wonderful if you want candid, real photographs.”
-
There is no team on Earth better at finding Kindles and iPads than Copenhagen airport security.
April
-
Think long and hard about whether you actually have big data before leaving that RDMS behind friends. It’s tempting to think you’re Google.
Apr 23, 2016 ( ♥ 18 )
-
A 2300-word document on how to build a 2-phase commit in Mongo to get consistency beyond the document level. docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutoria…
Apr 23, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
Head over to stripe.com/docs/api and bask in its newly ~instantaneous load time.
Brought to you by @michaelvillar and @romainhuet.
Apr 19, 2016 ( ♥ 23 )
-
RT @gudmundur: New version of Pliny out (https://t.co/PirHDDPJvW), now with @rollbar goodness (https://t.co/JcBRKx8eeV).
-
This episode of Surprisingly Awesome really helps to concrete the basics of musical theory. Highly recommended.
-
This should've happened fifteen years ago. But as they say, better late than never.
Apr 15, 2016 ( ♥ 9 )
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RT @apiaryio: 4/16 @github offices: World’s first ever hackathon focused on #APIDesign. Co-organized by our @manp. Join us! bit.ly/APIDesignHacka…
Apr 12, 2016 ( ♥ 7 )
-
A very informative article on Kubernetes and its predecessors at Google.
Apr 12, 2016 ( ♥ 6 )
-
If you’re in SF, you should considering coming to join us next Saturday at GitHub to talk about APIs!
Apr 10, 2016 ( ♥ 8 )
-
Using AWS Lambda as an online, serverless cron machine. brandur.org/aws-intrinsic-…
Apr 10, 2016 ( ♥ 27 )
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RT @gavingmiller: .@brandur great post on static sites: brandur.org/aws-intrinsic-… Appreciate the SSL & CD part, was the missing piece for me.
-
RT @bonjouryannick: Always great to read notes on languages from great developers: brandur.org/go Thanks @brandur.
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RT @tair: Excellent notes on #golang from a seasoned #ruby dev @brandur 👍Language features, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly brandur.org/go
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RT @rwdaigle: logfmt is still the most pragmatic, functional, and concise log output format I’ve seen. Keep it simple, folks! brandur.org/logfmt#human
Apr 1, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
March
-
Amended this article for the first time in years. logrus-style logfmt with a human-readable message is a good idea.
-
This is the single most concise example of the Go team’s “only we can be right” philosophy that I’ve found to date.
Mar 27, 2016 ( ♥ 10 )
-
It’s like Christmas every time a new Hardcore History episode is released.
King of Kings, episode II. dancarlin.com/hardcore-histo…
Mar 20, 2016 ( ♥ 4 )
-
I’m so used to printers failing in every creative way imaginable that when one is “just” out of paper, it takes time to realize it.
Mar 18, 2016 ( ♥ 5 )
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GitHub’s `ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md` is atrocious for anyone that writes commit messages.
-
Great “Common Sense” episode featuring its usual measured take on the Supreme Court's Justices and Apple encryption. dancarlin.com/product/common…
February
-
“This Must Be the Place” isn't a good movie, but its rendition of the Talking Heads song of the same name was great. youtube.com/watch?v=rVoPzA…
-
API Craft SF is holding an IoT event next week. You should come check it out!
-
I’m always surprised to see the low ratings of ”Pandorum”. It’s one of the best sci-fi *and* one of the best horror films of all time.
-
After two hours of native extension compilation problems, I now know more about Bundler and Nokogiri configuration than I ever wanted to.
-
Trying github.com/Homebrew/homeb… for service management on OSX today because the interface of `launchctl` is still trapped firmly in the 80s.
-
RT @obfuscurity: So many feels and fond memories of an amazing engineering culture recalled via @brandur’s take on Heroku Values. brandur.org/heroku-values
Feb 1, 2016 ( ♥ 15 )
January
-
First major UI error I’ve seen GitHub make: tabs changed to arrow thing on the PR view … but only from the code tab.
-
World’s most awesome club event: “We're dressing up DNA Lounge as Cyberdelia, the club from Hackers …”
-
Have been ignorant of CSS3’s “rem” (root em) unit all these years. It’s a far more sustainable way to build styles. github.com/brandur/org/co…
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I seem be the only person who didn’t like Star Wars VII, but by the time Disney releases episode XVII in 2025, I’ll have company.
-
Never thought I’d see the day: I was just issued a wildcard certificate for free. AWS Certificate Manager is amazing.
Jan 21, 2016 ( ♥ 7 )
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There is so much Canadian schadenfreude for Alberta despite the CAD’s value suggesting that all the country’s eggs were in one basket.
-
Bitcoin: better than fiction. medium.com/@octskyward/th…
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There’s nothing better for improving humility than attending your local Haskell meetup. First talk lost me in ~5 minutes.
Jan 14, 2016 ( ♥ 7 )
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In memory of Bowie, the Lohner mix of Disco King, the only good thing to come out of the Underworld film series. youtube.com/watch?v=b2gMMZ…
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Clever Jaws parody poster. behance.net/gallery/289482…
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What you always suspected but could never confirm: the changes in T-short width/height by wash cycle.
-
Crazy. You still can’t have both HTTPS *and* index documents when hosting a static website on AWS.
Jan 4, 2016 ( ♥ 6 )
-
Food for thought on alternatives to moving the social responsibility of contract-level workers to corporations.
-
How to get Vim to stop adding two spaces between sentences when you realign with `gq`: `set nojoinspaces`.
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After missing the target for a few years, finally ran 1000 miles in 2015. brandur.org/runs
Jan 3, 2016 ( ♥ 7 )
2015
December
-
With the Rotten Tomatoes rating system applied to TV, you need to be wary of anything rated < 98%.
-
Elk Valley and the Fernie townsite viewed from the top of the Great Bear. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
Excellent article on the effect of sensor size on ISO and aperture. northrup.photo/gear-basics/ca…
Dec 19, 2015 ( ♥ 4 )
-
The company X-mas party is roughly the one time a year that I regret not having a tailor.
-
Or for creativity/WTF value, try Prophet. Set 10,000 years in the future after the rise and fall of a space empire.
-
Comic recommendation: Tokyo Ghost. Start reading for the art. Stay for the contemporary themes.
-
Classic Haskell documentation technique: throw you straight into the deep end. Or maybe the Mariana Trench. hackage.haskell.org/package/lens-4…
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Breguet’s Marie Antoinette watch, designed to include every complication known at the time.
-
Kramer preparing to enter a scene (via Reddit). i.imgur.com/jKgvheE.png
November
-
Scala has the special distinction of being the only language that makes Objective-C look beautiful in comparison.
Nov 11, 2015 ( ♥ 7 )
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A rare view of what technology inside a technology company is really like. gigamonkeys.com/flowers/
(via @muyfine)
-
Go’s ast package is worth taking a look at. Surprisingly digestible considering that it’s a non-trivial problem.
-
Nothing makes you appreciate how hard it is to write fiction like NaNoWriMo.
October
-
How to prevent that thing where OS X makes the dubious decision to disconnect your wifi when you lock your screen.
apple.stackexchange.com/questions/7188…
Oct 30, 2015 ( ♥ 6 )
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The power of low interest rates: major recession and widespread layoffs; < 5% change in real estate prices. creb.com/Seller_Resourc…
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From 2002: the technology may have been worse, but the *nix desktop had a brighter future. anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/scr…
-
The major differences between Dreamforce and OpenWorld are one month and that one is red and one is blue.
-
Amazing work by Oslo and Madrid. techinsider.io/oslo-bans-cars…
Meanwhile we’re fighting to raise two blocks of bike lane on Market by two inches.
-
Daily tool sharpening: if on OS X, download Karabiner, and drop “Key Repeat” down to 20 ms. Changes everything.
Oct 12, 2015 ( ♥ 5 )
-
In honor of the Rick & Morty finale (which was genius), here's the Johnny Cash cover of “Hurt.” youtube.com/watch?v=vt1Pwf…
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“It is now impossible, reckons Dr Zerbo, to test even a small nuclear weapon in secret anywhere on Earth.” economist.com/news/technolog…
September
-
Patrick Collison, Alan Kay, and Stewart Brand sitting over a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. t.co/WS8fls1d2C
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Daily tool sharpening: ripper-tags (more accurate ctags for Ruby).
-
Daily tool sharpening: github.vim (open in browser or get a URL for selected lines). github.com/solars/github-…
-
Also, Starbucks went through with it and killed La Boulange. Bummer. Best duck confit ever. t.co/UBnYxQaerb
-
And all of it is yours and mine. So let’s ride and ride and ride and ride. t.co/nsrCu69uZX
-
Today's tool sharpening: set-option -g allow-rename off
(Have Tmux windows keep the same name you set for them.)
-
Great rendition of La Malagueña (in the style of “Once Upon A Time In Mexico”). youtube.com/watch?v=YZWudN…
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Not to mention that every frame of the movie is beautiful enough to print and hang on a wall. t.co/7qQDlCkfRH
-
And related: despite a formulaic story, Tron Legacy stands the test of time. Visuals, dialog, soundtrack, aesthetic, ideas; all top notch.
-
Re-post, but this article on the UIs and effects of Tron Legacy by @jtnimoy is still one of favorites.
-
Tool sharpening today: textobj-rubyblock. vim.org/scripts/script…
-
The “important questions” section in RbNaCl's README is a classic: github.com/cryptosphere/r…
-
Ported RbNaCl's simplebox wrapper to Golang (simple API to fast crypto using XSalsa20 and Poly1305): github.com/brandur/simple…
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I'm incredibly excited to announce that I'll be joining the talented engineering team over at @stripe.
Sep 4, 2015 ( ♥ 36 )
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Added pull request links to the bottom of my articles in the hopes of pity-driven contributions of grammar corrections.
August
-
Breaking down compost at the community garden. This is the most San Francisco thing that I’ve done in months. t.co/HxBAgT4m8t
Aug 30, 2015 ( ♥ 6 )
-
I was really starting to feel like I was the only person on Earth who felt that way about Slack/HipChat/whatever. Phew.
@ here @ here ^^^
-
“We lose control of our time and what was once creative, intentional work turns into a constant stream of noise.” guilded.co/blog/2015/08/2…
Aug 30, 2015 ( ♥ 7 )
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I never cease to be amazed by the energy (and tolerance for pain) of the Haskell community. blog.ezyang.com/2015/08/help-u…
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Dropped today: a new GCRA-based (genetic cell rate algorithm) rate limiting implementation by @agmetcalf. github.com/throttled/thro…
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RT @blakegentry: AT&T provides a great example of why every site should use HTTPS, even personal blogs. Just use free @CloudFlare TLS! webpolicy.org/2015/08/25/att…
Aug 26, 2015 ( ♥ 8 )
-
RT @bonjouryannick: Great article on alerting by @brandur brandur.org/alerting
Aug 26, 2015 ( ♥ 4 )
-
RT @dmathieu: Awesome blog post from @brandur on designing alerts. brandur.org/alerting
-
I really like the concise wording and unusual flow of this article on John Isner from the New Yorker.
-
Finally jumped ship from Rdio. This bug was the straw that broke the camel’s back. t.co/dnTKRgCFVI
-
Slightly disappointed that Thrift generates language bindings exactly how you'd expect that it would. github.com/apache/thrift/…
-
Really interesting article on the Academy of Art University (privately owned post-secondary) in San Francisco. forbes.com/sites/katiasav…
-
"She said, 'Infinite Jest. Every guy I've ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf.'" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_o…
-
Never thought I'd see the day. A Bond Seamaster without a tacky tiled 007 background or "gun" second hand. omegawatches.com/news/internati…
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Monodraw's diagrams look better than any text to SVG programs that I've tried. Plain text continues to dominate. t.co/zmNGr1ATSS
Aug 12, 2015 ( ♥ 4 )
-
Trying OmniGraffle right now, but so far with mediocre results.
-
If anyone has any leads on software to create low-effort, beautiful, retina-enabled flow charts and diagrams, I'd love to have them.
-
The next version of iTerm2 can display images! iterm2.com/images.html t.co/1kN5YMpHn1
Aug 10, 2015 ( ♥ 33 )
-
Finally got around to reading “The Everything Store” about Amazon/Bezos. That’s one well-written book.
-
The most concise description of the tax implications of exercising start-up options of pretty much all time. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100203…
-
Someone needs to tell Nike that there’s such a thing as too much branding though. I have the physical equivalent of a popup ad on my feet.
-
Where have these Lunar 3s been all my life. Great look, quality build, and amazing to run with. t.co/duYJPV7L3r
July
-
RT @patrickc: Inefficient waste of what could be a bustling riverside freeway, like FDR Drive in NYC. #urbanplanning t.co/rSu3wgdHun
Jul 31, 2015 ( ♥ 42 )
-
RT @patrickc: One of the coolest urban design projects I've ever seen: gardenbridge.london. t.co/hfjn8EYgNY
Jul 31, 2015 ( ♥ 68 )
-
Nice article on SV and the Bay Area from the Economist this week. “To fly, to fall, to fly again”
-
Top knot inspiration album from /r/mfa. imgur.com/a/pSrly
-
Love the tweak to GitHub's build/merge section today. The subtle updates from their design team continue to impress. t.co/pdxmpC0zj1
Jul 20, 2015 ( ♥ 4 )
-
It's so hot these days that I've started breaking the cardinal rule of SF: carry a hoodie or jacket with you everywhere.
-
vim-go is incredible. It's like being back in Visual Studio but without the multi-second lag on every action. github.com/fatih/vim-go
Jul 19, 2015 ( ♥ 4 )
-
Write-up on what it's like to be doored, and how the motorist in question is at no risk regardless of negligence. nowtoronto.com/news/mean-stre…
-
Excellent article on Canada's recent economic transition into a recession. macleans.ca/economy/econom…
-
Was lucky enough to get a comprehensive tour of the @hello offices yesterday. Those people are doing some amazing things.
-
Used upsert for the first time in an app today. So, so convenient.
Jul 13, 2015 ( ♥ 5 )
-
US infrastructure design: “... between 2009 and 2013 pedestrian deaths jumped by 15% as the economy recovered” economist.com/news/united-st…
-
Furious 7 throws so much utter unapologetic nonsense at you that your mind eventually shuts down and you become free.
June
-
At the behest of @danfarina, decided to see how much the Ed25519 paper would hurt my head. A lot, as it turns out. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
[Spoilers] Same thread. Some insight into how Ted in HIMYM may have narrated unreliably to justify the series ending. reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co…
-
Nice write-up on Reddit comparing the endings of the comic and movie versions of the Watchmen. reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co…
-
"Garden of Words" is one of the most beautiful movies that I've seen in recent memory. i.imgur.com/oeoQ6Tj.png
-
We talk about REST and Hypermedia a lot, but something like GraphQL may be closer to a future of more powerful APIs. facebook.github.io/react/blog/201…
Jun 21, 2015 ( ♥ 10 )
-
At long length, the great reopening. Those are some nice looking tennis courts. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
TIL that `.\{-}` gets you a non-greedy Regex wildcard in Vim. stackoverflow.com/questions/1305…
-
Looking at the sizes of iOS apps is downright scary. For example, Facebook's almost hit 100 MB, and that's not particularly exceptional.
-
Impressed by both the magnificent amount of effort has obviously gone into so many guitar tabs, and the total inaccuracy of so many of them.
-
Everything in San Francisco is for sale right now.
-
“Think of our saints, Tito. Two faces. Always, two.”
-
The good news is that they gave me their formula.
-
I was just schooled at the Coffee Collective in the use of the AeroPress. Maybe the best cup of coffee that I’ve ever had.
-
A solid step towards helping to unravel the "microservices EVERYTHING" craze. martinfowler.com/bliki/Monolith…
-
Copenhagen looks like a city from the future. Water, glass, and hard lines. t.co/JP4qg5z1Se
-
The Danube at twilight. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
May
-
Also accidentally discovered both Aquincum's ancient military and civil amphitheatres. flickr.com/photos/brandur… flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
The ruins of Aquincum (modern Budapest). Marcus Aurelius wrote part of Meditations here while fighting the Quadi. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
Selfie sticks are banned from events and places as diverse as Coachella, Wimbledon, WWDC, and Rome’s Colosseum. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie_st…
-
This Berlin apartment has a park on its roof (six stories up) complete with bench. Well done. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
Incredible show by Eluveitie. Turns out that not even in Germany do they know the words to Inis Mona though, haha. t.co/SWl1gXEwk8
-
Jo Quail may have been my favorite performance at WGT 2015 so far. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
A write-up I did after investigating degraded behaviour in our job queue, and a shallow dive into Postgres MVCC. brandur.org/postgres-queues
May 20, 2015 ( ♥ 8 )
-
RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome post by @brandur in @PostgresWeekly this week around Postgres Job Queues and some semantics of them - brandur.org/postgres-queues
-
I hope that in twenty years we’ll all be able to look back at the state of the telecom industry today and laugh about it.
-
Discovered Ludovico Einaudi from a rain simulation program. Beautiful work. soundcloud.com/ludovicoeinaud…
-
Congrats @geoghegan86! It's been a long time coming. git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=post…
-
A simple article on thoughts about Amazon Kinesis after a month in production. brandur.org/kinesis-in-pro…
May 3, 2015 ( ♥ 10 )
-
Unfortunately, SQL code is the most clever and the least documented.
May 1, 2015 ( ♥ 5 )
April
-
Received a Sprig delivery in less than three minutes from order. Someone's got the traveling salesman figured out.
Apr 24, 2015 ( ♥ 5 )
-
The site of Waza 2 in the modern day. San Francisco is changing fast. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
Ex Machina wins for the least Hollywood ending ever. So refreshing.
-
Pretty much best case scenario as far as a serendipitous experience that might fall out of a watch interest. reddit.com/r/Watches/comm…
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The SFMTA has now posted people at busy intersections to yell at drivers that run red lights. Nice job guys, hit ‘em right where it hurts.
-
New guitar weekend! The Martin LX1. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
Apr 6, 2015 ( ♥ 5 )
March
-
400 concurrent threads/connections in ActiveRecord 2.3 (and stable). Not bad Rails, not bad.
-
$5 rides for a long time to come. wsj.com/articles/BL-DG…
-
Going paperless with your evil US healthcare megacorp: okay. Unsubscribing from unsolicited mail from your local symphony: impossible.
-
Apple either just made Yubikeys and all port-eating peripherals obsolete, or they'll be backtracking inside 2 years like with the 2010 MBA.
-
“Our field selects engineers using a process that is worse than reading chicken entrails.”
-
This may be the best article on hiring that’s been written. sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/0…
Mar 7, 2015 ( ♥ 4 )
-
The Interagent HTTP API design guide is now available in Simple and Traditional Chinese. Incredible community work. github.com/interagent/htt…
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You have to appreciate the comedy though. By inbox zeroing, I’m compromising other inbox zeroes, so we all have to inbox zero harder.
February
-
RT @SpotifyEng: Elegant APIs with JSON Schema @brandur brandur.org/elegant-apis
Feb 27, 2015 ( ♥ 8 )
-
Manufacturing lab at Autodesk. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had one, but very cool. t.co/Bp0Y34JKp6
-
Remember to come down and check out API Craft #9, with a talk on API longevity. Held at Creative Market on Pier 9. meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…
-
“Hacking involves mashing your keyboard until code appears, ... just like in real life.” theinstructionlimit.com/i-know-this-gl…
-
JWZ may provide one of the few honest narratives of what it's actually like to bike in SF. jwz.org/blog/2014/05/t…
-
And also the Source-based “Accelerated Back Hopping” which you really have to see in action. wiki.sourceruns.org/wiki/Accelerat… youtu.be/NV-AWxqYAgc?t=…
-
Bunny hopping in the Quake/Source engines: there is a window of exactly 1 frame where ground friction is not applied. flafla2.github.io/2015/02/14/bun…
-
Overcoming the instinct to over-engineer and go all in on speculative technology. Every developer should read this. jasonpunyon.com/blog/2015/02/1…
Feb 13, 2015 ( ♥ 4 )
-
Optimistic fire hydrant. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
Great article on React's virtual DOM differencing algorithm. calendar.perfplanet.com/2013/diff/
Feb 11, 2015 ( ♥ 6 )
-
RT @bradfitz: We need a hip acronym like REST which means "like REST without religious pedantry": SITU? Stuff in the URL? And "situ" ~ "in place" too.
Feb 9, 2015 ( ♥ 63 )
-
Shout out to “can I use” for being a resource that provides clear, definitive answers rather than more questions. caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
Feb 9, 2015 ( ♥ 5 )
-
Read “To Kill a Mockingbird” after the big Harpee Lee news. Excellent book, but one that probably doesn't need a sequel.
January
-
The V2 AWS Ruby SDK is refreshingly solid software. github.com/aws/aws-sdk-co…
-
Candid, low-star, and well-written book reviews on Amazon are some of the most useful user contributions on the Internet.
-
Too many pull requests. Talk about a good problem to have.
-
RT @leinweber: Microservices will bring us a 5-10 year dark age of instability, complexity, and debt.
Jan 13, 2015 ( ♥ 5 )
-
Where did we go wrong? i.imgur.com/VqoN5CJ.jpg
-
Very interesting notes on iOS app and App Store viability in the Panic 2014 report. panic.com/blog/the-2014-…
-
In case anyone missed it on HN, this article on software quality is excellent.
“A Generation Lost in the Bazaar”
Jan 4, 2015 ( ♥ 8 )
2014
December
-
“Roads in Sweden are built with safety prioritised over speed or convenience.”
Imagine trying to sell that one in North America.
-
Unlike San Francisco, Sweden's taken steps toward Vision Zero that are known to work, with incredible results. economist.com/blogs/economis…
-
This “my year, deconstructed” style of blog post is a great idea. blog.fogus.me/2014/12/29/the…
-
I love Strava’s new “matched runs” feature. They have one of the few apps out there that continues to impress. t.co/1W42teuzkB
-
Goth ninja clothing/inspiration guide. reddit.com/r/malefashiona…
-
Now reminisce on what ye have lost. vimeo.com/115309653
[OSX UI performance regressions.]
-
Apple, we're three months into the release of iOS8. I will trade you handoff, instant hotspot, and SMS relay for keyboards that work.
-
$0.86. Perfect timing for my return. google.com/finance?q=cadu…
-
The biggest risk to Rust's success is incredible complexity to accomplish modest tasks.
-
A collection of emotive scenes from Miyazaki films. imgur.com/a/rX8ws
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This week's Economist cover nails it. 3.bp.blogspot.com/-guNxA05vt1o/V…
November
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“50 years ago, real prices started to climb ... If this is a bubble, it’s been inflating for two generations.” timharford.com/2014/11/why-a-…
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Thinking back, it's incredibly embarrassing how much time I spent getting really good at building table-based layouts in HTML.
-
A powerful image of America. i.imgur.com/FY6zI4a.jpg
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Hah, the fight over the addition of ASCII art on Redis start-up. github.com/antirez/redis/…
(I kind of like it.)
-
Best part of the .NET OSS announcement today: the source code wasn't released to CodePlex.
-
Now might be a good time to start planning the trip to Japan that you so far have never quite gotten around to. economist.com/news/leaders/2…
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RT @manp: I look forward to hosting another API Craft SF Meetup this coming Wednesday meetup.com/API-Craft-San-… cc @smarx @lhazlewood @brandur @newrelic
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No matter what you read online about Vim best practices, I'd very much recommend not using the Ctrl+Z/fg workflow, and not rebinding ';'.
October
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The expedition continues. No burning buses so far.
-
A magnificent showcase of circa 1990's color cycling in HTML 5 (from games like Loom). effectgames.com/effect/article… effectgames.com/demos/canvascy…
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“Crash Course World History” by John Green. Incredible work.
-
That said, hopefully the integration with upcoming iOS 8.1 will make Yosemite shine.
-
Yosemite summary.
Wins: Nice background photo.
Losses: Shallow interface, less readable type, 4+ hours fixing install.
-
git-getpull is a really useful tool that finds the pull request for a given commit hash. github.com/a-warner/git-g…
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Good earphones, but they fail so consistently that you could use them to track the calendar year.
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Sennheiser made good on about a year and a half worth of CX 300's. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
September
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Absolutely *fantastic* work by CloudFlare today. These people know how to ship. blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-un…
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Great article containing some history on the Omega Seamaster. hodinkee.com/blog/a-week-on…
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RT @doctorow: Wendy and Richard Pini's Complete Elfquest boingboing.net/2014/09/24/elf…
media.boingboing.net/wp-content/upl…
Sep 28, 2014 ( ♥ 6 )
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`set-option -g renumber-windows on` in Tmux will renumber your windows as you close them. It's a great micro-optimization.
-
A small article on shell exit statuses: brandur.org/exit-status
-
RT @craigmod: “Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the period of work.” —@cshirky
-
I'm a big fan of Go's RPC. I've never had two processes talking to each other so quickly. golang.org/pkg/net/rpc/#C…
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I love GitHub consolidates multiple levels of directories if it detects that some of them are empty. Is that new? github.com/heroku/heroku/…
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Scenes from Star Trek: TOS stitched together into widescreen panoramas. Astounding work! cargocollective.com/nickacosta/Sta…
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Do any experienced Gophers know of a better way to tackle conditional error recovery in Go? github.com/brandur/heroku…
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A proposal for type annotations in Ruby. I want this yesterday! bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9999
-
More reason to love SO. sf.eater.com/archives/2014/…
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Tim Harford on Hyperbolic discounting. timharford.com/2014/09/here-t…
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I love it when you start using an API and your Curl commands work on the first try. I just had that feeling with Dropbox's.
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RT @ID_AA_Carmack: It pains me to hear about GHz class systems with only 320x480 screens being sluggish and unresponsive. It is all a software problem.
Sep 15, 2014 ( ♥ 407 )
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cping: A tiny Go program to update CloudFlare-based DNS with your Dynamic IP. github.com/brandur/cping
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So much for amazing cross-platform support. github.com/mitchellh/go-h…
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CloudFlare makes a really great DNS host.
-
My best hope for the Apple Watch is that it gives us a window to buy discounted Omegas.
-
I'm still hoping for the big announcement that the Apple Watch is automatic.
-
My semi-quarterly repost from /r/HistoryPorn: Hunter Thompson writing at Big Sur c. 1961. i.imgur.com/lTSL5AL.jpg
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RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome tool by @brandur for better exploring your structured log data - engineering.heroku.com/blogs/2014-09-…
Sep 5, 2014 ( ♥ 4 )
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Six hours later, I already can't live without this. github.com/blog/1884-intr…
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Amazing write-up on the survival of Marcus Aurelius's “Meditations” over the last 1800+ years. reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…
-
I don't want to comment too much until I'm a few months in, but so far Sony XBA-1's feel like a good alternative to Sennheiser CX 300 II's.
-
The Chihuly museum in Seattle is a photo enthusiast's dream. Beautiful work. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
August
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I almost thought that I’d found a panel without a lineup, but actually there was a dedicated “queuing room” that I hadn’t seen before.
-
Line ups for PAX are worse than for brunch in San Francisco.
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RT @charleshooper: @brandur Hey right now the API Craft meetup page has 404 members #httpstatushumor
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Learned today that (1) an asymmetrical cord on earphones is called a J-cord, and (2) most people hate them.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
-
Simple shell-fu for disowning an already running command. stackoverflow.com/questions/6254…
-
Great talks by @vinibaggio and company at @Medium tonight! flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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RT @johnsheehan: #apicraftsf This Thursday. I’m giving a talk. How about “Crafting a great webhooks developer experience?” @brandur @manp
Aug 19, 2014 ( ♥ 4 )
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Nuget is now available on OSX! mono-project.com/Release_Notes_…
Aug 12, 2014 ( ♥ 5 )
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RT @Its_stolt: My @heavybit talk on Support for developers is up. heavybit.com/library/video/…
Aug 8, 2014 ( ♥ 4 )
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Dead on: “bike lanes were little more than paint on the ground for the cyclists to help protect the parked cars lining every street.”
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A letter from Danish tourists to Canadians regarding our singular focus on automobiles and horrific sprawl. news.nationalpost.com/2014/08/04/can…
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An amazing photographed deep dive into Rolex's 3135 caliber (and bonus disassembly of a helium escape valve). chronometrie.com/rolex3135/role…
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A $4 X100S filter ring hack. brandur.org/x100s-hack
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Found this guy outside the office yesterday. A little over two inches long by my estimation. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
-
And I thought I was the only one annoyed by sidewalk faux pas.
Introducing NY pedestrian etiquette: nytimes.com/2002/07/16/nyr…
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Pro-tip for pushing to GitHub from a network where port 22 is blocked. stackoverflow.com/questions/7953…
July
-
Great article on the implementation of lists in CPython. laurentluce.com/posts/python-l…
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A reminder about Pacman's “kill screen”, one of the greatest integer overflow bugs ever. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man#S…
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“Buying something made in Detroit, in this calculus, is not much different than buying a fair trade Andean sweater.” nytimes.com/2013/08/22/fas…
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Stack Overflow uses static methods and IL to squeeze out performance. Somebody should tell them about C/assembly. highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21…
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Also, Scala's `???` predef might be the most important programming language innovation of our time. t.co/zVS9fYVC8o$@???:Nothing
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I love the idea of a future, but in practice they seem to compose a lot like callbacks (which could be better).
-
This post on different ways to update attributes in ActiveRecord is on an incredibly niche subject, but very useful. davidverhasselt.com/set-attributes…
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Let's hope this fad launches, flounders, and blows over quickly so we can start thinking about the next thing. nymag.com/daily/intellig…
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At 4 inches, my phone is already awkwardly small for many interactions. I can't think of a single reason that I'd want a smart watch.
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New York looks and feels exactly how it's supposed to. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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A tribute to the visual style of the 80's. The view of the future then was one of both optimism and pessimism. uzicopter.tumblr.com
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The world just tilted a little. medium.com/code-adventure…
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One day there will be a major design trend to drop interface animations in favor of instant feedback, and it's going to look revolutionary.
Jul 2, 2014 ( ♥ 5 )
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Go Eugenie!
June
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“As long as driving on the roads remains easy and cheap, people have an almost unlimited desire to use them.” wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-t…
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A great photo gallery of abandoned places and objects in Iceland. structor.pixu.com/gallery/121908
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A type-safe `printf` written in Haskell. github.com/chrisdone/form…
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It’s funny to read about vi being described as “an editor with a roguelike interface”. (Which it is when compared to ed.)
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I just read Cat’s Cradle for the first time. Simultaneously notably amazing, and completely crazy.
-
There are some great talks from Lang.NEXT up now. Including pieces from Bjarne Stroustrup and Erik Meijer! channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NE…
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An amazing set of illustrated movie posters. abduzeedo.com/splendid-illus…
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Law of API Idealism: all API discussions eventually devolve into highly speculative echo chambers on hypermedia.
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I just noticed that Tmux 1.8 can "zoom" a pane out of the box (try `prefix`-`z`). This is a great addition to core.
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The scale of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig is breathtaking. Straight out of Middle-earth. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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This is one of those life changing tricks: get Vim splits co-operating with Tmux splits. robots.thoughtbot.com/seamlessly-nav…
Jun 4, 2014 ( ♥ 5 )
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I wrote a few short words on Swift, despite being completely unqualified to comment on the subject. brandur.org/fragments/swif…
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Very cool that Swift draws heavily from Rust and C#. graydon2.dreamwidth.org/5785.html
May
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My slides from yesterday, "The Story of a Thousand Services." thousand-services.herokuapp.com
May 31, 2014 ( ♥ 6 )
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The Neues Museum with its huge ancient Egyptian collection. I would have killed to see this place when I was five. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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Also, Leicas sure haven't changed their styling much over the years. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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The German Museum of Technology in Berlin. Managed to see a Z1 replica, V-2 rocket, and flying wing. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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Apparently missed the last ever Spreepark tour by five days. It’s been sold. The world’s changing.
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In San Francisco, your edgy graphic tees proudly proclaim Berlin. In Berlin, they proclaim San Francisco.
May 3, 2014 ( ♥ 4 )
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RT @naaman: really proud and excited to release the builds endpoints on the @heroku platform api devcenter.heroku.com/articles/build…
April
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“... that you imply rather than speak; that if you speak something, you make it less.” theholenearthecenteroftheworld.com
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Wow. The original plan for “Star Trek: The Experience” in Vegas included a 1:1 scale model of the Enterprise. drop.brandur.org/star-trek-the-…
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“I’m a space pioneer. My mission is to transform industrial ruins into cultural spaces. I could save Detroit.” newyorker.com/reporting/2014…
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RT @Annasnova: What would Harry Potter look like as an ’80s Anime Version? Awesome! www.wired.com/2014/04/harry-potter-anime/
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His gallery is well worth browsing as well. simonstalenhag.se
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Great piece by Simon Stålenhag of Sweden — a beautiful mix of the mundane and the extraordinary. simonstalenhag.se/bilderbig/gaus…
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A colorized photo of the Lower East Side in NYC from the 1890's. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…
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Between normal Sunday JFK closure and other 4/20 road closures Golden Gate Park is a bit less like a highway today. Great time to go see it.
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Interesting piece on the Collision brothers, with a great bullet on why the Stripe office is no longer in SOMA. ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9…
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RT @_adamwiggins_: The Role of APIs in a Hackable World: youtube.com/watch?v=SHqtLm… (20m video) — in which I talk about smarthome, nmap, and “the curl test”
Apr 20, 2014 ( ♥ 13 )
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Simple instructions force a GH pull request to reset its diff against your target branch. gist.github.com/brandur/109141…
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By far the best article on SF housing and policy that I've ever read on the subject. techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-…
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At our office you have to take the elevator because the stairs are broken. Surely this must be a unique problem.
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RT @oss_rb: pliny - Base Sinatra app for writing excellent APIs in Ruby github.com/12-oz/pliny
Apr 14, 2014 ( ♥ 7 )
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I always know when Giants games are letting out because inevitably it’s exactly when I’ve chosen to go for a run.
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The Chinese are aiming to have a Thorium reactor built by 2015, and the Japanese by 2016. Exciting times.
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The term “lost generation” is attributed by Hemingway to Stein, who attributes to the owner of a French garage. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Gene…
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When someone commented that Stein didn't look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_…
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Great Heartbleed article including details on both the commit that introduced it and the patch that fixed it. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/04/attack…
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Heartbleed, the most metal name for a security vulnerability to date. At this point, I'm just waiting for the power riff.
Apr 8, 2014 ( ♥ 4 )
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Related, Firefox is fast now. Who knew.
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Just spent ten minutes closing hundreds of Firefox tabs that I'd accumulated over the last year. It was like time travel.
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I wonder what percentage of fmt.Println errors are handled in Go code. golang.org/src/pkg/fmt/pr…
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You have to hand it to Microsoft: their conferences still have the best swag.
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Wrote a few words on “microservices” and 200-500 LOC micro-microservices. brandur.org/microservices
March
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If you're a Heroku user, you should check out hk and its new shell completion. Easiest productivity boost ever. github.com/heroku/hk#shel…
Mar 29, 2014 ( ♥ 8 )
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An interesting thought by Felix Salmon on the over-aggrandizement of small ideas in modern web design. blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2…
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“I can guarantee that you are wrong about where your code is spending its time if you haven't run a profiler on it.” code.facebook.com/posts/47698759…
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Iceberg, an absolutely beautifully designed black and white newspaper by Socio in London. abduzeedo.com/editorial-desi…
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Incredible (and quite subtle) illustration of your favorite Community characters. kyendo.deviantart.com/art/Communitre…
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RT @petervgeoghegan: What I think of jsonb: pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2014/03/what-i…
Mar 25, 2014 ( ♥ 7 )
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“The most dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities of all.” theguardian.com/society/2013/n…
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It bothers me that the @ doesn't have a better name than “at sign.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
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Connection draining on ELBs is finally here! I've been waiting for this feature for two years. aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what…
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“Please note, all HTML-formatted email will be merrily rejected” eudyptula-challenge.org
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A meticulously detailed analysis damning Newsweek/Goodman's conclusion that Dorian Nakamoto created Bitcoin. mikehearn.com/Hosted-Files/N…
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It's great to see that a first-rate Bundler-like package management system is being built for Rust. mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust…
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Rust has the distinction of being the only language I've found harder to get compiling than Haskell. Ownership move semantics are not easy.
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Spend my PLIBMTTBHGATY building an ultra-simple proxy in Rust. github.com/brandur/umbrel… stripe.com/events/plibmtt…
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“Why are functions in Rust not pure by default?” mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust…
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Just assembled my first Dockerfile for Ubuntu + rbenv + Ruby 2.1.1 + Nginx + Passenger + blog. Very cool experience. github.com/brandur/hekla/…
Mar 16, 2014 ( ♥ 4 )
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This article does a great job of articulating the strong arguments for Docker.
“Why Docker? Why Not Chef?” blog.relateiq.com/why-docker-why…
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Another API Craft meet-up come and gone. There's no subject like Hypermedia to get passions flowing. Thanks @mamund! flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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My great aunt's place in Austin is one of my favorite examples of home design. Here's her outdoor "grotto." flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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I applaud the griefing ability of whoever started the Lady Gaga @ SXSWi rumor tonight.
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The mediator pattern, or the interactor by a different name. brandur.org/mediator
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The panel on start-ups in Berlin at the German Haus. It sounds like a pretty solid ecosystem out there. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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Some great concept art for China’s new pedestrian-first city being built outside Chengdu. businessinsider.com/china-is-build…
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Austin's been seeing a bit of rain this year. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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Great show by @madidiaz on the rooftops of Austin. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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I'm really jealous of people who are holding film badges right now. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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Google search suddenly looks so much better.
February
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RT @jxnblk: also have vim invites, hit me up
Feb 27, 2014 ( ♥ 108 )
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House of Cards season 2 was pretty solid.
As a technologist, I wish they hadn't dragged computers into it, but what can you do.
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I am never going to get over these giant novelty discount cards. So much win. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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“I can tell you everything about the Windows API, yes, even secrets those of Redmond have half-forgotten.” catb.org/~esr//writings…
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Master Foo discourses on the graphical user interface. catb.org/~esr//writings…
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RT @_adamwiggins_: My journey into the Berlin startup scene: medium.com/wandering-cto/…
Feb 21, 2014 ( ♥ 25 )
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Dark Tranquility. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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RT @dhh: So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich. He taught me and many others so much. He will be dearly missed.
Feb 20, 2014 ( ♥ 136 )
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Gravity is a truly incredible movie with an even better soundtrack.
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We're proud to host API Craft no. 3 at Heroku. Mike Amundsen is speaking about building clients for Hypermedia APIs! meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…
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RadioLab about an old magic show and a trick lost to time ... until Penn Jillette dispels it in ~3 seconds. radiolab.org/story/you-are-…
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I don’t know how to feel about Hemingway App. Hemingway is one of my favourite authors, but I don’t want everyone to write like Hemingway.
-
And on that note, I finished Hardcore History's "Wrath of the Khans" series recently. Really amazing stuff. dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharc…
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The guy who did the History of Rome podcast has a new one: Revolutions, currently covering the American Revolution. revolutionspodcast.com
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I forget all too often that I can go and see the ocean every day. Glorious. t.co/5t3aNNWnzu
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I love the concept from Asana that Markdown is minimum required skill to contribute web content. eng.asana.com/2014/02/scalin…
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RT @dcurtis: A sad story about a CEO's aspiration and desire, and how it manifests itself in his company, Abercrombie & Fitch:
Feb 16, 2014 ( ♥ 48 )
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Mission and 3rd in SF sometime after 1978. Just similar enough to be recognizable (photo by Janet Delaney). drop.brandur.org/mercantile-bui…
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This photo of the Mission has 200+ upvotes. Some say gentrification (negatively), I'd say it's San Francisco in 2014. imgur.com/PgjJfW8
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About four months into ownership, the iPad Mini (Retina) is now the only medium on which I will read a paper. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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Interesting thought from meetup: Webhooks may be difficult for enterprise as setting up an HTTP receiver may be bureaucratically expensive.
-
RIP Jade Rabbit.
-
Haha, "Bloodlines of Conquest". Community is pure genius (s05e06).
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This is some really great data viz and D3 work. Kepler's Tally of Planets. nytimes.com/interactive/sc…
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RT @mtrifiro: A beautiful and thoughtful paean to the "page" as a design element /by @brandur Lamenting the Death of the Page trifi.ro/1g6XJLb
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I've been using Mosh so much lately that when I rebooted my local computer, I forgot that I was supposed to open Tmux on my remote.
-
Slightly disappointed to see that I couldn't publish Marvel comics using their new API, but it's cool nonetheless! developer.marvel.com/docs
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Healthy Anti-patterns. brandur.org/antipatterns
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I wrote an article entitled, "Why I don't want your SDK in production". brandur.org/sdk
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Very practical novel writing advice from somewhere in /r/writing. reddit.com/r/writing/comm…
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Preview.app's tendency to save your files as you make changes is sociopathic.
January
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VOID's first shot at a mechanical movement watch. Elegantly minimal. voidwatches.com/store/watches/…
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Beautiful concept art by Flavio Bolla. flaviobolla.deviantart.com/gallery/
-
Well, just watched Eraserhead.
You won't hear me complaining that Mulholland Drive is too weird again anytime soon.
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Mining Gitcoins.
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RT @_adamwiggins_: A treatise on modern web design: motherfuckingwebsite.com
Jan 20, 2014 ( ♥ 6 )
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“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
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Holy crap, I just started using Mosh today and it’s incredible. I want the last two years of my life using vanilla SSH back.
-
“the Apple aversion to ‘its’ rivals the MS Word paperclip for intrusive AI non-help.” discussions.apple.com/thread/2513219
-
Awesome surf video from our very own Ocean Beach! vimeo.com/83332142
-
Strava finally has an API! I made a simple dashboard to track my runs. brandur.org/runs
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Webkit's scaling model compared to Firefox's. Webkit stays proportional, allowing a large screen to be approximated. t.co/u1g0HDJqAA
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A cool hack for an element in that resizes proportionally in CSS. wellcaffeinated.net/articles/2012/…
2013
December
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Although it looks like the @ viewport CSS rule will make it in eventually. dev.w3.org/csswg/css-devi…
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First iPhone released June 2007 and the "viewport" meta tag is still the de facto real world standard. Real standards are hard.
-
My great aunt's Tumblr containing her art pieces. Amazing work. lindafriedmanartist.tumblr.com
-
Months after Google Reader's shutdown, I feel much better about the decision. It got me off of it and onto superior/maintained alternatives.
-
Amazing article on Diffie-Hellman, RSA, and forward security, explained in very simple terms. imperialviolet.org/2013/12/03/for…
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We released the Heroku API 525 times in 2013. How'd you do? gist.github.com/brandur/8152736
Dec 27, 2013 ( ♥ 5 )
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From 2010, but still one of the best articles on SSL/TLS and its performance considerations out there. imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/ove…
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The greatest drinking game. OF ALL TIME. flickr.com/photos/brandur…
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Bitcoin's Gini coefficient. bitcointalk.org/index.php?topi…
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RT @_adamwiggins_: “Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side but they love being closely managed on the career side.” hbr.org/2013/12/how-go…
Dec 16, 2013 ( ♥ 6 )
-
And Felix Salmon's bigger picture view of the situation is pretty intriguing as well. blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2…
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SF Streets' take on the Google bus protest situation nails it. sf.streetsblog.org/2013/12/11/the…
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In case anyone else was wondering about the boulders on 6th Street, they're a sidewalk extension pilot project. sf.streetsblog.org/2013/11/12/sfs…
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Five sections of the Berlin Wall in Paley Park, NYC. flickr.com/photos/9613311…
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You too, Brutus? t.co/TH0kiy8f6I?
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"... the dominant use case of bitcoin seems to be speculation, with a secondary use case for illegal transactions." blog.samaltman.com/thoughts-on-bi…
November
-
Ah yes, my old friend and favorite Golang error: "too many errors"
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Bullet point summary of the history of Detroit. reddit.com/r/explainlikei…
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The beautiful and unfortunately named Federal Center South Building 1202 in Seattle. aiatopten.org/sites/default/… aiatopten.org/node/204
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I keep on telling myself that this paper on Raft is going to be a lot easier to process once I have an iPad Mini Retina.
-
I’m on the map in JRuby! :) github.com/jruby/jruby/pu…
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The SF-based game jam to build ideas from Molyneux’s parody Twitter account was called "What Would Molydeux?” Genius.
-
Awesome API Craft turnout tonight. Thanks @harmophone and @mashery! Stay tuned for session #3. t.co/Xmv0H1CLAO
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My favorite slide from Holman’s deck. Can we immortalize this with a meme or something? t.co/PpN1us6vwD
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Amazing talk on scaling GitHub (organizationally). There’s no video yet, but the slides say a lot. speakerdeck.com/holman/how-git…
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An account producing sci-fi plot ideas on an overvalued messaging service produces the best social commentary of its time.
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RT @tmaher: blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/11/14/oauth-sso More companies need to open source their auth systems. Pull requests welcome.
-
Story from the perspective of a first time BART/Caltrain user. It reads so well because it’s all true. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6727560
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I appreciate Sightglass. They could operate in 1/10th the space and make everyone less comfortable (see: every Philz ever), but they don’t.
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Kyle Johnson's talk @ Google. Learned that there was even more that I missed in Inception, and about philosophy. youtube.com/watch?v=ginQNM…
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Join us Thursday at API Craft SF #2, and let's talk about APIs. Our guest speaker is @harmophone! meetup.com/API-Craft-San-…
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The “Unpleasant Design” book that has a jacket made of sandpaper so that it destroys books that it’s shelved with. we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2013/…
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RT @krarick: Is it O.K. to kill cyclists? Is it O.K. to give humans absolute control over 2-ton 60-mph death machines in the first place?
-
The JRuby birds of a feather at RubyConf was inspiring.
-
Venue550, a new gaming space opening up in SOMA. What a phenomenal space. venue550.com
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RT @igrigorik: secrets of the world's happiest cities: bit.ly/17zvhBc - hint: no, not more highways.. US planners, take note! great article.
Nov 2, 2013 ( ♥ 29 )
October
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RT @blakegentry: Wow, the FAA has instantly retrofitted all airplanes to be safe from interference by portable electronics! o_O faa.gov/news/press_rel…
-
Metalocalypse: The Doomstar Requiem is exactly as epic as it sounds.
-
Went to the symphony. Wore a blazer. Feel strangely cultured.
-
Messages.app'ing people on iPhones is the IM equivalent of an aimbot.
-
Great video on how bicycling infrastructure evolved in the Netherlands. youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9…
-
Backstory and future of the "defenestration" building (old SRO on 6th with furniture coming out the windows) in SF. sfgate.com/bayarea/articl…
-
Direct contradiction over HATEOAS between keynote speakers. This conference is looking up.
-
Two menu bars for two screens?! Mavericks is so much win.
-
Mavericks, the App Nap API, and the energy "hall of shame". This is so, so good. arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/…
-
Really enjoying Drudkh right now, a secretive Ukrainian black/folk metal band that's never given an interview. rdio.com/artist/Drudkh/
-
Hoping for a Nenshi loss tonight so that we can import him down here and have him run San Francisco. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naheed_Ne…
-
Photograph of San Francisco in ruins after the 1906 quake. Best experienced on a huge screen. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…
-
RT @Th_15798035965: When Banksy comes to Gotham I’m going to buy one of his pieces for the cave, then break his arm for vandalism. I’m tough but I’m fair.
Oct 18, 2013 ( ♥ 475 )
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Your periodic reminder that /r/HistoryPorn (historical photographs) is pretty much the best subreddit. reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/
-
*top speed
-
The 1930s era Schienenzeppelin ("Rail Zeppelin") with a top of ~230 km/h. i.imgur.com/j29CpIc.jpg
-
Alright! Calgary's on the map for something besides excellence in drilling holes in the ground. huffingtonpost.ca/2013/10/04/spe…
-
Have Git take you back to the last commit before a particular time.
git checkout `git rev-list -n 1 --before="2010-12-07 13:37" master`
-
Wes Anderson. Trailer in three days. I'm officially excited. i.imgur.com/7WceGSs.jpg
-
RT @jeresig: You know how they use dynamite to blow up an oil well to stop a fire? I wish that existed for runaway reply-to-all email threads.
Oct 11, 2013 ( ♥ 45 )
-
Think I could -1 min going early AM, -1 min by avoiding afternoon beers, -1 min eating properly. So, to win only need another -7 min, lol.
-
I was just demolished in a virtual race. For a city of geeks, San Francisco is pretty fast.
-
RT @jonathangrubb: Lesson from Silk Road: even the owner of an international drug cartel can't live in San Francisco without having housemates.
Oct 3, 2013 ( ♥ 207 )
September
-
Configuring your JRuby Ruby version. stackoverflow.com/questions/1528…
-
That said, I wonder if these guys could play at the permanent chess emplacements at Yerba Buena, which I've never seen in use even once.
-
The villainous mid-market chess culture has been shut down. blogs.kqed.org/pop/2013/09/26…
-
Transforming the old Bay Bridge into a park for adventure tourists. Great concept photos. gizmodo.com/transforming-t… img.gawkerassets.com/img/191drgto4g…
-
Playing an FPS so old that by default, A/D are not strafe.
-
RT @leinweber: Current status cl.ly/Rcas/image.jpg
-
Brian Vargo's absolutely beautiful HighLink. brianvargo.com
-
RT @heroku: Try Ruby 2.1.0 Preview 1 on Heroku right now: bit.ly/18lx3CY bit.ly/19uyduo
Sep 23, 2013 ( ♥ 12 )
-
git-cal: GitHub-style activity calendar for your terminal. github.com/k4rthik/git-cal
-
I tried to buy two of the biggest ICBMs in the Russian fleet in 2001 and 2002. khanacademy.org/economics-fina…
-
In short, erosion resistance is hard.
-
Just updated my Facts suite. Amazing how much broke in about a year: default Ruby version, CDN URLs, and changes in foreign APIs.
-
I'm pretty impressed by TweetDeck. It's still a web view, but feels fast, and doesn't bleed out battery life like the old Adobe AIR version.
-
`attr_accessible` is an anti-pattern to facilitate an anti-pattern.
-
The classic reference for inventions that are "too secret" to allow 3rd party audit. Newton's 3rd Law of Motion? Bah! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive
-
My 5+ year old IRC channel seems to have been reborn as a multi-person Google Hangout. Call me old, but I don't like it.
-
What it actually means for a ship to "warp out" of harbor. Sounds fast, but is in fact horribly slow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warping_(…
-
The beautifully designed 1931 map of the history of the world. slate.com/blogs/the_vaul…
-
None of the major prizes offered by the British government for solving the "Longitude problem" were ever claimed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude…
-
Queen Elizabeth I's ROI from Sir Francis Drake's 1577 expedition was 4700%. £47 for every £1 invested. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Hi…
-
This is not our office anymore. Such a weird feeling meeting the current tenants. t.co/06aaB41Hwq
-
San Francisco in the mid-1800s from the Smithsonian. Mission Bay is a bay. smithsonianmag.com/history-archae…
-
Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_… 1 lbs. purple-dyed silk maxed out at 150,000 denarii, the same price as a lion.
-
Props to Go for first class CLI and local web support for docs. After years of working with Ruby, successful use of `ri` is still rare.
-
Proposed futuristic architectural projects in SF. theatlanticcities.com/design/2013/09…
-
I was just sent "Scala for the Impatient". I fit the target audience perfectly. logic.cse.unt.edu/tarau/teaching…
-
Was pleasantly surprised to discover that rename scripts are no longer needed for Bitlbee's Facebook support. wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoFacebook
-
RT @_adamwiggins_: Black Rock City 2013 as seen from a drone: youtube.com/watch?v=woOHbb… (4m video)
-
They found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. economist.com/news/science-a…
-
Good HN comment describing why exceptions are kind of bad, but good in the real world. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6310969
-
Developer accessible APIs. brandur.org/accessible-apis
August
-
Not sure if this place is empty due to the long weekend or if burners and hipster climbers are a perfect overlap. t.co/obB9fLSAmg
-
Scrivener attempts to make non-HipChat XMPP clients somewhat workable by converting soft mentions to hard mentions. github.com/brandur/scrive…
-
RT @gregburek: This is how we deal with database corruption, from @deafbybeheading: t.co/zoDDefpfbE
-
Once again, Blomkamp nails it with Elysium as an amazing sci-fi movie and not-so-thinly-veiled social commentary.
-
Took ~2 min on Android to remember how much I miss Swype. The sooner Apple is willing to admit that its keyboard is wanting, the better.
-
I just replaced a dozen Memcache addons. gist.github.com/elliottkember/…
-
Beautiful and mysterious landscapes. 500px.com/Karezoid
-
RT @friism: The cause to make San Francisco safe for bicyclists requires many martyrs: medium.com/p/1456bbd017d9 What do you think @mayoredlee?
-
There's a plan on the books to reshape Folsom into a pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly 2-way street. sf-planning.org/ftp/files/City…
-
Let's let Elon build a Hyperloop please.
-
I started drawing a troll in the bottom corner of all my Draw Something art. He's a troll both literally and figuratively.
-
RT @BoingBoing: Lavabit, email service Snowden reportedly used, abruptly shuts down dlvr.it/3mpZTH
Aug 8, 2013 ( ♥ 24 )
-
Large refactors in Ruby are just the worst.
-
Great (and lengthy) article on the past, present and possible futures of petroleum, and the nature of reserves. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
-
Dutch disease, where a country's increase in exploitation of natural resources leads to a decline in other sectors. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_dis…
-
Back from the Midwest. API Craft was a great gathering, and Detroit is great. It may be the Berlin of North America.
July
-
Scoping and OAuth 2. brandur.org/oauth-scope
-
We're very pleased to announce Heroku OAuth. blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/…
-
Half of Iceland now wants the old centre-right parties back; a purely nostalgic vote – like voting for the year 1997. newstatesman.com/politics/2013/…
-
The curious story of the novel "The Cuckoo's Calling" makes a fascinating case study. rdd.me/9c8npc59
-
Cthulhu's type signatures (Yesod in Production). joelt.io/entries/yesod-…
-
The intro sequence to "Vikings" is pretty epic. youtube.com/watch?v=gmyCRJ…
-
Puma's source is beautiful.
-
Is there a way to easily send private GitHub docs to Readability, or do I need to build an API mash-up?
-
Or more likely, we'll use them to extend surburbia to previously unimagined proportions.
-
A possible utopia that could be come about by driverless cars. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6007977
-
Owl City's "The Midsummer Station" album art is great. umrg.edgeboss.net/download/umrg/…
June
-
rss2imap, a project that could be the answer to the problem that we'll probably never have an RSS syncing standard. github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap
-
Zeus is amazing, and customizing it is much simpler than expected. github.com/burke/zeus
-
Perceived service quality accounts for two percent variation in tips. esquire.com/blogs/food-for…
-
Here are easy steps to get a Twitter OAuth 2 access token for direct API access. gist.github.com/brandur/5845931
-
Every subsequent version of Twitter's API is a little more restrictive. I miss the non-authenticated user_timeline endpoint (gone in 1.1).
-
I never expected my home city to be the cover child for extreme weather, yet there it is. calgaryherald.com/news/LIVE+Floo…
-
As per usual, the new GitHub UI changes freaked me out at first, but are growing on me quickly.
-
RT @ped: doors open for the Heroku API hackathon! there's beer, food and secret features :} herokuapihackathon.eventbrite.com
-
The family tree of Indo-European languages. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…
-
There isn't a new retina MacBook Air, but there is a new Hans Zimmer soundtrack on Rdio.
-
Discriminating input. JSON vs. x-www-form-urlencoded vs. query params in Rack.
-
Tip 2: It's possible to have Firefox reset a site's HSTS setting by entering history and asking it to "forget about this site."
-
Tip 1: Firefox doesn't display the "I understand the risks" section on its invalid SSL page if the site has HSTS enabled.
-
SOA and Service Stubs. brandur.org/service-stubs
-
Any protips on how to build a minimal ACL implementation? I'm terrified of overdesigning such a thing.
-
A refreshingly objective look at Go. dehora.net/journal/2013/0…
-
Tracing request IDs. brandur.org/request-ids
-
Incredible article on why the right maintenance option for your local city-based highway is demolition. medium.com/changing-city/…
May
-
The scarcity of Magsafe 2 adapters makes them a more tenable currency than Bitcoin.
-
Check out Heroku's brand new V3 API. devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platf…
-
Tests that depend on an obscure edge case in a third party library to function are the best kind of test. Keeps upgrades interesting.
-
No one ever personally feels like they're contributing to bad traffic.
-
One day we'll be telling our kids how we had IM clients that could log into more than one chat network. plus.google.com/11627624830312…
-
By stubbing/mocking absolutely everything, all you're really testing is your double graph.
-
Great article on verbose mode in Ruby. mislav.uniqpath.com/2011/06/ruby-v…
-
5k loc, 4 if statements, 0 exceptions. mth.io/talks/haskell-…
-
I'm no Apple apologist, but they just replaced my iPhone 5, for free, with zero hassle. If only other retail experiences were this good.
-
ShawOpen is pretty much the greatest thing ever. Every city needs this. Especially SF.
(For non-Calgarians, it's fast city-wide wifi)
-
Beautiful fantasy landscapes. abduzeedo.com/fantasy-landsc…
-
Finished the Diamond Age. Neal Stephenson's best work (IMO). There's even a scene where a character develops and applies a Turing test.
-
Upstream Color doesn't actually seem all that complicated after you remove the obfuscated cinematography.
Spoilers! slate.com/blogs/browbeat…
-
Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was pithy and made heavy use of parentheses.
-- The Diamond Age
-
I'm pretty used to the standard Git interface, but Tig is pretty amazing. I'll try to get it into my workflow. blogs.atlassian.com/2013/05/git-ti…
-
Finally read Fight Club. Every memorable line from that movie is taken verbatim from that book. The screenwriters had an easy job.
-
Inked by an octopus underwater in Mexico. Divemaster also spotted us a seahorse.
April
-
Railsberry was a marvellous production. Sad that it's over. Here is a photo of an empty Krakow street. t.co/j7kNB6SY3R
-
The Satoshi blocks are valued ~$100M at current exchange. None have been traded. bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the…
-
Reminder that in 2008, a JRPG starring Charles Barkley in post-apocalyptic NY was made. The trailer is amazing. youtube.com/watch?v=8F1cOv…
-
"A quick survey of the carriage I was in found about 80% were holding an Apple iPhone." (Japan)
-
Epic finale episode of Spartacus. Just makes you want to read about Roman history all night.
-
The genesis blocks. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5545383
-
We all know that tail calls are a virtuous language feature. mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust… [Rust]
-
The Hobgoblin. stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/g…
March
-
When I look at the implementation and security options available on t.co/6nPSAVURzc, I'm embarrassed for every bank ever.
-
Probably the real reason that banks have such weak password restrictions: IBM mainframes. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5468542
-
"Oil is a metaphor for winning the lottery," said Ivar Froeness, a sociology professor at the University of Oslo. reuters.com/article/2013/0…
-
Alibaba thus sits at the heart of “bamboo capitalism”. economist.com/news/leaders/2…
-
Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off. marco.org/2013/03/26/pow…
-
Went running with no technology. It was freeing.
But now I'll never know whether I would've taken the top stop on that Strava segment.
-
It was more of a "ski by feel" day yesterday, but the 20 cm of fresh snow made it all worthwhile. t.co/ul1AgN3EYZ
-
I love using the expression, but did not know that Timbuktu is in Mali, West Africa.
-
A site linked on HN today hosting an article about lousy web design trends, has mouseover dropdown menus, complete with submenus. META.
-
At one point in the past, big rigs and custom hardware were for gaming. Now they're for mining.
-
Plain English explanation of today's Bitcoin block chain deviation. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5359719
-
Yep. That's pretty much the reason that I stopped signing e-mail. xkcd.com/1181/
-
I remember how bright the future looked when Microsoft launched OData. The Netflix OData API will be gone in a month. developer.netflix.com/blog/read/Chan…
-
Call me late to the game, but Ruby 2's shorthand definition for lists of symbols is nice.
SYMBOLS = %i[conditions limit offset]
-
Triumph of the City is the best, and most important book that I've read in quite a while. It's about urban economics. books.google.com/books?id=-yWTI…
-
A clever trick for required named parameters in Ruby 2.0.0. stackoverflow.com/questions/1325…
-
The Hugh Ferriss collection of drawings. columbia.edu/cu/libraries/i… Mostly renditions of what future urban environments could've looked like.
-
For anyone pining for a new epic by Clint Mansell, "Becoming..." from the Stoker soundtrack may be what you're looking for.
-
Irssi protip: Alt+A will cycle through "red highlighted" windows first (messages + mentions), then through windows with any activity.
February
-
TIL that ISO 8601 specifies how to define a recurring time interval. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#…
-
window_switcher.pl for irssi will change your life. My days of typing in window numbers is over. wouter.coekaerts.be/irssi/window_s…
-
I don't find ag's leap over ack to be speed, but rather its handling of file types that it's not completely familiar with. Ack uninstalled.
-
Also, I want to live in a city modelled after this campus. Paradise for walkers, bikers, and longboarders alike.
-
Stanford costs 10x as much as where I went to university, but I must admit, it really is 10x as nice. t.co/v5YvcJ4e7w
-
The Ruby on my projects is pretty clean these days, but the JavaScript still looks like the cat dragged it in.
-
To be clear, UUIDs *are* random. Just as long as they're V4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal…
-
Reconsider that Vim Ctrl+Z / fg pattern. Terminal multiplexers are around for good reasons.
-
Gwern strikes again. An absolutely amazing in-depth article on Silk Road. gwern.net/Silk%20Road
-
psql + gnuplot (without leaving psql). Incredible. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215040
-
Reading about Cocoa Auto Layout. The fact that there are alternatives to Interface Builder is (good) news to me. bit.ly/XNkRUy
-
My Irssi to Growl pipeline has more moving parts than a Swiss watch.
VPN + Irssi + Perl plugin + SSH RemoteForward + Growl.
-
Spoiler: the ending to The Wheel of Time is incredible.
SoT down. WoT down. Now all I can do is hope that GoT will get an ending.
-
The multiple Instagram quips really made the talk for me.
-
PSA: Cory Doctorow is at Borderlands tonight at 7 PM, and Brandon Sanderson is there tomorrow at 3 PM.
-
What's the tool that will provide me the same quantum leap over Sed that Ack did for Grep?
-
iOS should track personal autocorrect stats so users can decide whether they should turn it off. Strongly suspect it's detrimental overall.
January
-
Kelly Slater's donut-shaped pool for surfing in circles. Forever. neatorama.com/2013/01/29/Sur…
-
I thought they'd invent their own DCVS before giving into an open alternative. blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio…
-
Great story on a recent super battle in EVE Online, a game where in-game items have direct value in real world money. reddit.com/r/gaming/comme…
-
The final book (finally). Started this series on the back of a bus in elementary school. t.co/5JIwcUvn
-
Two letter find in Vim. This is huge. github.com/goldfeld/vim-s…
Jan 27, 2013 ( ♥ 4 )
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However, consensus seems to be that an Alberta buyout isn't quite as positive as an event as a Silicon Valley buyout.
-
The first company I worked at out of university was acquired yesterday. research.tdwaterhouse.ca/research/publi…
-
Install the original Half-Life on my Mac. The day has come!
-
Just re-read this excellent article today explaining why you should pick JSON or XML for your API, rather than both. mnot.net/blog/2012/04/1…
-
Reviews on Goodreads are so broken. "Norwegian Wood" is rated more highly than any of the best non-fictions I've read in the last few years.
-
Found this comic I owned as a kid in an antique store. I'm officially old. t.co/pmyTJaSj
-
I don't mind cold weather, but I do miss daylight.
-
/r/music is jokingly going through a metal phase. reddit.com/r/music
-
The JavaScript Problem. haskell.org/haskellwiki/Th…
2012
December
-
The scariest situation. d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/php-endorsed.p…
-
All I see here is a Dead Like Me tribute (Homeland). d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/homeland-cafe.…
-
11" MBA + full-screen Plex + transparent full-screen (not the Lion kind) Plex + Tmux.
-
The proper combination of Sinatra settings to have errors raised to the terminal while using rack-test. mutelight.org/sinatra-rack-t…
-
(Then consider whether Sinatra is actually so different than Rails.)
-
Exercise: step out of a Sinatra route, and through all the middleware it's added to protect you from your imperfect knowledge of HTTP.
-
Experimenting with Rack::Cache patterns. Love the idea of implementing client HTTP caching, and getting server side caching for free.
-
In Rack::Builder what you pass into a `use` is auto-instantiated, but what you `run` is not.
-
`brew install youtube-dl`
A great answer for anyone who doesn't install Flash or use Chrome. Works on Vimeo too.
-
Running today, hit the floor of my iPhone 5's operational temperature. ~-17C.
-
Between Gmail and Gmaps, Google is better at Apple's operating system than Apple.
(Had to use Mail.app for something. It was frustrating.)
-
My internal server errors are causing internal server errors.
-
X-Cascade. The answer to all my Sinatra composition problems. stackoverflow.com/questions/5643…
-
All APIs seem great until you try to do something with them. It's a recurring problem in the industry.
-
The History of Rome. thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of…
-
Advice from Dad: always start with a book's 1-star reviews. amazon.com/Cloud-Atlas-Mo…
-
RT @mattt: Introducing Rack::PushNotification: Run your own push notification service on Heroku. No addon required.
Dec 4, 2012 ( ♥ 70 )
-
The location of the world's tallest tree has never been revealed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_…
(via Know I Know)
-
Law of 2-factor authentication: your 30 day computer authorization will always expire the day you're late to a Google Hangout.
-
OH from noob/troll at Grove: "You know what I hate using? Vim! I'm part of the Sublime generation."
I laughed.
-
Finally figured out what the tuxedo collars are called. imgur.com/a/UlfIu
November
-
San Francisco ranks 18th in per capita funding to bicycle and pedestrian projects. sfbike.org/main/city-of-s…
-
For years I assumed that Ruby profilers were bad because the debuggers are bad. Turns out the profilers are actually awesome.
-
Sinatra's last_modified behaves in exactly the right way.
-
Cross-section of Kowloon Walled City. d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/kowloon.jpg
-
Even DNA Pizza is closed. It's either Thanksgiving, or the end of the world.
-
RT @heroku: Support thousands of developers. Join @ped, @brandur & @daneharrigan on the Heroku API team: ow.ly/fsbL1
-
Simulacra & Simulation. Neo's hollowed out book in the Matrix.
d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/simulacra-and-…
-
Kreuzberg, Berlin. AirBnB neighborhoods are the best new thing I've seen on the Internet in a while. airbnb.com/locations/berl…
-
So angry that this isn't a real product. thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/dharm…
-
RT @ped: POST /jobs {"title": "Heroku API Developer", "url": "http://t.co/fGAMlw7t"}
-
Post-rock Tuesday. postrocktu.es/day/2012/11/06
-
The asset pipeline in Sinatra. mutelight.org/asset-pipeline
-
IsNateSilverAWitch.com concludes: “Probably.”
-
Run `bundle update <gem>`. Version goes from 1.7.0 to 1.4.4.
-
*the help of a
-
The British, with a help of a Canadian (!) task force, invaded Iceland in 1940. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_…
-
A small, but working, version of the Babbage Difference Engine from the Computer History Museum. t.co/yzrEzZLF
-
You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
-
Just got a guy in a Bane costume to say, "When Gotham is ashes, you have my permission to die."
October
-
New York as the center of the Universe. 1976. d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfront.net/steinberg-newy…
-
I'm perfectly okay with Star Wars episode 7! Between episodes 1-3 and the Expanded Univerise, things really can't get any worse!
-
Technique for a very loud whistle with no fingers. reddit.com/r/IWantToLearn…
-
x4.
-
3x Daenerys costumes so far tonight. Love it.
-
Please connect to the Internet before continuing to use offline playback.
Makes sense, Rdio.
-
Launched Puma. Felt great. Then realized I'd been working with Unicorn so long that my code was no longer thread-safe.
-
The Nicoyans in Costa Rica use the term _plan de vida_ to describe a lifelong sense of purpose. nytimes.com/2012/10/28/mag…
-
Hardcore history. The latest series is on Genghis Khan and the Mongols. This is amazing stuff. dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharc…
-
Windows RT. "The RT acronym does not officially stand for anything." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT
-
Clay Shirky is a great speaker. ted.com/talks/clay_shi…
-
Imperative Reaction at DNA; music I discovered in 2007. Taste doesn't change much. t.co/oFaMQcIH
-
The Bay. You could take this shot from your Motorola Rzr and it would still look amazing. t.co/E36GlFlr
-
The average employee of the SF Parking Authority commits more parking infractions in single shift than most people will in their lifetimes.
-
Just noticed that Twitter killed RSS. At least the user timeline API can be accessed without authentication. For now.
-
RT @blakegentry: This morning I received an envelope w/ no return address. It would appear that @github is challenging us to a rematch. ...
-
“We never talk about closing the streets,” said Gil. “We talk about opening them to people and closing them to cars.” www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/toronto-chart…
-
Killing my experiment in S/MIME signing e-mails. Provides little practical benefit, but adds a lot over overhead to every e-mail sent.
-
In case you missed it from last week, by far the best guide on how to get Mutt up and running that's ever been written: stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/
-
There's something very satisfying about sending mail from Mutt. It feels like you're in a Neal Stephenson novel or something.
-
Giving Strava a shot.
(because apparently nothing in Runkeeper has improved in the last three years)
-
What’s happening in Iceland’s metal scene? www.ghostcultmag.com/2012/10/what-hell-is-happenin…
-
Market Street is no place for cars. www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-portanova/market-st…
-
Beggars and track stands. I must be back in SF.
-
The Vasa, 226 feet long, 1210 tonnes displacement, sunk < 2 km into its maiden voyage. My favorite tourist trap ever. t.co/G3A9D2YT
September
-
I actually can't tell whether the majority of people on this boat are speaking Finnish or Swedish.
-
The GitHub drink up in Helsinki was by far the most epic I’ve ever attended.
(Thanks for organizing @demonbane + @danishkhan!)
-
Haha. Ruby "stabby procs".
-
The talk on refactoring by @kytrinyx at Frozen Rails does an astounfing job of articulating the good coding habits of an advanced Rubyist.
-
RT @kytrinyx: Woah, this #frozenrails talk on first class APIs by @brandur is excellent. I'm totally going to run with this.
-
Slides for my talk, Composable Applications with a First-class API: composable.herokuapp.com
-
I have a bad feeling that I might be missing a Red Hot Chili Peppers performance right now.
-
Helsinki. t.co/Bq7ETbPC
-
Affinity's Metropolitan, the bike ridden by Wilee in Premium Rush: affinitycycles.com/frames/metropolitan/
-
Eluveitie + Wintersun 2012 north American tour: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cefa30wM3cY
-
You'd never expect it, but the ING Direct cafe on Post and Kearny is hacker central.
-
Just another one of San Francisco's exclusive parties. t.co/4LfVc8Gw
-
The Game of Thrones board game is equal to the book series in raw epicness.
-
With surf and skateboards featured on the roof, the bars of San Diego are exactly what you'd expect. t.co/4dUbXjmO
-
Had a difficult reminder today that surfing is hard.
-
Just read "Gmail as a Facade".
You could do all that, or go a bit further and learn Mutt, and you've got a good mail client for life.
-
I want to see a sequel to Tron Legacy that presents an alternate timeline in which CLU & co. made it off the grid and conquered the world.
-
Had a problem: needed to pick up beer so went to Bevmo for maximum selection. Now have two problems. t.co/eOxrTHdd
-
1 SSL Endpoint, N Apps: mutelight.org/1-endpoint-n-apps
-
I love the simplicity of DNSimple's metrics system for a domain:
> Over the last thirty days we've answered about eighty thousand requests.
-
Seriously enjoying Reamde. Certainly Neal Stephenson's easiest read to date.
-
Simultaneously love and hate the syntax that CoffeeScript lets you get away with: gist.github.com/3589087
August
-
"Revolver" explained in two parts: (1) www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/z3dwl/what_is_thi… + (2) www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/z3dwl/what_is_thi…
-
Best part about dropping Ctrl-A as your Tmux/Screen prefix is that it’s freed up for the Emacs style go to start of line shortcut.
-
RT @fabiokung: Epic. @heroku weekend warriors! @ped @wuputah @brandur t.co/5QPxayoq
-
Still puzzling over the fact that the croissants at Vega (a cafe in a garage) are better than those at La Boulange.
-
Fixation -- a beautiful documentary on fixed gear in SF and LA. It's crazy seeing your own streets in this kind of production.
-
Experimenting with Caps Lock as Tmux prefix. So far so good.
-
Premium rush: one stupid stunt movie that I *will* go see. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYDIw4ZnecM
-
So next week someone will invent another DSL that makes Twitter easier to use, but your bank will be writing new COBOL. blog.jelastic.com/2012/08/13/hate-java/
-
Clive Owen is a wearing a London 2012 sweater in the siege scene of Children of Men (a 2006 film). Nice touch. drop.brandur.org/children-of-men-london-2012.jpg
-
Just re-read Neil Gaiman's American Gods. This time around I had new appreciation for the settings in San Francisco and Reykjavik.
-
The indispensable ability to switch to the perspective of your reader. www.stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesday…
-
RT @ekryski: with @brandur @markhazlett @TheEricAnderson @joshuapinter at the top of Sparrowhawk. #yyc t.co/vxhwB6m8
-
Ensiferum’s new video for “In My Sword I Trust”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN5NpaSbVQU
(warning: metal)
-
Amazing climb up Rundle East yesterday w/ @markhazlett, @BryceMEvans, and co. Easy to miss Alberta in the summer. t.co/KgoAY3iE
-
Nexus application successful.
FYI Canadians, Nexus also qualifies you for Global Entry for quick access from countries that are not Canada.
-
Nexus interview today. This should be interesting.
-
A couple great passages from Philip K. Dick: the-surf.org/philip-k-dick
-
Inglewood is such a great community. Additions like Gravity continue to make it even better. t.co/8Qz5rrDa
July
-
to_xml(:dasherize => false, :skip_types => true)
I’ll be proud to own an API that no longer returns XML.
-
Reasonable `time` formatting for Zsh:
TIMEFMT=$$'\nreal\t%E\nuser\t%U\nsys\t%S'
-
The Olympics overrun their budget with 100% consistency. Largest overruns were Montreal 1976 (796%), and Barcelona 1992 (417%).
-
A random photo capture.
BBQ Dev Ops: www.flickr.com/photos/miekd/7532412420/in/photostr…
-
RT @dhh: When you sell investors on a trip around the milky way, they're not going to be happy merely staying at a hotel on the moon.
-
Sunday Streets is a guaranteed win every time. t.co/faIJx1IQ
-
PATCH is not safe, nor idempotent, and allows full and partial updates and side-effects on other resources. weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/2/25/edge-rails-patch-…
-
Microsoft will open source Entity Framework: www.hanselman.com/blog/EntityFrameworkMagicUnicorn…
-
MathJax looks amazing anywhere: facts.brandur.org/harmonic-mean
-
Disappointed that there wasn’t a track on the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack called “Discombobulate.”
-
Good read from Linus on reverting a faulty merge: www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/rev…
The important part involving a `git rebase --no-ff` is near the end.
-
Tech now accounts for 1.6% of Canada's benchmark stock index. www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/canadas-vanishi…
-
Pier 39. t.co/VS3b2Qxg
-
San Francisco drivers attempted to solve the gridlock problem via their primary competency: honking a lot; with shockingly poor results.
-
Complete gridlock along the Embarcadero tonight. It's good being a bicyclist.
-
People in San Francisco are ridiculously fucking good at trivia.
-
RT @zeke: Today I set out to answer the question: Who wears the stripes in San Francisco? project-zebra.herokuapp.com/
-
The mist/rain droplets today are the perfect cooling for biking. Also good for keeping the crowds off the beach ;)
-
That said, configuration through config vars exclusively doesn't always feel like the final answer. www.12factor.net/config
-
In hindsight, experimenting with staging/production config in separate branches of my project was a pratical failure.
June
-
The only company that does packaging better than Apple. t.co/Ot9MwcSR
-
Afraid to upgrade to a faster laptop.
Now I can tell exactly when Firefox starts chugging/devouring battery and kill it. Not so on i5/i7.
-
Microsoft may do bad things.
But, lambdas + method chains in Java 8 are a perfect recreation of a product that has worked well for 5 years.
-
SF protip: if you have an engagement on the other side of market street today, cancel and stay home.
-
Also, switched to Inconsolata-dz. A lot more clear than Monaco.
-
iTerm2 has a feature that allows ascii and non-ascii to render differently. Easy to enable unintentionally, and can lead to visual glitches.
-
Played around with iTerm2 to see why antialiasing + unicode doesn't seem to mix. Finally got that fixed.
-
Evening project: installing and de-branding tires. t.co/DAXpUCOs
-
At the risk of being a peon in a tide of net rage, the idea of Craigslist C&Ding Padmapper is absurd.
+1 this comment: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149130
-
Workers who used a hot cell trained to use its mechanical manipulators by threading a needle with string. www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/plum-brook-nucl…
-
How does CloudFlare work? www.quora.com/How-does-CloudFlare-work/answer/Matt…
-
RT @dpiddee: happy cedar by default day!
-
Why is it so common to see Enumerable#inject used when the alias #reduce is available?
-
Building an API with .netrc: mutelight.org/netrc
-
Returned $$3 tire levers that broke while levering a tire. It was satisfying.
-
Julian Assange's commits to Postgres: git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=sear…
-
Meet PagerDuty co-founder at party. COMPLAIN ABOUT UI.
-
Came into work a little after 430.
@daneharrigan @leinweber @gorsuch @stolt45 were still steaming along at full power.
-
Barely made it back into the country. As a people, I wish us Canadians hadn't developed such a questionable reputation.
-
Just heard Germany score a Eurocup goal, kilometers from any working television.
-
I'd try to take some photos, but this guy already nailed it: www.ottsworld.com/blogs/photographing-spreepark-be…
-
Staring into Spreepark is like looking into an exclusion zone. Very quiet. Can only nothing but birds chirping.
-
Jobs hosted “Top 100” meetings every 12-18 mo. where he invited his 100 favorite, not highest ranking, employees to discuss Apple’s future.
-
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
-
tl;dr Retina, but on the wrong computer.
-
Oh man, is ARGF ever cool.
-
Consider adding a bin/console to your Ruby app: mutelight.org/bin-console
-
Is there justification for why Sinatra uses the `at_exit` hook to start up? github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/master/lib/sinatra…
-
Most badass climbing wall ever. t.co/mCqZ8dPp
-
Watched the latest Game of Thrones on my 11" MBA. Felt very guilty for doing so. It deserves better.
-
Great blog: blog.sanctum.geek.nz/
A lot of advanced stuff on here about Vim and the like is downright hard to find out.
-
Kind of a nice debug pattern if you're still stuck maintaining code that needs to be both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 compatible: mutelight.org/ruby-debug
-
American top 40 domination internationally is beyond impressive.
-
Typical day for me -->
Me: Ein Kaffee bitte.
Barista: Okay, did you want anything else?
-
Authbind (for people who dislike man pages without usage examples):
-
In case, like me, changing an app over to heroku-postgresql:dev wasn't the most obvious thing in the world for you: mutelight.org/heroku-postgres-dev
-
Unfortunate how much I depend on Rails' monkey patching just to make certain portions of Ruby reasonable. e.g. Time.
-
Whoah. All roommates in bed by 1 o'clock. For a Berlin hostel, to say this is statistically improbable is an understatement.
-
Having only recently discovered the hard way that making a good stencil is hard, I was extra appreciative of this one. t.co/fhRkIWMP
-
The gentlemen's agreement for graffiti in Berlin is only paint over something if you can do better. t.co/5KcaYU6p
-
Love it. People actually say "Gesundheit" here when you sneeze. We'd always use it in our family half-jokingly.
-
Had a sudden Starbucks carving, so searched for one in Berlin. Results not promising.
-
This club has four floors so that one of them can play Depeche Mode full-time.
-
After many years of Twitter, my username has finally changed from IRC handle @fyrerise, to @brandur. Thanks @jdarrellg for releasing it!
-
In Berlin, urban exploration is still a real thing. t.co/JlZxqJgS
-
Huh. Expedia's mobile site is significantly better than their web version.
May
-
Writing on paper would sure be great if it weren't so slow. It's hard to beat the novelty of journaling into a moleskine.
-
Just saw a guy in Berlin riding a fixie and carrying a Chrome messenger bag. For a second I thought I was back in SF.
-
The good part about OpenSSL is that it works.
That's it. The complete list of its positive qualities.
-
You just don't see this kind of thing in the Western Hemisphere.
-
Imagine a gothic ball full of Victorian gowns, cravats, and top hats, accompanied by this music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L72e7OgW5j8
-
Berlin ping pong. t.co/3BS2Mglu
-
Sifted through a lot of confident-sounding bad diagnoses on camera Q&A sites though. Like Stack Overflow without a "right answer" mechanism.
-
Blurry viewfinder on the d90. Turns out my diopter wheel had been knocked out of place.
-
Workspace for the next few weeks. Great light. t.co/mdyAOgll
-
[America's] not-so-friendly neighbor: www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/opinion/our-not-so-frie…
(via @josephbreihan)
-
The most accurate depiction of apartment hunting in San Francisco I've seen to date: avnergeller.blogspot.com/2012/03/apartment-hunting…
(via @michellegreer)
-
Agora Collective in Berlin. t.co/mZnJ2nIo
-
Amazing. Sex Bob-omb / Garbage Truck just played at DNA pizza.
I pretty much come here for the music videos.
-
Wow, seriously, Netflix doesn't even have the Matrix? Final straw.
-
How Weird is on today! Why am I down here. howweird.org/
-
Walking into a Starbucks now feels like an artifact from a past life.
-
Elsewhere, you time your sprinklers to water your lawn. In SF, you time them to water your pavement. t.co/jf886oew
-
Oh, and forgot to tweet this. Check out our new SSL endpoints: blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/5/3/announcing_bette…
-
Finding the Wiggle, a route that nearly became a park, but didn't because this is North America and roads are better. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panhandle_extension_to_…
-
First K&L wine club shipment is in. Now waiting for a special occasion. t.co/FIh1mUHb
-
That's a sizeable messenger bag. t.co/3h013UDe
-
SF Bike Party is so much win. I wanted to post some photos, but nothing I took could possibly do it justice.
-
nzbs.org redesign. Brutal.
-
Can't get past 30% average core usage on a c1.xlarge with Handbrake.
-
Nice. Putting `bind -v` into your `~/.editrc` gets you Vi-mode in programs using editline, like IRB.
-
Great article on event matching in Upstart: netsplit.com/2010/12/03/event-matching-in-upstart/
April
-
Schneier / Prisoner's Dilemma on a game show: www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/04/amazing_rou…
-
RT @StanLeeComikaze: Stan and his good pal @patrickhstweart hanging out. Professor X!!!! We are having a blast in Canada! t.co/h ...
-
See that hipster d-bag walking his fixie up the last hill towards the Panhandle on Page St?
That was me.
-
Pool. t.co/BTbTyncB
-
.NET Entity Framework automatic migrations made it to HN front page! blog.appharbor.com/2012/04/24/automatic-migrations…
Nice work by the good people of AppHarbor.
-
Decommissioning my old running shoes. They've been around the block a few times. t.co/D0UQqaGx
-
PG&E service deposit required because I'm Canadian: $$90.00.
Actual bill for last 30 days of usage: $$4.63
Deposit/reality ratio: ~20
-
Sausalito is like a different, more tropical, country. t.co/WcisTkqO
-
Biking Golden Gate Bridge with only one side open is like flying the trench run.
-
Offlineimap running as a long-lived process is kinda fail. Use cron.
-
The Revival Tour. t.co/pcYBmeyg
-
Delores on a nice Saturday is a San Franciscan's version of going to the beach. t.co/wDw34w8F
-
Improbably nice today in SF. At Westfield buying emergency shorts.
-
Terrible website, amazing posters: clubnocturne.com/
-
Yesterday, creating a new repository on GitHub was the single most annoying thing to have to do.
Today, that's been completely overturned.
-
JUSTICE. t.co/2cBzHvIa
-
Today I learned that I didn't really understand git submodules very well.
-
Knowing how the stereo is wired is the worst kind of incumbent knowledge.
-
Yoga on the labyrinth. If this can't get me into yoga, I don't know what can: www.gracecathedral.org/cathedral-life/communities/…
-
There isn't any furniture that I can buy for which I won't experience buyer's remorse.
-
Flow my tears, the policeman said.
-
In an event of heroic outlandishness, I went running and lost my key chain .. but not my keys.
-
Death to Word: www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/…
Authors are on the right track. I anxiously await the day they discover Markdown and Git repos.
-
+1 37Signals: 6. Don’t use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-programmers-writing-tests 37signals.com/svn/posts/3159-testing-like-the-tsa
-
The day I leave SF, I'm taking this sign with me. t.co/cX3xYUgM
-
I take back what i said about there not being enough Pho in SF. Just had the most delicious bowl of it ever in the Tenderloin.
-
Commenters on National Geographic might just give YouTube commenters a run for their money: photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/pho…
-
Used offlineimap to sync 4GB of e-mails. Then disk/CPU/battery started disappearing. Culprit: Spotlight workers.
-
9.8G /Users/fyrerise/.Spotlight-V100
-
Switching from Mutt's built-in IMAP to Mutt + offlineimap is a 100 fold improvement. Fast e-mail browsing becomes instantaneous.
-
Okay, it was moved out of the AUR and is now called `passenger`. Chasing after these things is annoying, but this is pretty nice.
-
`nginx-passenger` gone from the AUR without a trace. I guess this is why people use Ubuntu LTS.
-
This 8-bit Google Maps prank gives me renewed hope for the feasibility of a Maps command line client ;)
March
-
TIL that `/stats p` in IRC doesn't just list network staff, it notifies them as well.
-
OH: I'm in F.A. ... U.X.
-
I use Aurora over Minefield so that when Mozilla breaks Vimperator, the community is caught by Aurora release.
Also, Aurora? Way cool name.
-
If you're looking for a tiling window manager for OSX, the answer is Tmux.
-
If you're on OSX, get BreakTime. It's a much healthier way of using a computer.
-
Switched back to a keyboard with a real Ctrl button and it didn't work. Entirely dependent on crazy Apple Fn/Ctrl setup now.
-
Paged just after 5 this morning. Can't pay for a better way to wake up.
-
Optimized the tool set a bit more by switching from Bash to zsh this morning. It took watching @leinweber use it for a week to convince me.
-
Paganfest on Apr. 17th (including Turisas, Arkona, Alestorm): www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2012/04-17.html
-
It's unnatural that I still can't order IKEA furniture online.
-
PG on writing and speaking. paulgraham.com/speak.html
"Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader."
-
As a Canadian living in the US, it becomes your sacred duty to receive Amazon .com shipments and forward them to relatives up North.
-
Okay Austin, you win. t.co/49RxGoA6
-
Slate magazine's "Where’s _why?": www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/…
(Heroku mentioned on page 2!)
-
(That is, during the times of a year that you don't feel like you're being roasted alive)
-
Didn't see it coming, but it turns out that Austin is a beautiful place for running. t.co/VmCHpD8f
-
No music badge. Feel like an outsider.
-
So many great articles on patents hit HN's front page, and not even one will ever be read by a single legislator.
-
Guy just walked in with a farmer style suspender thing going on .. and it actually kind of worked.
SF hipsters have nothing on Austinites.
-
It's passed 11 PM and I'm still in a cafe coding. Austin is a great place.
-
Jonathan Stark has issued a second community shared Starbucks card. Nice. #sxfreecoffee
-
Is that a Duck Duck Go circle? Club #fail. /cc @SaraD t.co/rSdlkYYk
-
Still have yet to attend any large event with reliable wireless. No number of fancy looking Cisco base stations help.
-
Lytro session made SXSW worth it.
This technology has a strong potential to shift the entire industry.
-
Robots?! t.co/pzXtbcrC
-
OH: there's a real life flash mob out there! t.co/z9cF6Jmu
-
Ghostland Observatory. t.co/B14dXjxh
-
Staying sober was worth it. The head of Xprize makes it on stage. t.co/FBSTaXmT
-
Seems impossible, but we're still talking about startups well into drinking hours at #sxswi. t.co/0uALfxUG
-
Great turnout for the MIT Media Lab's session.
Still hoping one day it will produce results worthy of such a great concept.
-
This rain is making prospects for food trucks and beer gardens pretty grim.
-
Nothing like wondering why a Ruby repository is taking so long to clone, then realizing that somebody dropped a .WAR in there.
-
First quake! M4.3: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes…
-
Nice. AT&T Park has valet bike parking during games.
February
-
Ah yes, the stuff you read on the Internet.
Apple at $$500 Billion is *not* worth the same as Poland: www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/02/29/apple-…
-
Wholesale .com/.net registrations are $$7.85 (from $$6) after the last price increase built into Verisign's contract. blog.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-do…
-
Harmy's Star Wars Despecialized Edition HD (actually a real thing): originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WA…
-
Why isn't PostgreSQL using my index? www.revsys.com/blog/2008/sep/16/why-isnt-postgresq…
(Answer: because it's probably too smart)
-
Guy next to me at cafe is unboxing a new iPad. At the end of February. Can I tell him to return it without coming off as a hipster d-bag?
-
Quite possibly the best bar ever conceived by mankind. t.co/58daK4W6
-
Simultaneous Flash + specs proved a little too much for my C2D Air.
-
Last post in reference to big money Agile (contractors + conferences + dogma) as opposed to being agile. Great article.
-
Agile evades criticism using standard tactics like the two above: embracing anything good, and disclaiming anything bad steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-ag…
-
Always surprised to find Starbucks croissants still suck. They should be able to invent a way to do them better than a boulangerie in Paris.
-
Of course the first time I ever accidentally delete my local Gem cache is at 30,000 ft. somewhere over Oregon.
-
Have been using the California library system for only two weeks now and library funding needs defending already.
-
Where to sleep in Paris: www.pret-a-voyager.com/2011/08/where-to-sleep-in-p…
(Could have used this 3 months ago!)
-
"Frostbeard" the Viking. t.co/rCBJD78P
-
SNOW DAY! Skied open to close. t.co/fwTR0PZe
-
RE: Mountain Lion Gatekeeper. How long will that 3rd option be around? s3.amazonaws.com/random-brandur/gatekeeper.png
-
Blue skies make for some nice pictures, but we could use a nice 20 cm snow dump up here. t.co/9T8hjjum
-
It's Unicorn philosophy not to support persistent connections: unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPHY.html
Luckily, swapping one Rack server for another is easy.
-
Sequel's filter expressions take Ruby black magic to a new level.
-
The simplicity of logging to $$stdout is quite beautiful.
-
Well, at the very least, being able to say you live in San Francisco makes a good talking point on ski lifts.
-
The key proficiency of any travel writer is the mastery of hyperbole.
-
No one is frivolous in the future. No one exhibits poor or mediocre time mgmt. All are paladins of self-organization. www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/shits…
-
Thanks @markhazlett for organizing #CoffeeAndCode tonight. Crazy turnout. Interesting things brewing in #yyc.
-
Awesome. Code haiku! RT @ethicfailblog: @fyrerise
if i equals 5
print error in I O file
system dot exit
-
A promising alternative to Mutt: sup.rubyforge.org/
-
s/borrowed from/loaned by/
-
Working off of desk space kindly borrowed from @acceleratoryyc in Inglewood. Thanks guys!
-
First time ever at LAX and the only memento I'll be taking away is duty free.
-
... and since I just that back to myself: rotary telephone is not a euphemism. There was actually a rotary telephone mounted on his bike.
-
... I don't even know where to start. #onlyinsf
-
Saw a guy biking down Market in an American flag bikini at 2 AM. He had to stop riding because his rotary telephone fell out of its cradle.
-
Used Airdrop to transfer a file for the first time. Effective.
-
Adobe's building is beautiful. t.co/0fDHQ1uw
-
Switched from Vmail to Mutt and threaded sorting.
I think I finally understand how Tom Lane is doing it.
-
United just freaked me out telling me that my flight was tomorrow. Then I realized it was just a classic time zone bug.
-
And if I'd said that last line out loud, it would've come out PRO-cess rather than PRAW-cess ;)
-
SF PL's process for getting a library card is pretty streamlined. Beautiful library too.
-
House party @ HQ.
-
Blue skies in SF today. t.co/AICkLw7Z
-
Emilie Autumn last night. Her style is billed as "Victoriandustrial". t.co/Yr60FNJI
-
Firefox's page up/down is far better than Chrome's because it's not animated, and therefore faster and less distracting.
Do less, get more.
-
Placards were entertaining though: one claimed that a buyer had bid $$70M for this styrofoam rock, but the Buddha politely declined.
-
So, as it turns out, the museum was a front for an organization headed by a self-proclaimed Buddha. 80%+ of the pieces inside are by him.
-
Free admission to the International Art Museum of America today 1100 to 1900. Going to check it out while battery charges.
-
Successful core deploy from a coffee shop.
If my previous employer would've seen this, they'd have gone instantly mad. Lovecraftian style.
-
Just saw @kch execute his trademark move of getting into an Uber (outside of Philz).
-
Jazz @ Revolution Cafe. Really chill cafe/bar in the Mission. t.co/76H724EZ
-
`display: inline-block` is a hack at best, and not a real substitute for `column-break-inside: avoid`
-
.vimperatorrc --> `map <M-f> /`
Open Vimperator find when you hit Cmd-F by accident (instead of FF quickfind with no close shortcut).
-
San Francisco could benefit from more establishments selling late night food.
Possibly poutine.
-
GitHub's one click logout is so nice.
UIs are trending towards the anti-pattern of hiding logout in a menu. Take Gmail for example. Or us.
January
-
Good to know: an older version of a gem executable can be run like this: `heroku _2.18.1_ list` (compared to just `heroku list`).
-
Pentadactyl definitely not a clear win over Vimperator.
-
"Emerald Forest and the Blackbird" by Swallow the Sun: soundcloud.com/inferno-magazine/sets/swallow-the-s…
Really nice new #metal (if you're into that kind of thing).
-
Subject of best surf magazine came up on /r/surfing. The answer is the Surfer's Journal. Sold at Hollister. t.co/qcrcT4t2
-
The Great Gatsby @ Noir City as shown by Castro Theater. Best part was audience dressed as if from the earlier 1900s. t.co/k8InwxBr
-
Added monthly headers because these days I tweet with what can only be described as obnoxious frequency: brandur.org/twitter
-
For a month now my TODO list has been a basic text file open in Vim inside a dedicated Tmux window. Works beautifully.
-
`for` loop inside IcedCoffeeScript's `await` block. Nice! Brings Node that much closer to practicality ;)
-
Hm. Just saw an error on GitHub's side when doing a push .. for the first time ever.
-
Ruby meetup at Heroku. There's a keg. t.co/jvO1EyNw
-
Printed and scanned both a .doc and a .xls, and the scanned .jpg's were half the size of the original docs.
MS Office is truly a marvel.
-
I was just told by @exdevlin that this guy's hair reminds her of mine: img3.lln.crunchyroll.com/i/spire1/4ce09a2b8e07cfa7…
That explains the reactions of a lot of people.
-
TIL that `?`, `+`, and `|` are extended POSIX regex.
-
Empty commit and push for testing buildpacks: `git commit --allow-empty -m 'Iterating'` (thanks @ped!)
-
The divergence of `sed` on GNU vs. on Darwin is so unfortunate.
People say that `brew install gnu-sed` is the right answer.
-
How does Google Voice capture outgoing texts from non-Android phones? It's like magic.
-
San Francisco is at its nicest in the early AM.
-
Troll field gas is extracted by trolls A, B, and C. "A" platform is the largest structure ever moved at 656k tons and 472 m tall.
-
Priceline, Hotwire, and Better Bidding turn a monotonous task into an interesting hobby.
-
I (finally) have an American bank account. So baller.
-
I've finished reading exactly one book since arriving in SF. Living here is giving me ADD.
-
Rails 3.2: `ActiveRecord::Relation` now has a `uniq` method for selecting distinct values. Nice.
-
The Volcano. Smuggler's Cove, San Francisco. t.co/LJhEvzCf
-
#vim: Map F1 to Escape to make it less obnoxious.
```
map <F1> <Esc>
imap <F1> <Esc>
```
-
Love Maddox's piece on SOPA/PIPA: maddox.xmission.com/
Here's more of an optimist than me though. That's a good thing.
-
New Eluveitie album 'Helvetios' out in February. Can't wait. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1lXdLus2WI
-
Drinking Hoegaarden and doing laundry at Brainwash. This is the true San Francisco experience. t.co/9cXtsiNv
-
Wish Path was built on Twitter as a backend. I like using it a lot more, but not enough to post things twice.
-
SSN finally ready. Only 7 weeks to have a computer generate a number.
Pretty fast for the public sector.
-
Think I'd be happier browsing most of the net in text-only.
Some sites (e.g. CNet) are getting too JS heavy for my puny C2D.
-
Moved a Rails project from page to action caching this morning because `expire_page` on Heroku is a no-op: www.whatcodecraves.com/articles/2010/02/24/page_ca…
-
Feeling for my countrymen in Calgary where it's currently a very grim -30C. #metal
-
Finally made it out to Ocean Beach last Saturday. People surf, but only the lion-hearted (water is impressively cold). t.co/sEOFxqeU
-
Forgot to mention this SSL branch of the camper_van gem that some Herokai put together the other day: github.com/dpiddy/camper_van/tree/server-ssl
-
So I'm left with external dependencies either way: MiniTest (built in post 1.9) + Mocha or RSpec.
… and generally people know RSpec better.
-
Minitest has mocks but not stubs?
The decision to include this thing in core may have been a little too hasty.
-
Layered, breathable layers are kind of a fad, and not required by real hikers. @kch demonstrates. t.co/XJIaxZUZ
-
As @Isabelle puts it, this is why you put up with high taxes to live in California ;) t.co/Oh7LeUnA
-
Looking onto San Francisco from the top of North Peak in McNee Ranch State Park. t.co/fGI9lG9U
-
It seems like it would just be annoying, but I'm really liking Google's two-factor authentication.
-
#waza the poster: t.co/H9DewlCw
-
DeVotchKa. #waza t.co/L9P5N96m
-
The founders. #waza t.co/14ZvwhYV
-
RT @leinweber: Taiko 太鼓 at Heroku #waza yfrog.us/0lvoez
-
Rob Pike and gophers explaining concurrency vs. parallelism. #waza t.co/cGNsLuib
-
Adam showing off his MUD during the keynote. #waza t.co/ytXg4Bz2
-
James opening #waza. t.co/gBfJwDg8
-
Pyrrhic Victory Pt. 1 by Orphan Hammer, a wicked metal band from my hometown:
-
Why to use a terminal multiplexer reason no. 87: for when you hit Cmd-Q or Cmd-W by accident.
-
Currently engaged with practicing voodoo (i.e. shell scripting).
-
Remember how in Sim City if you reduced your road budget from anything but 100%, holes start appearing?
SF's budget is at 20%.
-
Take your eyes off the pavement for two seconds in this city an you run into a pothole 5 inches deep.
-
Best use of MiFi is at social security office, where I wait while the bureaucracy is still trying to assign me an SSN. 5 weeks and counting.
-
Return a bad exit code when any command in a Bash pipe fails: `set -o pipefail`
-
Skiing Tahoe with @pvh and @isabelle. t.co/ugX665BO
-
This is work today. t.co/bDdxyE0S
-
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: mutelight.org/articles/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-th…
(internationally portable Wikipedia)
-
Canada -- skiing near Golden a few days back. t.co/bc1I2UcI
-
+ Phoenix Downs (thanks for hosting @exdevlin!). t.co/a6lMqRUY
-
Arkham Horror (we won!). t.co/1FjrS0oG
-
Impress.js just blew me away: bartaz.github.com/impress.js/
Even the demo is an absolute work of art.
-
Scrollorama is one of those things that's so cool, it makes you want to build something around it.
2011
December
-
Amazing how much content I come across Googling tech subjects, read on tech blogs, or find on GitHub is written by other Heroku employees.
-
Last blog post was at the beginning of August. Sad.
-
Have Icelandic lineage/ancestors? Then check out: snorri.is
I did Snorri in 2007 and it was the best experience of my life.
-
All domains switched from GoDaddy as promised.
Now that my DNS is out of limbo, my e-mail works again too. Sorry about that.
-
Can't believe how much time I've spent messing around with domain transfers.
-
Paul Christoforo has been Google bombed so hard that he's going to have to legally change his name.
-
Rocking some code at Kawa. Seriously missed these delicious chai lattes. t.co/BIHR2hrc
-
Pretty rare to see Calgary this quiet. t.co/yzCAlTiP
-
Apple waits for a product to be good before shipping. This is a very hard (if not impossible) pill to swallow for most big business.
-
Amazon and the Fire: plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/EvstFn…
-
Just used Overdrive/Adobe Digital Editions to help my mom get a library book onto her Kobo.
If this is the future, it scares me.
-
Wiki of tropes: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
This is one of those things that I had no notion even existed!
-
brandur.org/Dorian now fixed up and deployed on Heroku. No more ordering problems in charts and elsewhere either.
-
Highlight of the day: my mom receiving a robot for Xmas. t.co/EfAtu4Yz
-
Hacking session over. I'll probably get in ~10 seconds of Hemingway before crashing.
-
Since `false.blank?` is true, `validates_presence_of` can't be used with a boolean field. Use `validates_inclusion_of` instead.
-
Just setup some apps with Heroku's Scheduler add-on for the first time. Sure beats cron wrestling.
-
(Ice) skating down at the Olympic Plaza with the Blairs tonight, followed by an abundance of eggnog and rum.
-
Was just owned by `default_scope`: order inserted into an SQL aggregate. SQLite let it slide, but Postgres bailed.
-
Had a Canadian border guard search my computer today.
Knew things were getting pretty backward here, but didn't know the extent.
-
Calgary.
-
You know, I've been looking for an excuse to ditch GoDaddy permanently. This SOPA debacle is perfect.
-
Bicycle assembly complete. t.co/4TsoZ8ap
-
PHP 5.4 to support fancy mixins called traits.
PHP is sure a lot more fun when your relation to it is that of a disinterested observer.
-
Reread some journal entries that I'd written in Europe (old school in Moleskine).
Introspective experience. Next time I'll write more.
-
Find humour in the fact that I'd spend less on a night in a dorm in Europe thank on a single drink in upscale SF.
-
Just realized the famous Brandur (http://brandur.com) hosts on Heroku (http://brandur.heroku.com) when I tried to reserve that namespace. Haha.
-
Sorensen's answer in this case wasn't really fair.
Cheap energy is a nice to have, but even that wouldn't get us off oil anytime soon.
-
Haha. The woman asking the oil sands question is my mom: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4&feature=youtu.…
Thanks for digging that one out Aaron ;)
-
Grab PCKeyboardHack to map Cap Locks to Escape (keycode 53): pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/extra.html
-
The Japanese showing us some serious love: fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/38824…
-
A Game of Shadows is a good movie, but make sure you like 300-style stop/start slow-motion!
By movie 3, even the dialogue be using it.
-
Rocking some C#. NOSTALGIA.
-
Compiling Mono off battery power. Of course I never think to do it during the 16 hours a day that my notebook sits in my hotel room.
-
Fellow Canadians the Barenaked Ladies at our Salesforce Xmas party last night. t.co/maIz7CiQ
-
First business cards I've had that I'm pumped about carrying with me. t.co/8KA2L83X
-
Keep forgetting that being in the US means that Last.fm is free now.
-
#iddqd RT @daneharrigan: I always code with godmode turned on.
-
It's OSX 10.7 now and Dashboard's Dictionary widget still can't remember whether it's been set to dictionary or thesaurus across sessions.
-
Grails on Heroku: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3356750
-
Attempted to build a synth at GitHub last night. Impressive place. t.co/VJnqQfkH
-
Really good explanation for why OSX clipboards don't work under Tmux: github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard
(+ really good solution too)
-
Swap bundled Vim for terminal MacVim on OSX: `ln -s /usr/local/bin/mvim /usr/local/bin/vim`
(/usr/local/bin should be up there in $$PATH)
-
Just had to `ORDER BY strftime('%s', published_at)` in SQLite to properly order by a date column.
I'm going to Postgres.
-
No way!!! Look what I just found in the Heroku fridge. Someone has to be messing with me. t.co/HYny7F6S
-
Just went to the SF Reddit meetup.
Neither the guy from Apple, nor the guy from Google, nor the guy from Netflix knew who Heroku was. #wtf
-
Went to a Japanese style bath in Japantown. Extremely relaxing. www.kabukisprings.com/images/gallery/lg/baths02.jp…
-
Is there a legal limit to the maximum duration of a car alarm? If not, there should be.
-
A customer went nuts in the cafe this morning.
Afterwards, the workers were worried he'd leave a bad Yelp review of all things. That's SF.
-
The pavement here is terrible for boarding.
Hit someone's littered mustard packet on the way back too. Wasn't pretty.
-
First time I've managed to find one of these since leaving Japan. Love Japantown. t.co/nRuZ8xZ5
-
When the Internet goes down here, everyone reaches into their bags and pulls out MiFis. Pretty funny to see.
-
So, as it turns out, the US is pretty serious about the 10 day waiting period for a social security number.
-
I should really start paying for a GitHub account.
It'll be quite some time before I pay off what I owe them from drink ups anyway.
-
Just got the new Twitter web.
I like it, but for an instant when I first logged in, I thought I caught a fleeting glimpse of ... MySpace.
-
View certificate information: `openssl x509 -text -in twitter_cert.pem`
-
The Citadel, City 17. t.co/gmm81dpq
-
Interesting in the new Twitter interface: handles (i.e. @fyrerise) are much less significant.
-
Handy OpenSSL command for retrieving a site's certificate: `echo | openssl s_client -connect twitter.com:443 2>&1`
-
Today I learned that ginger beer is totally gross.
-
Trusted root certificates extracted from Mozilla's bundle: curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html
-
Not having to deal with a weakly typed language anymore is like finally walking into the light.
-
Running Vmail under 1.9.2 instead of 1.9.3 makes a big difference. I use `rbenv local` with a dedicated mail directory.
-
Arkona. t.co/jiK7xAoy
-
Go all the way to Oakland to see Arkona, then they change the venue to DNA Lounge .. half a block from work.
D-bag bands.
-
Rule of thumb: if Vim crashes, it's probably because of Command-T.
-
ChaotH from Unexpect playing Words on 9-string bass: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLeXaxlSbc8
-
Longboard reassembled.
Now just have to wait for the buzz from this bulldog to wear off, then time to go cruising. t.co/YrLdzuiR
-
Everytime I eat at TexMex I regret it, yet I just keep going back.
-
Visa acquired!
-
Thinking about starting a service where someone comes to your place and ruthlessly disposes of the stuff you don't need.
-
Path — still not sure what I'll do with it, but I sat there absorbed in its gorgeous UI for an unhealthy amount of time.
-
Anyone curious about getting into Game of Thrones?
Tweet me for a free complete set! t.co/2S7EPwap
-
Girl from the moving co. came by. They once had a demand for a tub to be ripped out and shipped.
Need to ship something epic like that.
-
Learnt from /r/malefashionadvice:
1. Men's fashion forum exists.
2. Men's fashion is honest: don't request criticism unless you want it.
November
-
It would be cool if @runkeeper included some sort of error correction, or at least error flagging.
Pretty far off: runkeeper.com/user/fyrerise/activity/61613985
-
Hotel bar closed at 12? Come on!!
-
Reader's Cafe at Fort Mason. Chillest cafe I've ever been to in my life. t.co/IRJKoF4R
-
Pendulum bobs for Long Now's clock.
Right is aluminum test. Left is tungsten, denser than uranium, and very heavy. t.co/d7Qnp6J0
-
Stopped in at @heroku for lunch: starving-samurai-42.tumblr.com/post/13509499462
-
Plan B in case apartment hunt proves impossible. In SF, #occupy holds some nice oceanfront property near Market. t.co/XxGcv5lG
-
Pic from my run this morning. The fog here is still cool to me. t.co/IP7eWja6
-
Pan handlers here are crazy and extremely aggressive in some instances.
I blame the rental market.
-
I love SF because it seems like everyone who brought a laptop to the cafe is doing something interesting.
-
Asked a girl who was moving out of her apartment yesterday what she was paying vs. the new list.
$$400 or 20% increase in less than a year.
-
Getting an apartment in SF is hard.
Getting an apartment in SF without a social security # or American bank account is even harder.
-
.. so I asked about it today, and actually you can't select a seat, but are always sent to that screen anyway.
Bad UX on a whole new level.
-
Thought I was dumb for never being able to select a seat with United's self service terminals.
-
Just found out about a Japanese metal band called Blood Stain Child ... and they are epic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4YeG2euoGE
-
Important article on creativity and isolation: blog.oxplot.com/2011/11/creativity-requires-isolat…
+ HN discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277050
-
Cannes from above (the famous theatre is the seaside building on the right). t.co/k7Vr5kdm
-
Conditionally accepted for a Nexus pass.
-
The superyacht Lady Moura was moored in Monaco.
It has more in common with a cruise ship than other yachts, but is still only 24th largest.
-
3. Not my kind of place.
Changed ticket and am staying in Nice. Went to Monaco today instead.
-
2. His first night, his mate's iPhone was snatched as he was using it.
He suggested taking the metro to the hostel rather than walk 15 min.
-
1. So about to leave for Merseilles today, and this guy walks in who was just there.
-
On my way to Marseilles in an hour and I've just been informed by three different people that it's a complete shithole. Outstanding.
-
The mass commercialization of hotspots is a tragedy.
-
Sunrise in Nice. t.co/3k4vwEYN
-
Almost got locked out of my hostel for the 2nd night in a row.
At least it's pretty warm here. LOL.
-
... but even so, boarding the Promenade des Anglais is about as good as it gets.
-
Introducing "Titanic".
Similar length, turning radius, and stopping distance as her namesake. t.co/vMWt1quX
-
Nice la Belle. t.co/Ejnl3IgX
-
Louvre was a lot better than expected. Hordes around the Mona Lisa, but elsewhere was okay. Breathtaking collection. t.co/cTFmekS7
-
At a concert. On a boat. t.co/p7jrRnvP
-
The only cheap thing to do in this entire city: t.co/dZcZB9xw
-
Paris catacombs were the best €8 spent on this continent so far.
They check your bag as you leave to make sure you didn't take a skull.
-
Memento mori. t.co/DX76dorM
-
First thing I saw in Paris above ground. t.co/9G7SCMKv
-
Booked a preview trip from YYC to SFO. Airfare cost: almost $$800.
Now looking at short notice Paris to Barcelona: $$37.
-
Gibson's Zero History didn't do much for me, but it did introduce some cool concepts.
e.g. The secret brand: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_brand
-
Seriously considering booking a trip to SF with no hotels, and winging it with @HotelTonight for three or four days.
-
Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
-
The thousand times he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.
-
Drunk hobo at the train station: t.co/BREqjMYq
-
If you plan on relying on an iPhone for navigation while outside network coverage, have a plan B.
-
Just read this Wikipedia article on a famous Berlin artist squat:
-
Travel protip: if you make it to Berlin, stay a week.
It's one of the more interesting places on Earth.
-
Whoah, @doctorow is also in Berlin today. Random!
-
Next stop: Berlin.
-
I just imagined what it must have been like resolving logistics for a European backpacking trip pre-Internet.
It wasn't pretty.
-
I really need to put my iPhone away and go write something.
-
Coca-Cola tastes weird here.
-
Just noticed that Freerides are now for sale: www.originalskateboards.com/longboards/freeride-lo…
If only I wasn't right in the middle of moving to a new city ... haha.
-
To anyone else who's read SJ's bio, does the following line sound too familiar?
"X started to cry"
Do people actually cry that often?
-
Finished Isaacson's Steve Jobs. This is the one book to read this year. Too many deep insights to count.
-
Kobo battery life not quite as good as advertised.
I think the 30 days metric comes with the assumption of 5 pages read per day.
-
Just found out that parenthesis are called "brackets" in the UK. That sure explains a lot of the naming in my last company's search module.
-
Gone from Belgium less than five hours and I already miss all the beer stores.
-
Bruge should start a revolution and ban motorized vehicles from the inner city. One of the places where something so radical is possible.
-
Cheese and 11.5% beer: t.co/h7H6AiyB
-
Energy here is actually measured in kcal instead of our made up unit of Cal (with a capital 'C').
-
Municipal pride. t.co/vwiOyLOf
-
Rad hostel too. The lockers even have power outlets. Reading trip advisor beforehand was most definitely a good idea. t.co/3A87aQXY
-
In Bruges.
October
-
... and the audience that night: t.co/jq0krxKN
-
Pretty cool pic of Matt's Amsterdam crew breaking. t.co/38dkYTt5
-
I always admired SJ's old (1925) Spanish colonial revival mansion. Turns out he was involved in a legal battle so he could tear it down.
-
Just noticed that Isaacson's biography contradicts Mona Simpson's eulogy on how she met Steve (introduced by lawyer vs. by mother).
-
Use Rails' engines to share components between multiple apps: edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Engine.html
-
Occupy Amsterdam: t.co/YT1y7LJF
-
Before DST it's now 5 AM here, but the streets are still jammed. No one ever goes to sleep.
-
Imagine the footprint of a parking lot for the same number of cars.
-
Bicycles. Amsterdam Central. t.co/D4RbNiG6
-
I'm very late to the game, but I finally have a Google+ account.
-
Sweet. Google+ finally available for Google Apps.
-
Amsterdam is beautiful. So many bikes, so few cars. t.co/368qQxxE
-
Reading my first book on the Kobo Touch and it's a great experience so far. Good book too. t.co/RpiJFOqW
-
Delivered this morning. Really, really good timing: t.co/uZCa3Zg8
-
iMessage is the ultimate social critique. Apple realized there's only 1 way for the public to stop SMSing: for them not to know they're not.
-
My lasting contribution to @iStock (the search team adopted my peace lily): t.co/u7eOIV91
-
Oh yah, and the new version of QuickSilver supports pseudo-Vim shortcuts (i.e. C-h/j/k/l).
-
QuickSilver mastery in progress.
Recommend plugins so far: 1password, Gmail, Dictionary, iTunes, Screen Capture, Extra, Image Manipulation.
-
Mutt (the terminal mail client) is surprisingly unstable considering its age.
-
200 hr standby time, 8/14 hr 3G/2G talk, 6/9 hr 3G/Wi-Fi Internet, 10 hr video, 40 hr music =~ 1 day light to medium usage
-
Boarded down to finally take a photo of one of my favorite spots in Calgary: t.co/BsD1nAbQ
-
Awesome card with hand sewn surf board too. (thanks Lara!) t.co/2WEittmz
-
Impromptu going away dinner with my oldest friends. Emotional moment for me. t.co/8mmds6KF
-
The currency converters upstairs at Chinook would've given me a better rate on Euros than my bank (TD). 1.4424 vs. 1.4486
Lesson learnt.
-
Has anybody ever successfully convinced a Hollister or Abercrombie store to turn down their crappy music?
-
Long live the Palooza brothers.
-
Introducing Silver Waiting. Check them out on tour pretty soon. t.co/0slTtSeY
-
The girl at the café just gave me the lowdown on hair dreading for white people. Of course I'm doing it all wrong. Haha.
-
I've been using iPhone 4S and iOS 5 for a week now, and I can't think of one negative thing to say.
(This is totally unlike me)
-
Really enjoyed Steve Yegge's article on Jeff Bozos: plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/Aa…
-
iPhone is loaded with Lonely Planet phrase books. This is how I pretend that I'm prepared for stuff.
-
Some time ago, I was introduced to post-rock. It's really nice, but what's even better? Post-METAL: kutkh.bandcamp.com/album/earth-without-light (thanks @jeka!)
-
Great #coffeeandcode. We should of started doing this years ago. @markhazlett @StbG @percyhanna @ekryski & @rhettdickson (there in spirit)
-
Repeat last ex command in Vim: `@:`
-
American Airlines and the negative bag-check fee: blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/17/bag-chec…
-
The most important article on Vim that you will ever read: blog.carbonfive.com/2011/10/17/vim-text-objects-th…
-
Made this Kobo case out of a Canada Post envelope and duct tape: flic.kr/p/awqBve Works better than the real thing!
-
The lag on SSH over a 3g tether is killing me. Really need an ABORT LAST TWEET option in Bitlbee.
-
Huh. After using Calibre to convert an EPUB for Kobo, you can never again adjust its margins from the reader. Bug is marked as "wontfix".
-
Best part about HipMunk is when legs marked "Mystery Airline" show up.
-
What if the FAA required jet aircraft be able to survive crashes into the ground? Passenger rail in the US: ebbc.org/rail/fra.html
-
Bought a Kobo Touch (they're $$10 off this weekend). Surprised at how nice the form factor and packaging is.
-
Trying to rekindle my lost French via podcast.
-
Reread Batman: The Long Halloween this morning. What a masterpiece.
-
Is it just me or are the plots of Point Break and the first Fast and the Furious almost indistinguishable?
-
Enjoyed reading Rework. Best advice was right at the end: inspiration has a shelf life.
-
I like how Rework calls out "dead documents" in business: docs, charts, spreadsheets that take many hours to make, and seconds to forget.
-
My bro and I went to go talk to a local St. Albert Star Wars painter. Tried to convince him to try this business model: afremov.com
-
Did my fav Edmonton stuff while up for Thanksgiving at Grandma's: St. Albert farmers market, ate at Oodle Noodle, Whyte Ave cafe, Muttart.
-
30 of 30 articles on the front page of HN are about SJ.
-
Vim + DrawIt! + Ditaa = Diagram ownage (and nicely versionable too)
-
When all the things I still need to do and to learn are thrown into sharp relief, being stuck on a problem gets even more frustrating.
-
Refactored code base to use Devise because of stack overflow problem caused by Authlogic. Overflow still occurs. Authlogic was okay. Arg.
-
My brother doing a presentation on Drangey and puffins at the fall feast: flic.kr/p/as7hsN Drangey: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drangey
-
Nice of the Devise guys to provide instructions on moving Devise views from Erb to Haml *and* from Haml to Slim.
-
One of the girls who did Snorri this year just became a notary public. So lucky! I've been looking for one of those.
-
Bar tending at the annual Icelandic fall feast. Drinking on the job.
September
-
Alyth Bridge pathway FINALLY RE-OPENED!! Best news for bikers all summer. bikecalgary.org/node/2699#comment-23393
-
the longtime status of skateboarders as an oppressed ethnic group means that by now all of them are escape artists to some degree -SnowCrash
-
Wow. The satellite #UARS with 1 in 3200 odds of hitting someone as it returned to Earth landed near to us in Calgary (Okotoks). No injuries.
-
I'm registered for SXSWi 2012. (Reminder: today is the last day for early bird pricing)
-
Adding @factsproject as a favorite in Flipboard works astoundingly well. So well, that I doubt I'll bother with a custom iOS app anymore.
-
The official Rspec docs should be replaced with this cheat sheet: cheat.errtheblog.com/s/rspec/
-
I don't think a Cron replacement that behaves in a predictable and reasonable fashion would be out of line.
-
New project facts-twitter to tweet random facts: github.com/brandur/facts-twitter Currently tweeting to: @factsproject
-
A "feature" of Twitter's t.co URLs is that I can assume that any long URLs sent in to the API will occupy 20 characters on the other side.
-
Authlogic still busted up in Rails 3.1. Should've gone with Devise.
-
Wikipedia's "centuries articles" are pretty amazing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century
-
Evil genius: "fraudster Bernard Madoff filed Benford-compatible monthly returns" timharford.com/2011/09/look-out-for-no-1/
-
Developers should have to pass an exam to quality for using the `static` keyword. Have seen so many perfectly good classes butchered by it.
-
Watched the Win 8 Metro vid: video.ch9.ms/ch9/a586/46671215-8ef9-4e06-b1b4-9f5e…
The future: 5 touches and 10 animations to accomplish the work of a single keystroke.
-
Understanding old British curreny (i.e. pound, guinea, shilling, penny, sovereign, quid, pence, farthing, etc.): woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/mon…
-
Yesterday, read the first chapters of Catch-22 and Snow Crash at City Lights.
-
Can my longboard come on the airplane with me? Investigation tonight: packing techniques and airline regulations.
-
Introducing Parched: a very basic Git-backed wiki supporting code and Tex, written in Rails 3.1: github.com/brandur/parched
-
I've been doing my Git commit messages so wrong: github.com/blog/926-shiny-new-commit-styles
-
Zoned out listening to postrock.
-
`scroll-mode` was removed for newer Tmux versions. Scrollback is now accessed via copy i.e. `C-b [` and paging up with Vim/Emacs shortcuts.
-
Use `next` to leave a Rake task early (i.e. not `return` or `break`).
-
As far as development is concerned, Ruby 1.9.3 preview is your best option. The faster startup times make a BIG difference.
-
Just finished a The Statues that Walked, a book describing the history and moai of Easter Island to some depth. Highly recommended.
-
MathJax doesn't fit into the asset pipeline very easily. Way better just to use the CDN.
August
-
Postgres' semantic parsing is a single file of thirteen thousand LOCs. Whoah.
-
Yesod 0.9 released: j.mp/yesod-09
Recommended deploy is just a compiled binary, Nginx no longer req'd to serve static files quickly.
-
FINALLY finished up the A Song of Fire and Ice series (so far). Now to do something productive.
-
Learning to longboard switch is like starting to board all over again. At least the weather is accommodating!
-
Introducing the Original Freeride 38 & 41: youtu.be/OW-J2pQrlsw Please, take my money.
-
I'm sold. imakewebthings.github.com/deck.js/ Keynote & Powerpoint: goodbye forever.
-
For clarity: the reasoning behind that last date parsing snippet is that August 2nd is the 214th day of the current year.
-
Ruby: `Date.parse("Ca. 214 B.C.")` --> Tue, 02 Aug 2011.
The parser may be a little too forgiving.
-
Seriously, what are the chances: flic.kr/p/aexQMr
-
Listening to CJSW's metal program right now. It's good to know there's one good radio station in Calgary: cjsw.com/program/rage-cage/
-
"invalid byte sequence in UTF-8"
I hate to speak ill of one of my fav languages, but Ruby 1.9's encoding handling is kinda fail.
-
Anyone know off-hand how Google+ loads image albums so quickly? If not, investigation tonight.
-
Surprisingly, I'm running into far fewer problems with Flash and Chromium after moving from Archlinux i686 to x64.
-
3 SUP surf boards, 2 kayaks, 1 small truck. Ridiculous packing job by my coworker from last weekend: flic.kr/p/adDFJA
-
Have SSH share sessions for fast scp/ssh init. Add two lines to `.ssh/config`:
```
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath /tmp/ssh_mux_%h_%p_%r
```
-
The Postgres parser is built on Bison/Flex: j.mp/pUy8KD (scan.l) Use those tools to write your own language: j.mp/mStmRP
-
Wasted 2h on VMWare thanks to issues like no support for 2 part kernel versions (3.0 vs 3.0.1). Gave up and had Virtualbox going in <10m.
-
Is it possible to deprogram corporate writers from Microsoft Word and over to an portable/versionable format like Markdown or LaTeX?
-
Started boarding to Kensington despite looming shadows hanging overhead. Now hiding from this: flic.kr/p/acc3Ch
-
Moved from 'A Feast for Crows' to 'A Dance With Dragons' today. Last book before a 5+ year hiatus while GRRM writes the next one.
-
♫ Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate! flic.kr/p/ab1zUz (Bow river boating w/ awesome flag)
-
Awesome jazz duo (with an occasional dancer) playing at Waves coffee house right now. #yyc
-
Beautiful. The Fountain's Together We Will Live Forever (guitar cover): youtu.be/VH7pp2BXGC0
-
Bitlbee's OTR feels like more trouble than it's worth. `set otr_policy manual` or `set otr_policy never` will slow it down.
-
Subtleties of the X clipboard: mutelight.org/a/x-clipboard (+ how to setup a consistent system clipboard)
-
Reading history: brandur.org/books (okay, I better work on another project for a while)
-
Chrome's new "Lion scrollbars" on OSX are kinda gross.
-
Reddit has an active longboarding subreddit: reddit.com/r/longboarding The hivemind seems to hate Original (what I board, haha).
-
Moved brandur.org over to Columnal; now looks way better on narrow viewports. Columnal makes grid-based layouts make sense (finally).
-
Going forward, all my projects will be using this: www.columnal.com/
July
-
Signature capture via FaceTime app in OSX Lion: j.mp/prF6M1
-
Just launched a cleaner version of brandur.org
-
Met a ton of native speakers of Spanish tonight -- great for my "maybe one day" ambition to learn the language.
-
Steve Yegge on cat pictures, data, and getting interested in hard problems: youtu.be/vKmQW_Nkfk8
-
Took all night, but I redid my Facts command line interface with better docs and to leverage Thor: github.com/brandur/facts-cli
-
For a nice laugh on data warehousing and "enterprisey software", go to page 54: tigerorigami.com/slides/tsmongo.pdf
-
`slock` is hands down both the best, and scariest, screen lock program ever. Locked state is a perfectly black screen with no prompt.
-
Those eroded trails through grass (along the shortest path from A to B) are called desire paths: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
-
Spent wayyyyy too much time tonight researching unicode.
-
My Practical Tmux article gets a number of views, so I pushed my Tmux conf and launcher to GitHub: github.com/brandur/tmux-extra
-
Merged a patch from an awesome dude on GitHub for Mutelight: had some extra HTML in the conf section of my Tmux article. Social coding FTW!
-
Compiled my first C++0x program tonight. Using a lambda in C++ feels pretty good.
-
Really loving somafm's Space Station channel recently: somafm.com/spacestation/
-
Just moved all my repos from github.com/fyrerise to github.com/brandur in case anyone was looking (thanks @github!)
-
"the IRS actually has a permanent office within the Google compound because they audit them year-round" 2.4% tax how to: j.mp/o1sC87
-
Just noticed today, but as of Ruby 1.9.2, $$LOAD_PATH no longer includes '.' (for reasons of robustness, and being deemed a security risk)
-
I especially love open source projects where the link to the source code is BIG, and right on the homepage.
-
Faux named queues with Gearman: mutelight.org/a/named-gearman
-
Fireworks AND lightning tonight. #awesome
-
Just got told no boarding on Stephen Ave by 4 cops cruising along on their bikes. #doublestandard
-
The Objective-C retain property pattern: mutelight.org/a/retain
-
Cocoa: release objects created using methods starting w/ "alloc" or "new", or containing "copy". Objs from class methods often autoreleased.
-
Read about MessagePack today: msgpack.org/ Efficient message serialization claiming to be faster than protocol buffers.
-
Zend tip: table abstract's _primary field is lazily initialized, and only in some cases like an insert. Force init w/ _setupPrimaryKey().
-
Think I finally get UITableViewController. The secret is that it's both UITableViewDataSource & UITableViewDelegate itself automatically.
-
Awesome. My brother just pointed out that there's an island south of Iceland called Brandur: j.mp/brandur
-
Agalloch is the perfect ambient metal for writing an iPhone app. Actually feeling like I'm making progress today.
-
If you're ever left with extra breakpoints in Vim that the DBGp plugin can't remove, try `:sign unplace` or `:sign unplace *`.
-
I'm starting to have doubts that Gearman is production ready. No way to have multiple queues on a server/cluster?
-
Amazon Cloud Drive's MP3 storage looks awesome, but has no API and the multifile upload (Cloud Player) gives Canadians the runaround!
-
How to really start appreciating Git's staging area, `--amend`, and `git rebase` --> use Subversion.
-
Apple's developer docs put Microsoft and the MSDN to shame.
-
Want the tab for this! RT @foojie Game of Thrones Title Theme (Acoustic Guitar) - Ramin Djawadi www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-WgphHsAn0&feature=share via @youtube
June
-
Next guitar project is Asturias by Isaac Albeniz. It's way too ambitious, but Youtube helps a lot: youtu.be/9efHwnFAkuA
-
Regressing from .sass to .scss as default syntax is crazy.
-
OMFG, just realized what Ctrl+S is useful for. Freezing screen while terminal output is scrolling by really fast! Wasn't obvious to me.
-
Rails 3.1 asset mgmt. and Coffee/Sass/jQuery integration is killer. All inconveniences of working with vanilla Rails are gone (except erb).
-
.@dickysum Haha, technically summer is more like 3 months. I meant that the whole spring/summer season is ~2 months here though!
-
At cafe trying to code, but can't focus. Too nice outside. Luckily #yyc summer is so short that you max out at two unproductive months.
-
Worse yet @exdevlin, #winteriscoming. I try to enjoy every day over 10C in this city ;)
-
Got passed by a wicked longboarder today. Matched him for speed & carves. Then he pulled out tricks and extreme hairpin turns. GG.
-
Was feeling pretty good about my longboarding tonight so I decided try to teach myself to board goofy. Dangerous.
-
Caught the last two hours of the Comic Expo, and Q&A w/ Jonathan Frakes and the Guild.
These days, Calgary's on the map. It's big.
-
That is, from the perspective of any given end user, not in total of course.
-
Still don't really understand how pretty much any usenet provider has better network throughput than Apple/Steam/Google combined.
-
"the Clock in the mountain keeps time even when we pretend the past did not happen and the future will not come." longnow.org/clock/
-
Simple side-by-side live and sandbox Rails deployment with Nginx and Phusion Passenger: mutelight.org/a/simple-phusion
-
Actually agree with Zed: "You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession."
-
Dear Marvel: Give us a movie worth caring about: mutelight.org/a/marvel
-
So sweet that PHP includes an '@' error suppression operator for easy & purely opaque abuse.
-
I'm sure that wherever I decided to put all my guitar picks seemed perfectly logical at the time.
-
Sweet! Yesod packages finally stable enough on Cabal to install and run.
-
Think or Swim + Awesome WM + terminal apps for everything = pretty badass flic.kr/p/9RqaWU
-
1 LOC in Haskell or Ruby is 4 LOCs in C# and 8+ LOCs in PHP.
-
Thumb typing keyboard for iPad in iOS 5 finally! Might actually be able to type on it now.
-
Amazing site with info the Hindenburg and other Zeppelins: www.airships.net/
-
Looks like Google's new schema.org microdata format j.mp/schemaorg is working with the new HTML5 draft: dev.w3.org/html5/md/
-
Got in a nice tennis rally tonight vs. @markhazlett, then cruised in the park on the longboard as long as I could.
May
-
What I learned about JavaScript by breaking a top 200 website: mutelight.org/a/ie-js
-
Royal Board Shop in Calgary runs longboard clinics on Wednesday and Saturday night rides: royalboardshop.com/blog2/longboard-clinics/
-
It's beautiful longboarding after sunset. Finally got a helmet, and did my first set of hill runs today.
-
Added Google/Bing/Yahoo sitemap support to Askja after working with them on a much larger scale at work: j.mp/lo7eJM
-
TIL that longboarders can use a technique called "pumping" to board up to 390km along flat land without taking a foot off the board.
-
Looked at the Bow River recently? It's pretty high right now: flic.kr/p/9MRnju
-
Has IT blocked Exchange's IMAP because open protocols are scary? Try DavMail.
-
I'm the newest member of the Calgary Tennis Club. A week ago I didn't even know that there was a Calgary Tennis Club.
-
(wow!) RT @markhazlett Crazy awesome video from the Calgary Camera Store www.youtube.com/watch?v=awq90APEVgw&feature=player… "We take photography very seriously"
-
Coming to terms with the fact that Facebook just may be the best way to find new symphonic metal releases: j.mp/symphonicmetal2011
-
Most unproductive weekend ever ... longboarding was fun though. Compensating by committing goals to paper for this coming week.
-
Activated a Linode instance to replace my EC2 Micro. So far about a million times faster give or take an order of magnitude or two.
-
Can't believe how easy it is to get jQuery + easing + scrollTo + localScroll working together. Four includes and one line of code.
-
(and in Ctrl's place!) RT @shancarter: Apple works hard to remove the trackpad button, but then leaves this useless "fn" key on all laptops?
-
Remove Chrome's smack-to-the-face-intense border around active fields: *:focus { outline: none; }
-
"a Surfraw liberateur is capable of navigating speeds that leave GUI tainted idolaters agape with fear and wonder" j.mp/surfraw
-
Finally using CSS reset for new projects. Better late than never I suppose. meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
-
Rspec is the way that testing was meant to be done.
-
Oh man, just got major pwned by Rails' `resource` vs. `resources` (plural) gotcha in routing configuration.
-
Browsing Restoration Hardware makes me want to buy a place just so that I can decorate it. Cool steampunkish collection in now.
-
Just learnt about Vim's `q:` and `q/` (edit ex and search like a normal Vim buffer). Talk about the missing link.
-
I'm not a big Wordpress person, but I'm a fan of how child themes work for customizing basic themes: codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
-
Foreman, a process manager for local development: j.mp/l3TFDF (super useful for a Rails app running Redis, delayed_job, etc.)
-
Gtags (GNU Global) does a *much* better job than Ctags for a large PHP codebase (also, very fast incremental DB updates).
-
`:cq` will exit Vim with an error code (aborting commits, rebases and such).
-
SVN can't handle tracking a copy/move that's already occurred: stackoverflow.com/q/2217565 The case for Git/Hg kind of makes itself.
-
dbext: The Last SQL Client You'll Ever Need: mutelight.org/a/dbext, part one of the Masters of Vim series: mutelight.org/s/vim
-
Hated to do it, but I killed transparency w/ xcompmgr/AwesomeWM. Too slow/buggy.
April
-
Ate at Oodle Noodle on Whyte Ave. Edmonton is pretty cool when not buried in snow.
-
Minimal guide to debugging PHP with XDebug and Vim: mutelight.org/a/xdebug
-
The Rails Guides are *really* good these days: guides.rubyonrails.org/
-
Redesigned my blog Mutelight: mutelight.org/a/redesign (now actually readable!)
-
Whoah. I think I only just realized how truly amazing `git rebase` is.
-
Parentheses-enclosed parts of MSDN links are optional e.g. (VS.*) in msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752574(VS.85).a…
-
Portal 2 is pure genius.
-
Prevent iTunes from backing up devices: `defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true` (useful for small MBA HDs)
-
Problems in PHP tend to be solved by nesting more arrays.
-
I hate to repost Reddit, but this is just so great: i.imgur.com/SGo8r.png ("Cycling listening to Daft Punk")
-
Turns out that army surplus is a great place to pick up messenger bags.
-
So far HBO's #gameofthrones is living up to the source material. The production quality is ridiculous.
-
Fellow Redditor @catsfive said hi at @kawacalgary today. Good meeting you man!
-
How to detect the Konami code with Rx (reactive extensions): j.mp/fJ7vXI
-
Free Kinects for all #mix11 attendees!! I'm a huge Microsoft fan suddenly.
-
. @ryanjanzen: "my enunciation is killing me. I asked for a paralyzer, he have me a budweiser."
-
Running Node.JS/Ruby/Python on Azure is a noble idea, but it's sure a lot of work! #mix11
-
I get even more inspired at #mix11 than at #sxsw. I can't explain this.
-
For the first time, have seen people use Ctrl-Z/`fg` in practice. It seems to be mainly used to multitask by ppl who don't use Screen/Tmux.
-
Just wrote a simple Vim plugin for working in PHP with Zend: github.com/brandur/zendtools.vim
-
Trying to build a Vim plugin makes me wish I was an Emacs user.
-
Just discovered what the Thor gem does today. Will be using it for all current and future command line interface projects.
-
Classic statement and response on use of `grep` in Tron Legacy: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405281
-
Really like this guy's personal site and Tron legacy article: jtnimoy.net/?q=178 Jealous.
-
I was a skeptic, but RVM (Ruby Version Manager) is just as cool as people say.
March
-
Huge advantage to using the Google font APIs: sites look consistent even across Linux boxes with minimal or strange looking fonts installed.
-
My favorite line from one of my favorite books (Catch-22): brandur.org/favors
-
In .vimrc, `filetype off` and `filetype plugin indent on` should come after calls to Pathogen for bundles' `ftdetect` dirs to be loaded.
-
Got my first company sponsored massage today. Now I'm hooked.
-
Practical tmux: mutelight.org/a/42 (I'm now switched completely from GNU Screen to tmux. Here's how to lower the barrier of entry.)
-
Most software companies share this much in common: documentation is wishful thinking. For the real story, go to the code.
-
TMUX, new base session: `tmux new -s bbox`. New session that shares windows with the base session: `tmux new -t bbox`.
-
Start window numbering at 1 in TMUX: `set -g base-index 1`
-
Don't ask me why I do these things, but here is a page containing every single one of tweets ever: brandur.org/twitter (and a graph)
-
Wrote some simple Ruby loaders for tweet backups from Tweetake & TweetScan: j.mp/fgg3wz
-
Just played Sword & Sworcery for iPad, an 8-bit RPG. Such a great experience.
-
Read up more on iOS firmware, signing, SHSH blobs, and jailbreaking than I ever really wanted to know. Apple is pretty much the worst.
-
Anyone going to (or at) the Reddit meetup in Calgary tonight?
-
Thank-you BBC: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842 The media is running a smear campaign on nuclear power, and that's bad for us all.
-
I hadn't seen this before, and it's awesome: github.com/404notfound (move mouse inside image)
-
To get Xdebug under PHP working, make sure to disable the Zend debugger first. 'There can only be one' applies to debuggers too.
-
In PHP a method call after object instantiation e.g. new Actor()->act() isn't possible for no particular reason. Entire language is a hack.
-
Fixed Vim's backspace in urxvt with `stty erase ^?` from the terminal.
-
Finally took the time to learn dbext for Vim yesterday. Massive boost to database productivity.
-
Finally got Vim buffers/Xorg clipboard/GNU Screen buffers interacting properly. See the Fakeclip plugin for Vim.
-
I generally love the service, but I swear that Amazon's EC2 instances are actually getting slower.
-
Let's hope that Americans are smarter than Canadians are, and this monopolistic sale gets blocked: j.mp/dIPxLO
-
The South by Southwest Experience: mutelight.org/a/41
-
Mobility: mutelight.org/a/40
-
Summary of first week of new job --> day one: awesome, day two: awesome, day (+ night) three: REALLY awesome. Going to like it here.
-
I'm really missing Austin's scrumptious Mexican food right now.
-
Today, forced myself to learn and use a tiling window manager (Awesome WM). This kind of thing always hurts in the beginning.
-
Wasn't obvious to me: under Archlinux, `startx` script comes with the `xorg-xinit` package.
-
Simplest solution for keep shell aliases when using `sudo`: j.mp/icPPH5
-
Got my haircut yesterday at Birds Barbershop on Congress. Me: is this where the hipsters get their hair cut? Them: yes.
-
Was reading treets for like twenty minutes before realizing that I was in Mystery's proverbial death row. Reintegrating into society now.
-
This guy next to me is using his ipad 2 as a periscope. #sxsw
-
My cousin drove me by Michael Dell's house. It's epic. Looks like he's digging up a few sq kms of property to build a monolithic monument.
-
Workaround and updates for the Swype word correction issues in Gingerbread: j.mp/g08Aqr
-
First round of #sxsw sessions this morning were sabotaged: already hard to make because of Saturday night, and then DST gets thrown in.
-
Some locals told me that Michael Cera is in Austin for SXSW Film. Michael: Canadian meetup?? ;)
-
This performance at the Phoenix last night was really cool: flic.kr/p/9q3gvA
-
The Converse All Star shoes outnumber the people in Austin.
-
At Etsy: Code as Craft at Venue 222 #notsxsw
-
Tired. Kind of wish that monster energy guys were on the road again today. #sxsw
-
South by South Best joked not to speak to anyone with fewer followers or less VC than myself. Turns out this is easy for me, lol. #sxsw
-
Pleasure to meet @ksullan and @hellofisher at @222austin tonight. I missed an amp catching fire earlier too. This place is great. #sxsw
-
Randomly met up with some other Calgarians at #sxsw: @jimbones & @graemeduckett. They told me to join Beluga.
-
What's Beluga?
-
I think I'm the one guy here who paid to get in. Met girls who got in free with class. Next up: someone who found a badge in their cereal.
-
Even Nexus had a lineup today.
-
Greatly successful departure party. Never seen a group of ~20 people overpay on the tab before. Thanks everyone + @kerv @ryanjanzen @cyau25
-
"I'm going to need your gun, and your badge." flic.kr/p/9p9yiJ
-
In my last ever Mentor iteration demo. I think they call this "bittersweet".
-
oh: what if jason agrees to go against you in his supertight jumpsuit?
-
Never seen ski conditions like this before.
-
Nirvana: yfrog.com/hs8scbkj 13cm last 24hr (and increasing rapidly). 105cm last 7 days.
-
Business cards are obsolete. Can't wait to Bump my contact info to people at #sxsw: youtu.be/hx3FC_DWsGQ
-
Android #Gingerbread: music app's scrubber still completely worthless. Come on Google, you're smart, just copy the iPhone already.
-
Gingerbread is sleek -- finally a phone with a dark/black theme. The screen off animation is cool too: youtu.be/-Lv1p4TvRw4
-
There's a bug in how Chrome displays CSS3 columns at short widths, and it's not clear how to work around it. j.mp/gMY11x
-
Awesome. Use the 'whenever' gem for periodic tasks in Rails: github.com/javan/whenever
-
Some nights I get so much done in Rails that I wonder why I'd use any other technology.
-
The barista at @kawacalgary is a genius: (soy) mocha with Kahlúa and whiskey.
-
I fixed a problem with Highcharts expanding out of its box in a column layout by styling its layer with { overflow: hidden; }
February
-
Improvised karaoke: flic.kr/p/9mEXWq (2x iPhone 4 + Youtube)
-
I was getting a little worried about Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, but like Blood and Sand, the finale was *EPIC*!
-
Nick Ring wins by unanimous decision! An exciting day for Calgary and Canada. #ufc127
-
Dear @readability, please consider fixing this: flic.kr/p/9mej4S Before, I could use your app to read wide pages in small windows.
-
Today I learned about fontsquirrel.com, widespread @font-face support, and the Google font APIs. Definitely an eye opener.
-
Just joined Quora. Looks interesting, and hopefully useful too: www.quora.com/Brandur-Leach
-
It just struck me that I'm going to be a PHP coder again. najafali.com/php-is-better-than-ruby.html
-
For the first time in a while, I have several good ideas and the motivation to build them. Vacation works.
-
Waiting for the ticket office to open at #sunshine
-
You can use e-mail to reply to Facebook messages now?! How great is that?
-
The metal umlaut: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut (e.g. Dëthkløk)
-
Quick notes on SQL's `LIKE` operator (from Use the Index Luke!) j.mp/gUJgtF: facts.brandur.org/computer-science/databases/like
-
After relying on surfing and skiing for all my exercise for three weeks, it's back to reality. Going to the gym.
-
just made it through before highway 1 between revelstoke and golden closed due to avalanche. now stuck in golden. brutal driving today.
-
Greeting cards have been needing a refresh for a LONG time and here it is: www.chirply.com/ (why didn't I think of this)
-
Just realized I missed a whole bunch of @ mentions in the last few weeks. Sorry people.
-
Powder conditions at Silver Star! EXTREME. Should be a wicked week.
-
Guiones, the home of howler monkeys, bonfires, and turtle hatchlings: surf.brandur.org/articles/guiones
-
Extend Vimperator to have an image source copy action with ';m' j.mp/ejlk47
-
DSH, (kind of) like LINQ for Haskell, but safer: hackage.haskell.org/package/DSH
January
-
I find out every vacation the hard way that waterproof sunscreen actually isn't.
-
Experiencing serious Internet blackout since arriving in Santa Teresa, more soon!
-
Listening to the Tron Legacy soundtrack from my oceanside hammock. This is the life.
-
Belgian fire: surf.brandur.org/a/fire
-
The Shortcut (or, the perils between Tamarindo and Guiones): surf.brandur.org/a/shortcut
-
On the importance of rash guards: surf.brandur.org/a/rash-guards
-
Day One: surf.brandur.org/a/one
-
Tamarindo, and meeting the tour's crew: surf.brandur.org/articles/tamarindo (also, I'm going to bed, it's 6:00 AM)
-
If anyone has the time, check out my new blog about surfing Costa Rica! surf.brandur.org/
-
I feel like someone just made off with my wallet. Boingo is the worst.
-
Couldn't even feel my Tetanus shot all day yesterday when I got it, but I wake up today and it's aching hardcore.
-
Had a nice discussion about suburbia at the cafe today, and remembered this TED talk, "places not worth caring about": j.mp/Mgr2d
-
Had a very cold photography run in Fish Creek this morning with @dickysum and field tested my new Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 ultrawide lens.
-
Imagine the power of Erlang's live hot swapping with a fully integrated IDE like Visual Studio.
-
The rad song near the end of the Sucker Punch trailer is Panic Switch by Silversun Pickups: youtu.be/HFFGguX2SZM
-
My new favorite blog: artofmanliness.com/
-
I get mail at brandur@facebook.com. I'm not a big Facebook fanatic, but that's pretty cool. All thanks to Project Titan.
-
One thing I've learnt about CSS is that it goes from clean to an unmitigable disaster faster than any other language.
-
Beautiful "Icelandic Dragon Sword" calligraphy courtesy of @dickysum.
-
Just call me MacGyver: flic.kr/p/96MqCz (breaks caused by the guys who installed our new desks)
-
"Icelandic Dragon Sword", since my actual name can't be written in Chinese: flic.kr/p/96QshN
-
The spammers are winning the game of Internet search: hackerne.ws/item?id=2057772
-
Eating multiple meals at West Ed's food court to replace spent energy.
2010
December
-
Black Swan is the ballet of movies. No one really gets it, but it's classy to pretend to.
-
Using the little-known built-in .NET JSON parser: mutelight.org/a/40
-
A barista was telling us how the network went down and wreaked havoc at the registers. It made me want to build the Git for point of sale.
-
TIL compound adjectives with ill, best, better, little, lesser, well, etc., take hyphens: little-known author, best-seller list, etc.
-
Guide to installing XBMC and Ubuntu on an Acer Revo: mutelight.org/a/39 (including screenshots of Aeon!)
-
Aeon65 for XBMC is unreal: github.com/pix/aeon/wiki/linux-download-instructio… (best part: no mouse support)
-
Christmas was over fast!
-
Twitter really needs a 'quick!!! edit spelling in last tweet' button. Or I need to proofread more. Whatever.
-
Facebook doesn't keep chat history?! They've really got not excuse with Infrastructure this clever: j.mp/fWVO2H
-
My new watch: j.mp/gIUblc We'll see how it fairs given two weeks in the sea.
-
The Tron Legacy soundtrack is awesome, but it sounds a lot more like a movie soundtrack than it does Daft Punk.
-
Swype for advanced users: mutelight.org/a/38 (same content as the tips and tricks videos, but faster!)
-
A plug for Swype: mutelight.org/a/37
-
Getting closer to having my Jan/Feb vacation booked. Surf camp in Costa Rica: j.mp/hRZFtZ
-
We have a winner: KeyRemap4MacBook. Look for Remap Fn Key --> FN to Control_L (+ Command_R+FN to FN).
-
Seriously wish the Control button on Mac keyboards was bigger. The fn button be hidden underneath the casing for all I care.
-
Comments on "Leaving .NET": mutelight.org/a/36
-
So much for my daily blogging habits. I'm averaging only one post every few weeks.
-
Simultaneous Oracle and SQL Server support in Entity Framework with designer generated objects: mutelight.org/a/35
-
If you read one article about .NET make it this one: j.mp/b9wZz1 The worst part is that most .NET devs don't even know about this.
-
Tried Vmail and it is the greatest tool to be released in quite some time: danielchoi.com/software/vmail.html
-
Every major security breach experts say, USE BCRYPT; MD5/SHA/DES are liabilities for password storage. Industry smiles and nods.
-
Lake Louise conditions are paradise! Powder everywhere and still snowing.
-
Just got invited to the Swype Beta. After signing up about half a year ago, that was pretty unexpected.
-
Congrats to Heroku on the buyout. Just please don't let the Salesforce web designers near the Heroku website.
-
The Inception soundtrack is epic on another level.
-
XPath is nice, but XML namespaces are still the most overdesigned "feature" known to man.
-
Should've realized a long time ago that Willow Park would carry MEAD! flic.kr/p/8YD8KB (thanks @twitabix)
-
Goal next week is to get my sleeping schedule under control. 5-6 hours ideal per night w/ afternoon nap and consistent bedtime/wake.
-
How did I miss this?! j.mp/8Yfn8d Coolest event idea ever. #neilgaiman #houseontherock
-
Working around PowerShell's set-alias: mutelight.org/a/34
November
-
Why I track my reading and you should too: mutelight.org/a/33 (now with commenting!)
-
PowerShell has a `more` command, but no `less`. I'd imagine this is Microsoft making a statement.
-
I think I just froze my PowerShell by attempting to use tab completion with the SQL Server provider.
-
Disqus is really cool and its styling is flexible enough to make it look great, but it looks terrible on iPad.
-
Minimum width for most websites these days is really wide, and it's killer for people who don't maximize everything.
-
Vim tip: have file autocomplete behave like bash instead of matching the first file: `set wildmenu` and `set wildmode=list:longest`
-
Easy way to get Shift-F10 working in CoRD/RDC/VMWare Fusion: disable the OSX shortcut in Expose's preference pane.
-
DataContext in a custom control: mutelight.org/a/32
-
Remote desktop clients for Mac are seriously not metal.
-
Tonight, I designed and built a small application to track my reading history: brandur.org/books
-
The most ambitious girl (or any person) at work: mutelight.org/a/31
-
I wondered why we switched to an "enterprise" wiki rather than a more sophisticated free package. Then I saw the "edit in Word" button.
-
Heard somebody say that WHS rocks. It was such a fundamental logical fallacy that I started looking up other definitions for 'WHS'.
-
I didn't know this existed, managed stored procedures in SQL Server (write in C#!): j.mp/hZ1kBo
-
The year is 2010. Mankind can produce a mini-Big Bang with a collider, but there is still no way to run Silverlight unit tests via MSTest.
-
Best TSA line: "Whoah, whoah. Sir, SIR! That banana peel you're holding? Send that through the security scanner." (actually happened)
-
All string literals in an assembly are interned by default, other runtime strings are not. That clears some things up.
-
Cool, Bitlbee's Twitter support is actually pretty good now. No more struggling with Perl to get tircd working.
-
Got off the highway, randomly drove around a bunch of side streets, and somehow ended up at my hotel. And the rental car is a Mustang. YES.
-
Reading technical books on my iPad and taking notes on my MBA. I should probably be doing this on the Enterprise D.
-
The coolest part about the iPad is that you learn to focus on workflow and not battery life.
-
The Windows Phone emulator under a VM is slow to the point of unusable. Microsoft to developers: no more using Macs for Microsoft stack dev!
-
As long as you're not adverse to ditching your old AWS account, simply creating a new one with the same C/C gets you free tier access.
-
If the App Store for Mac does take off, I'm really going to miss the custom designed layouts in *.dmg containers.
-
L4D2 runs quite nicely on the new MacBook Air 11" at native res. Final test will be the most resource intense of all: Win 7 running VS2010.
-
Everyone wants to make their own web framework.
-
No idea how many hours I wasted just to find out that Infragistics doesn't support the Reset action of INotifyCollectionChanged correctly.
-
Firefox: about:config --> network.protocol-handler.warn-external.itms --> true. Now FF will warn you before opening disguised iTunes links.
-
Noticed based on my own Facts project: Firefox 4's JS speeds have improved tremendously. jQuery animations look fluid.
-
Vim is WriteRoom level 2: mutelight.org/a/30
-
Nice. This is team Camel deep in thought, pondering life, the universe, and Scrabble strategy: i.imgur.com/66Sfa.jpg #reddit
-
Just back from the hugely successful Calgary Reddit meetup. Redditors are the coolest geeks around. The hivemind is unquestionably real.
-
Just got owned by everyone in word war, including the guys here that are handwriting and hunt and pecking. This is serious. #nanowrimo
-
Mostly as a reminder to myself: in XAML, {Binding MyProperty} and {Binding Path=MyProperty} are the same thing (known as an implicit path).
-
Launched a ROR app that runs fine on Phusion with > 10,000 views/day and has no caching/optimization. Ruby can't be as slow as they say!
-
Still haven't finalized a novel idea, but have committed LaTeX infrastructure: github.com/fyrerise/nanowrimo10 #nanowrimo
-
Trick or treaters final tally: 35 (pretty good for here!). Highlight: Lady Gaga singing Poker Face on the landing.
-
Finally some trick or treaters! Was worried *there'd been a zombie apocalypse that no one had told me about.
October
-
Interesting. The WP SDK's built-in data-bound application template is written with MVVM. MVVM using a singleton ViewModel ...
-
List of built-in resources for Metro styling on Windows Phone: j.mp/cUmhGi
-
Windows Phone 7 code samples are here: go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=190695&clcid=409 (includes a sample using reactive extensions)
-
Template for high-rated Youtube comment: "<X> dislikes?? What is wrong with these people??" This is a community that would not be missed.
-
Joined the Firefox 4 beta and now using Youtube's HTML5 beta w/ WebM. No more Flash stuttering on OSX! + Vimperator nightly works w/ FF4.
-
Totally listening to the Dethalbum / Dethalbum II right now, and they're awesome. #metalocalypse
-
Does anyone know why Microsoft installers are so slow? Speculation: encrypted packages, massive compression, 10s of 1000s of tiny files .. ?
-
C# 5 features starting to roll in. Asynchrony: j.mp/cFoiHH Reminds me a lot of emerging solutions for use with Ruby's fibers.
-
Usually go into these CG type movies doubting I'll like them, and come out loving them (watched "How to Train Your Dragon").
-
Somebody has to stop Apple. We're going to be looking into dismantling their monopoly in all their markets in ten years time. #backtomac
-
Yesterday I learned about an easy way to skip null checks when firing events: mutelight.org/a/29
-
Nexus One ownership 101: at night, *always* make sure to leave it face down. Stupid glowing trackball.
-
I was at a lecture on eventual consistency that cited Amazon and SO. They should've cited Twitter, master of 'at its own pace' consistency.
-
Galneryus — Technical Stress: www.youtube.com/watch?v=11F6OP1yIUI (sweet metal instrumental and guy on left is my idol for cool hair)
-
Fixed blog display issue when viewed with a very narrow window. Took 3 min of CSS work. Should've done that earlier. #procrastination
-
Just ate what roughly translates to 'green bean dessert'. Despite its unfortunate naming, it was actually delicious. (Thanks Connie!)
-
Most useful VS extension I've found in months: default browser switcher for picking IE/FF/Chrome to run your web apps: j.mp/cQBfbd
-
Our intern discovered that Silverlight <object> data/type attribs must be EXACTLY as shown by M$ to work in all browsers: j.mp/9bqhW3
-
Surprisingly productive night: got a poor man's version of Rails/Amazon Cloudfront integration working for global video streaming via RTMP.
-
P2, "They avoided a major disaster, but they might regret it later."
-
Mentor Championship Wii tennis team is broken as team carry @dickysum elopes on honeymoon! The Intellifleet powerhouse will be unstoppable!
-
Pretty amazing when a lone dev like me can deploy streaming videos to a global CDN in minutes for a few pennies. Amazon web services FTW.
-
Missing muay thai was lame though. Sorry @guppyjack!
-
#democampyyc awesome/inspiring as always. I know I should demo before the bar is raised too high, apps get better everytime!
-
Goal this week: don't waste a single minute watching TV or movies.
-
It normally starts raining when I hit the halfway point of my run, then stops raining after I've turned around and am halfway back.
-
markdown2pdf produces 'LaTeX Error: File `ucs.sty' not found.'; On Arch: pacman -S texlive-latexextra texlive-latexextra j.mp/bSEtqs
-
The problem with Twitter is that it's a big temptation to tweet instead of writing meaningful content. e.g. this tweet should be a blog post
-
Just pushed my Facts project: github.com/fyrerise/facts (+ command line client at facts-cli) Demo here: facts.brandur.org/
-
Never use a ControlTemplate for a UserControl's job. #xaml
September
-
I often fall under the illusion of needing a product to finish a job. It's a destructive pattern: mnmlist.com/subtraction/
-
I tried to meditate in lotus position today, but just ended up hurting myself. One day.
-
Need Firebug or Chrome developer tools for XAML. Is there such a thing?
-
I finally disabled 'vibrate on new mail' on my Nexus One ... it was starting to feel like my phone worked for someone else.
-
Opera doesn't support CSS3 gradients? ... and they're the only ones doing it right by avoiding vendor prefixes. We need a faster W3C.
-
I found my dive log! That thing's been MIA since I was like 19.
-
Going through my old room and disposing of old belongings. This is a tough job because I'm a recovering packrat.
-
Blown away by Tokyo Hackerspace's Akihabara tour: tokyohackerspace.org/akihabara I want to go back to Japan now.
-
Columbia adopts the ideology of American exceptionalism, launched by the 1893 Worlds Fair: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock_Infinite
-
Working with CSS3 makes me feel like I'm using a styling language that was designed this millennium, a far shot from old CSS.
-
So I'm running in Fish Creek after dark, and a coyote runs right by my leg, along the path in front of me, and into the bushes. Cool/creepy.
-
Genius! --> RT @coollike: If you liked Scott Pilgrim, you'll love this: is.gd/foqjp Brilliant work by @rstudios!
-
"All of this data can wait until later – and much of it can wait until never." tweetagewasteland.com/?p=1561
-
VLC for iPad works great! Tested with four DVD-quality movies I had lying around. One crash while playing Sigur Ros' Heima.
-
Very handy for blowing away the default Prototype install in Rails 3: github.com/indirect/jquery-rails
-
Today I filled a glaring hole in my CSS knowledge; learnt about collapsing margins: reference.sitepoint.com/css/collapsingmargins
-
#newtwitter is a hit. Facebook should certainly be jealous of design this far beyond them.
-
Just met one of the guys working on coapp.org,/ a Windows OSS package manager, at Good Earth. It's a nice idea, hope it works out.
-
Just noticed that TweetDeck has Vim shortcuts! Looks based on Gmail: hjkl => navigation, c => compose, / => search. Seriously awesome.
-
Running a console app with Ctrl+F5 from VS will give you 'press any key to continue' after execution. How did I not know that trick?
-
I totally reserve the right to wear the new Nano as a watch. This thing is the Bluetooth headset of the 2010s.
-
New iPod Nano is extremely slick and smaller than I expected. Unfortunately, as with most new electronics, so far has not changed my life.
-
Pixel shaders (e.g. DropShadowEffect) on UIElements in WPF/Silverlight blurs their contents beyond recognition. Shade hidden element as fix.
-
I suspected Zuckerberg was a Bond villain but didn't know until now: j.mp/bdwE3E I like him, but am scared that I have an FB account.
-
TIL, use flash[:key] only if you're about to redirect a user to a new action, otherwise use flash.now[:key]
-
iPhone/iPod screen repair is a happening business. At least two separate and competing operations meet at Good Earth at Glenmore Landing.
-
iOS < 4 treats <video> tags specially and renders them above all other DOM elements (z-index ignored). This is like IE6 all over again.
-
May save time/money: Plex Media Server streaming 720p or 1080p video to Plex iOS app on iPad doesn't work very well. Tested on C2D 2.53 GHz.
-
What rock have I been living under? Plex (the OSX XBMC port) to be integrated into LG TVs and Bluray players: j.mp/bfj0uh
-
I think iPhone 4s coming w/ 512MB memory, but only 32GB HD; and iPod Touch 4Gs with 64GB HD, but only 256MB mem is an inside joke @ Apple.
-
Didn't realize that Django had fallen so far behind the curve. "Why Django sucks, and how we can fix it": j.mp/bZuYY7
-
New Nano is shipping right out of Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong. Getting away from Android's music player will be a great relief.
-
Personal secret: I love the rain.
-
Rails' support/doc for dynamic error pages (404, 422, 500, etc.) is weak. Best description I found: henrik.nyh.se/2008/07/rails-404
-
Adobe Reader's bloat ballooned so I used Foxit, which in turn ballooned so I used Sumatra: blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf
-
Bike ownership in a nutshell --> week 1: fun care-free riding :D, weeks 2+: maintenance
-
Apple just commoditized HDR photos. Prepare for the Flickr onslaught!
-
New blog post! How to make right-click select a row with the Silverlight DataGrid --> mutelight.org/a/28
-
Apple does such a good job of packaging that even unboxing a new notebook battery is an EXPERIENCE.
-
Holy awesome! RT @Jeka: This is what happens when one of the best black metal bands matures its sound youtu.be/p4ZzqWhvOVA *worship*
August
-
My personal goal for today is to read the entire OData protocol doc: www.odata.org/developers/protocols And play guitar tonight.
-
I need a browser that combines Firefox's plugin system with Chrome's general lack of memory leaks. Is that too much to ask?
-
A 3G iPod Touch will change the wireless industry, and that's why Apple won't make one. That said; please please please. j.mp/9SgvSU
-
Protip for selecting a VPS provider: OpenVZ = the hosting industry's solution for being unable to oversell Xen boxes. Also, avoid Delimiter.
-
Good to know: -extent only observes -gravity with ImageMagick > 6.3.2
-
New Ensiferum/Finntroll tour and they're coming to the Republik in Calgary 2/14! Won't miss them this time ... fb.me/EwJEt8Z8
-
Vim: Ctrl+] -> go to definition, Ctrl+o/Ctrl+i -> backward/forward
-
I've been missing out too long on a very powerful tool: Ctags with Vim is easy to setup and changes my workflow completely.
-
M$ libs can be dangerous. BackgroundWorker might silently absorb an internal exception and not fire RunWorkerCompleted: j.mp/a6IFyP
-
Implementing on OData web service for Stack Overflow: j.mp/bLOCal (from #mix10 times, but new to me).
-
At the St. Albert farmer's market in old downtown. I just bought 5 lbs. of beef and bison jerky.
-
Got a haircut from a Korean hairstylist today. She totally gets my style.
-
Old but new to me, bootstrapping your startup globally: bit.ly/HbGSA (w/ focus on Panama)
-
MDT/UTC -6. Still 1.5 hours left of #whyday. Time to get hacking.
-
Music from the Scott Pilgrim trailer is Invaders Must Die by the Prodigy, a band that transcends the soundscape. youtu.be/EiqFcc_l_Kk
-
Even via a mature Gem, implementing OAuth provider infrastructure is going to double the size of my codebase. Is it worth it?
-
A few months back I was looking for an awesome finite state machine impl. to reference, wish I'd found this: github.com/rubyist/aasm
-
Bash loop for programs that crash too often (e.g. sass --watch) => while true; do <cmd>; done
-
Ever notice how everyone in Harry Potter works for either the government or a bank? How does the economy not implode?
-
Continued copyright trolling on Oracle's part over Java might see good things for C# and the CLI
-
System.Threading.AutoResetEvent is the asynchronous tester's best friend
-
My first bike flat! Pinched the tube taking a corner way too fast. Glad I took everyone's advice and was carrying tools and a replacement.
-
Finder column view --> holding Option while dragging the tab at the bottom of a column changes the default column width.
-
Using Divvy 5 minutes and now I'm not sure whether I could ever live without it. It's like a tiling window manager for OSX.
-
Just read At the Mountains of Madness, and it's certainly one of Lovecraft's best. Looking forward to Guillermo del Toro's film adaptation.
-
Was just blown away by Nginx + Phusion Passenger for Rails. I can see that I should've looked into this a lot earlier.
-
This quote might apply to me and the Calgary housing market: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." -- Keynes
-
If anyone is thinking about going to wait an Apple Store for a carrier-discounted iPhone 4: just don't.
-
The final scene of Inception was shot at Fortress (near Calgary). Rumor was that the cash influx might be enough to reopen the ski hill.
July
-
Microsoft is promising to kill the iPad when they can't even get their "iPhone killer" (Windows Phone 7) out the door. Ballmer is a troll.
-
So I'm biking home and I hear growling from the bushes, I look and there's an Ankylosaurus. An Akylosaurus from Dinosaurs Alive! at the Zoo.
-
Scott Pilgrim vol. 6 fight needed more epicness. I fully expect the upcoming movie to pick up that slack.
-
Traded Crank Brothers Candy X clipless pedals for Shimano PD-M520s in a gambit to extend my life a little longer.
-
New blog post on using Readability with Vimperator: mutelight.org/a/26
-
First blog post in five months! Building a command line environment for .NET development with Rake: mutelight.org/a/25
-
Losing the birthday edge: tweetagewasteland.com/2010/07/happy-birthday-from-…
-
Don't escape characters in Ruby strings -- rors.org/2008/10/26/dont-escape-in-strings
-
For those extra finicky Windows programs: convert a local Unix/Cygwin path to an absolute Windows path: cygpath -a -w local/
-
Rails works. Took over a foreign codebase and the code was easy to understand, and thanks to gem usage, no file weighs in over 100 lines.
-
Been a while since the last time I made it to sunrise.
-
Woot! Replacement Oakleys have arrived. Let's hope that I don't sit on these ones too.
-
Once in a while, I'll watch a movie and think about how beautiful the scenery is. Then I realize I'm looking at my home province of Alberta.
-
Fix page up/down in the OSX terminal, send string to shell: Page Up \033[5~ and Page Down 033[6~
-
Today I am one of the ~100 crazy people who camp in front if MEC on Sunday waiting for it to open. Why? Because it's MEC.
June
-
Bike ride home is about 29km: runkeeper.com/user/fyrerise/activity/12040834
-
(3) Observe that watching Hulu is technically feasible. Now go read a book.
-
How to play Hulu in Canada: (1) Set up a US proxy or put a US IP in x-forwarded-for (2) Block outgoing TCP/UDP on port 1935
-
Meditation is hard.
-
New wheels: MEC Cote Bicycle. If all goes well, I'll be doing some bike runs to work this week. j.mp/a07ihN
-
Awesome site built by Simon Willison and his wife to document their world travels: sparkabout.net/
-
During the Japanese bubble of the 1980s/90s, the land under Tokyo's Imperial Palace was said to be worth more than all of Florida
-
I've come full circle and am back on Rails (3).
-
#CCP is inspired by #Iceland: vimeo.com/12231666 Seriously loving this ad campaign.
-
Try the VS 2010 Pro Power Tools: j.mp/cpbT8b (highlight current line and align assignments are awesome)
-
Google's "Bing" homepage today: proof that most good minimalist design decisions Google has taken were sheer luck.
-
When your country's primary industry sinks, do this: www.inspiredbyiceland.com/
-
Trying to make a lolcat by putting sunglasses on @coolmody's cats. They're having none of it.
-
Using Firefox with Socks: DNS is NOT proxied by default, to fix this go to about:config and set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns --> true
-
Osaka Sushi House has perished. It's a sad day for Calgary.
-
1.5 years ago, Japan. My colleagues abroad laughed when I saw the local phones and told them the iPhone would take over. j.mp/9ggbj6
May
-
#11. Finally saw a toadfish. Last dive for another couple years. Sad.
-
Lacoste shirts sell for USD88 even in Mexico. WTF.
-
Nine dives down. Georges speared a lionfish and demonstrated the technique (they're an invasive species).
-
Six dives in. Dove with a film crew yesterday and we're probably going to make a Mexican TV program on scuba. Channel 10.
-
Is there a name for the guilty feeling you get when you somewhere and don't speak the local language? I have it now.
-
Cozumel. Four dives in. No sharks so far, but quite a few rays and turtles. Internet here moves like glass flows.
-
I get a lot of free drinks at Starbucks. I have a system.
-
What do Apple and Microsoft have in common? Both are huge companies and major Internet players, both build absolutely worthless websites.
-
For 2 years I've kept a CD in my MBP to suppress the grinding noise on wake-up. Has been fixed 6 mos. now: support.apple.com/kb/DL974
-
Force eject a stuck DVD from a MBP: restart and hold your trackpad button. Yah. That makes sense.
-
Using Steam on OSX is surreal: I never thought I'd see this day.
-
Function currying just saved my life.
-
RT @doomsayerpeter: EVERYTHING UP. EVERYTHING HAPPY.
-
Wow. Modern Warfare 2 spent $50M on dev and $150M on launch advertising. Also, the state of Mac/Linux gaming: j.mp/ck050T
-
Note to landlords: when taking photos of rental units, take them on a bright summer day, everything looks better and happier.
-
It's symbolic that politicians' Twitter accounts only follow other politicians, not any of the people. (e.g. mpjamesmoore)
-
Experimenting w/ working standing up today. To everyone asking: it's good for focus. And the S-shape of my spine.
-
My #NodeJS/#CoffeeScript project has been awesome, but JavaScript's ultra-weak typing is terrifying
-
Chrome bugs that need repair to get Vimium fully operational: wiki.github.com/philc/vimium/chromium-bugs-were-tr…
-
Switching from #Firefox to #Chrome. Terrible not having #Vimperator (#Vrome?), but my battery likes how Chrome doesn't idle at 20% CPU.
April
-
I was glad to see this ad at #yyz for the #UofC: flic.kr/p/7XkKgY Dr Keith's energy and env course was the best engg course I took.
-
"... good riddance. Flash is the RealPlayer of the decade." -- HN. Apple is evil, but if they help get rid of Flash, I'm onboard.
-
You don't realize just how bad of an idea centralized version control is until your server goes down.
-
Unresponsive SSH session? Instead of killing it from another terminal, try: <return>~.
-
Just passed Bridgeland LRT station. It's still closed from a double stabbing last night. And I kind of wanted to move to Bridgeland. .. #yyc
-
Democamp is the best event in Calgary PERIOD. That is all.
-
I'll convert my MVVM presentation into a blogazine article complete w/ infographics. Any nice diagram libs for JS? brandur.org/mvvm/
-
World Bank estimates that $1 trillion is spent on bribes annually, 3% of global GDP. - How to spend $50B (Bjorn Lomborg)
-
The *only* good thing about Pearson #yyz is that it has a monorail.
-
Landsbanki employees post-crash --> 1/3 axed immediately, 1/3 re-assigned, 1/3 took a massive pay cut (hope I heard those stats right).
-
Landsbanki head office sent e-mails to employees reassuring them of the bank's liquidity right until the bitter end.
-
Experts on this panel think that Paul Martin, who knows Gordon Brown well, should help Iceland negotiate with the UK on the Icesave issue.
-
A new centre-right party is expected to be elected in Holland, and are to take a harder stance on the Icesave issue. #timebomb
-
In room full of Icelanders disagreeing over policy. This would be way awesome if Viking helms and mead were made mandatory.
-
Places like Tequila Bookworm are exactly what's missing in Calgary. Also, life.
-
Icelanders who don't know me always start speaking to me in Icelandic. They might be messing with me. I don't know.
-
Open data from the World Bank: data.worldbank.org/ (economics, education, environment, health, .. !)
-
Everyone here asks me for directions. I must look like I know where I'm going. Not. Even. Close. #yyz
-
I don't even know how I traveled before we had this 3g thing. Now we just need it when traveling abroad. Landed in TO!!
-
#Spartacus finale #EPIC. Now it's time to brush up on a little Roman history.
-
/set activity_hide_level parts joins quits nicks modes --> #irssi now works perfectly with #screen's activity monitoring (C-a M) again!
-
The Wild Hunt Calgary premiere tonight @ 7pm, playing @ the Plaza. Actor Mark Krupa in attendance. brandur.org/tmp/wildhunt.jpg
-
Ctrl+S freezes output in some terminals and makes them appear locked up. Ctrl+Q reverses the effect.
-
VS 2010 Ultimate = $11,899 MSRP. www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products
-
Nexus One capacitive touch definitely doesn't inspire the same confidence's as the iPhone's. The screen is beautiful though.
-
Tweeting from new Nexus One. Delivery guy came at 8pm on Friday
-
Now I remember why I kept those winter tires on. (Massive blizzard outside)
-
Mandatory WPF reading: weak event patterns --> j.mp/5AvgpY
-
Why am I even trying to read the news today? I must like the pain.
March
-
Designer's block: pursue a given task rather than think up a magnificent design out of nowhere www.artlebedev.com/mandership/162/
-
Muse live is just as frakkin' awesome as the stories say: j.mp/bsxMlI (Muse, Silversun Pickups @ Calgary 2010/03/30)
-
Stop proclaiming the end of #NoSQL! The fact is, we need systems that map better to our programming models, and that may not be SQL.
-
Got into work to hear the most ear-splitting screech ongoing. Turns out my new neighbor had daisy-chained power bars into the UPS. Arg.
-
#Spartacus is the best show on TV by a good margin. The series directors have even coaxed a decent performance out of Lucy Lawless.
-
H.264 vs. Theora: keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356 Food for thought as Firefox/Opera hold out against H.264/MPEG-LA. No right answer here folks.
-
#nhibernate awesome: after adding 2 LOCs, I got an object to recurse through a parent hierarchy of its own type in a single SQL query
-
Being used to HTML/CSS, it's strange to use a vertical alignment property that works as expected #wpf
-
Hanlon's razor is an adage wise enough to live your life by.
-
D: I'm talking about cooperation. Favors. You do a favor for me, I'll do one for you. Get it? Y: Do one for me. D: Not a chance. -Catch-22
-
Watched Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and thought it was great, if unorthodox. Liked the bit on willingless to believe in the supernatural.
-
Went out to dinner w/ Christina Sunley last night, author of the Tricking of Freya. j.mp/aA3dv0
-
It's pretty lame having to pay for Red Bull again
-
The Rx team refers to the JS implementation as the "reference" library, as it's considered the most beautiful.
-
In a talk on Reactive Extensions (Rx) by Erik Meijer (who is a major Haskell researcher). Need to think of a REALLY smart question to ask.
-
Java has had Observable/Observer since version one (good for async collection handling) but Erik Meijer says their interface is ugly
-
Sitting in on the @matthiasshapiro talk on data visualization. Afraid to tweet in case I look and miss something awesome. #mix10
-
WCF has a PollingDuplex class that lets you to use the duplex pattern over HTTP #mix10
-
<div id="AlternativeContent"> w/ hidden style --> recognized by search engines to hold accessible content #mix10
-
XML sitemaps w/ lists of deep links are recommended for Silverlight SEO. Use an output cache to have minimize the # of times it generates.
-
Revitalizing at the pool. It's a beautiful day. #mix10
-
At session on building standards-compliant apps in ASP 4. It's very refreshing to know that some ppl using M$ tech care about web standards.
-
After rather one-sided #ie9 sessions at #mix10 today, more neutral discussion is refreshing: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1196054
-
Microsoft to world: red polo shirts are funny. Believe. #areyouhavingalaugh
-
Microsoft has dedicated people around the world who choose the daily Bing background images #mix10
-
Someone stole my CEO business card off the personals wall. I hope that they use it wisely.
-
an extension allows a Linq query to be converted to an OData query (which builds a service URI and lets the service host do the work)
-
OData carries a metadata file along with it, this metadata file can be used by VS2010 to build a strongly-typed service reference #mix10
-
OData is Open Data Protocol, supports querying data via extra parameters in the request URI odata.org/ #mix10
-
#tircd exhausted my API limit during the keynote this morning, prepare for backpost flood ...
-
I don't care about Bing, but I do like search engine technology, I'm at Breakers D #mix10
-
#areyouhavingalaugh at this rate, we're going to lose somebody to suffocation watching old office UK clips
-
At ESPN sports zone, indeed there are many TVs here.
-
lap around Azure presentation was an SVG converted to a Silverlight DeepZoom app on the Azure platform onebigslide.com/ #mix10
-
Microsoft solves the problem of not having a "big" non-relational DB for Azure by offering defined sizes only, 1GB or 10GB #mix10
-
Dallas: Azure information marketplace w/ sources like AP/NASA, some of it free and some paid, accessed via REST #mix10
-
finally get the MVC vs MVP distinction, P/Presenter's views are only MOSTLY passive, because of data binding #mix10
-
Mono presentation packed, switched to the Azure presentation in Breakers L #mix10
-
at the MVVM pattern overview (Lagoon F)
-
*the guys at the keynote kept on talking about how good the Windows Phone's performance is, but there was latency in every transition #mix10
-
Winter Olympics Silverlight player (created by Vertigo) is being open-sourced. Looking forward to it. #mix10
-
Foregoing too much Vegas because I'd rather attend the Mix sessions/keynote tomorrow. I may be a dork. #mix10
-
Hi everyone, meet my future fiance/wife: flic.kr/p/7KPbHu
-
Being in Vegas is all about having an A++ team: flic.kr/p/7KKczk
-
Just passed Bill Buxton on the escalator while ranting about Azure. Hope I'm not making enemies already. #mix10
-
Just registered at #mix10! Name badges have cool orange zipper strings.
-
irssi + bitlbee + tircd --> slickest communication there is, should've had this setup a very long time ago.
-
The C# ecosystem is a funny place: code docs on most APIs are so bad that people have trained themselves to not see them.
-
Agile development is conducive to delivered software, but not to polished software. Article on this later.
-
I think I'm finally getting the hang of general XAML/dependency properties. Next up: styles and data templates!
-
Can't open NHibernate.Linq-2.1.2-GA-Bin.zip? (File is invalid) Use WinRAR, nothing else will work.
-
Outstanding weekend of skiing in Fernie, if anyone is looking at skis, I'd highly recommend Salomon Lords.
February
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My roommate just reminded me: I blew up a hard drive last weekend. Now how could I forget that.
-
Trying out Vrome for Chrome as an alternative to Vimperator on Firefox. Most of the features I use are present, but I do miss quickmarks.
-
how do I handle failures in Haskell with so many alternatives, each more intimidating than the last? haskell.org/haskellwiki/Failure
-
Acceleration fix has been applied to my Toyota. This should mean that I'm no longer driving around in a media-hyped deathtrap.
-
Validating an XML document according to its XSD schema hints in C#/.NET: mutelight.org/a/24
-
Programming is an easy way to procrastinate: blog.cubeofm.com/programming-is-a-way-to-procrasti…
-
Help! I've lost my ability to watch TV. I get fidgety when commercials come on.
-
Tested some 2009 Salomon Lords today, coming from circa 1995 Volkls. Handled beautifully in the fresh powder (and later, the not-so-fresh).
-
New blog post, "Generating a Permalink Slug in Haskell": mutelight.org/a/23 (the regex system makes this somewhat unintuitive)
-
how to actually use regular expressions in Haskell: j.mp/F5q13 (this is not obvious)
-
Random ski instructor on hill today: "We're going to be taking a more aggressive line this time; no more mogul shopping." Pure insight.
-
You wouldn't know it from Rotten Tomatoes, but #Pandorum is one of the best sci-fi movies I've seen in a long time. Loved the twist.
-
Switched my blog to #nanoc after a Ruby upgrade broke Jekyll (again). nanoc.stoneship.org/
-
Farewell Slicehost. You served me well, but you're expensive and compile Haskell at snail's pace.
-
"If you're not inside, you're outside!" - Gekko, Wall Street. True in 1985. True in 2010.
January
-
The footnote that you can't see until after you've shelled out $99: <fineprint>** 3.2 beta requires Snow Leopard.</fineprint>
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Just shelled out $99 USD to get early access to the iPhone SDK 3.2 beta (w/ iPad support). All my base are belong to Apple.
-
the Matroska container format's (.mkv) name is derived from "matryoshka", the Russian word for "nesting doll" (Russian doll within doll set)
-
if you're looking for something awesome to do in #calgary, try BarCamp & DemoCamp: barcampcalgary.com/ (it's like being in San Fran)
-
#rhinomocks How to change the result returned by a stub method call: j.mp/9UPQTU (this might save your life someday)
-
Come see our latest restriction! bit.ly/a6STgX Apple: the iPad is great, but the appstore has got to go
-
remind me to check out "Maybe I Should Have" (once there's an English translation): j.mp/84Rww9
-
just pushed a cleaned-up copy of the Geotools.Net project to Github: github.com/fyrerise/geotools
-
All articles explaining monads read the same: okay, makes sense, *nod*, yep, makes sense, WTF?! Still, best one so far: j.mp/8HeOyg
-
I'm off tubbydogs for a while
-
I think I've just realized why Silverlight isn't more widespread: it isn't, and never has been, ready for release
-
Pai Gow?
-
Wound down the weekend watching Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian. A+ as far as plays go.
-
Why Japan's smartphones haven't gone global: www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/technology/20cell.html
-
Olafur Grimsson refuses to sign bill to repay $5B for lost foreign savings in Icesave: j.mp/5zeWDo
-
The single life: "It's not like a candy store. It's a lawless, post-apocalyptic, wasteland." - NPH in HIMYM
2009
December
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My Grandmother surprised me this year with a beautifully-assembled photo album of my entire life up until now, WOW! Merry X-mas everyone!!
-
#avatar The immersive flora/fauna of Pandora was beautiful. Characters were strong. The ending defied belief too much to be credible though.
-
#avatar was one of the most engrossing film experiences I've ever had
-
Installed brand new X-ice Xi2s + rims just before Calgary pulled another Hoth moment. Goal to switch them out next spring: clock < 30 min.
-
Passport acquired! Vegas is a go.
-
AUFS is an elegant solution to a problem that I've been trying to solve for the better part of a decade.
-
My Acer EasyStore now runs GNU/Linux. Just in time too. I think Windows Home Server was planning to murder me in my sleep.
-
AG_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE. So much for static typing ...
-
Terrible news. After 560+ days of uptime on my VPS, I finally had to reboot.
-
ever notice of how even just a second of video relays a disproportionate amount of information compared to a single photo of the same spot?
-
gun-running with @foojie in #l4d2 for the gold in survival mode flic.kr/p/7npzjT
-
Being a realist, I saw #500daysofsummer and thought, "the guy Summer married was a surgeon." All the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.
-
It's so obvious now. A programmer must have two gears and a fast way to switch between them. One for comp. science, and the other for life.
-
Globalive allowed to enter Canadian cellphone market: j.mp/4RLIPU
-
thanks Tony Clement for protecting us from the #crtc. #globalive is coming to Canada. #rogers, #telus, + #bell just felt a chill in the air.
-
Been so long since I took #calgarytransit that I'd forgotten their mandate: "No matter how bad the roads are, our service will be worse."
-
Mono is now C# 4.0 feature complete! j.mp/6Vi3Jw
-
Might have been losing people during that last presentation. I might need a subject more interesting than C# delegate-based memory leaks.
-
being at Marlborough Mall is like being in the Blade Runner movie
-
ALT-D --> select address bar in Windows Explorer (extremely useful in Windows 7)
-
Windows installers can now detect each other to prevent you from trying to run two at once (for your own good of course)
-
messing around with google wave. we totally have to put this into our development workflow tomorrow.
-
just discussed with my co-worker how we're both going to bring our pen tablets to work and overthrow the evil mouse establishment
-
after seeing #prgmr and having looked through every VPS option, I kind of want to co-locate: prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html
November
-
my hair is getting pretty crazy even by my standards: flic.kr/p/7joGAo (and check out that full windsor knot ... thanks jane!)
-
Children of Men is the most underrated sci-fi of all time. Serenity/Firefly is the most overrated.
-
If L4D2 is featured on day 2/5 of Steam's sale, what will be on day 5? Steam Complete Pack: Steam's entire catalogue of games for $99.99!!
-
C# rule: if your class attaches a handler to a global object, or an object that was passed in as an arg, make sure to detach that handler
-
Now locked in for Vegas Jan. 8th to 12th for round 2. Thanks @WestJet for the awesome flight deals.
-
Steam is 90% likely to have L4D2 for 25-50% off as their "crown jewel" on day 5 of the pre-Xmas sale. Why didn't this occur to me 5 min ago?
-
Black Friday sale swag: L4D2 PC $37.50 + WD Green 1.5 TB $90 (good deal for us Canadians) #ncix
-
NCIX --> Brandur: SERVICE UNAVAILABLE. Get a Google App Engine account guys ...
-
Dubai credit-default swaps now more expensive than Iceland's! That's a win. The British now have a bigger fish to worry about.
-
Just realized that I get up at 5:30 on weekdays but not until like 11:00 on weekends. That's a 5.5 hour discrepancy ...
-
make page up/down scroll a full page in #irssi: /set scroll_page_count /1
-
reading through the Venusian Arts. theory gets tested again tonight. #mysterymethod
-
this is the wicked looking flute: flic.kr/p/7hJaR9 now I just have to learn how to play it #irishflute #caseyburns
-
picked up an Apogee ONE today, and realized that I should have had one of these days since day 1. ONE + GarageBand = badass guitar.
-
quote of the day: "yah I'm spending a lot of money, but it can't be helped, unfortunately I'm getting into producing." - hwu
-
sarging fail. pua skill = (natural skill) + (number of approaches) * (material read). now increasing number of approaches.
-
love it: j.mp/JI1Ap (#smashingmagazine) paper magazines still look better than websites. it's time to change that.
-
wish I'd read the GNU Screen man page sooner, activity monitoring is sweet mutelight.org/a/22
-
tv shows always get computers right. thanks to numb3rs, I finally understand IRC: youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ (via #irssi)
-
#itsalltext got nuked again by this bomb: trac.gerf.org/itsalltext/ticket/63 hitting my hotkey is like playing Russian roulette.
-
Windows/NTFS has symbolic links! Keep that on the down low though, for some reason it seems to be a secret. j.mp/138wjb
-
DFS and mounted volumes are a lot more complicated than they look
-
Windows 7 == Windows Vista with some minor UI and backend changes. It is NOT the second coming.
-
new .NET 4.0 feature: Enum.HasFlag() mutelight.org/a/21
-
C# tick = 100 ns. reasonable double-click threshold = 250 ms. --> double-click threshold in ticks = 2 500 000 ticks
-
is method documentation important? (I don't know) mutelight.org/a/20
-
the origin of the word "guy" (referring to a man) comes from the first name of Guy Fawkes j.mp/1C5QX
-
Flashblock: another one of those Firefox plugins that in retrospect you wonder how you lived without
October
-
I'm at the point where I'll just hit the power button to reboot instead of waiting 5 min for VS to close.
-
McDonald's closes in Iceland (krona devaluation has made imports too expensive): j.mp/1Yx7XJ
-
Swallowing an Extensible Exception in Haskell (noob Haskell post): mutelight.org/a/19
-
suspended my Giganews account for the time being. trialing Astraweb (USD$11/mo).
-
time to get back on the #haskell train.
-
wow. according to Wikipedia, A State of Trance is the most popular radio show in the world with 30 million listeners each week.
-
New Hagstrom got to Calgary from NY in < 24 hrs. What's the deal with J&R;'s crazy shipping?
September
-
two years today I started working at this company. repetition makes life blur by at high speed.
-
finally received my copy of Programming Clojure!
-
ordered a handmade Irish flute!
-
Everyone at work prints their code reviews in Arial. I explained monospaced fonts once, but the concept was too hardcore.
-
Apple is finally letting me keep my money. What a bust.
-
it's a right of passage in OO programming when you realize that most things don't need a base class
-
Vimperator win: "set usermode" to remove page styling
August
-
#firefox has the most annoying nag update system known to man. Apple and Microsoft can't even compete.
-
I get back from dinner and there's a LAN party at our place. Bachelor life is awesome.
-
The Iceland weather report: icelandweatherreport.com
-
#perseids were (are) much nicer tonight! viewing Calgary-side
-
Stargazing. (it's a patience sport)
July
-
Wish I'd never discovered Vimperator or ABP. Then it would be so easy to switch from Firefox, Destroyer of Memory.
-
3 days after the rain incident and my iPod has managed to rebuild itself
-
Back from Fernie. Was awesome, but my POS iPod Touch was pwned by a bit of rain.
-
Road trip successful. Now boarding plane, preparing for 44 degree heat.
-
it's nice to have a working PC again. what an adventure a simple BIOS flash turned out to be.
-
30% insurance drop for turning 25. I don't feel much different ...
-
Only MonoPrice's cable prices are grounded in reality. MBP mini displayport adapter $10 there vs $35 from Apple vs $60 at BestBuy.
-
Includes Redis set implements written in Lua for Tokyo Cabinet. Nice!
-
Icy >>> Cydia
-
my next project: XenServer on my MBP citrix.com/freexenserver
-
A new day -- and a new release iteration
-
preparing for our pirate party tonight, looking fun already: flic.kr/p/6BQGbc
-
Transformers not as bad as expected. Meghan Fox just a good :) Just don't try to piece together the nonsensical story after the movie.
June
-
Why does every Windows app made since the inception of time steal focus? I propose relegating Windows to be known as a single task OS.
-
what kind of noob screws up their BIOS flash? this noob (w/assist from the fail Asus update utility)
-
Risk winna! occupying Europe ain't easy.
-
BSOD in the middle of my presentation, so much for managed memory in .NET :)
-
Alt + Esc minimizes a window! so much less awkward than Alt + Space + N. Microsoft needs better keyboard docs ...
-
heading out the .NET user group presentation on XNA and Xbox live (@ Nexen conference center downtown)
-
up and running on #twyt! there's no line like the command line