2,177 tweets, and 3,858 including replies.
2017
September
- I referred to `encoding/json`’s optimizations and did the same. Languages with self-implemented stdlibs are the only future we should want.
- This was a fun foray into optimizing our new form-encoding package in stripe-go. https://github.com/stripe/stri…
- Views from Panorama Ridge in Banff National Park. https://t.co/bw9WKjfEiZ
- RT @philipbrown: Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency http://phlp.be/2ldqEE2 via @brandur
- RT @craigkerstiens: Managing database migrations better in Postgres: http://www.craigkerstiens.com/…
- 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.
- TIL that poor email etiquette, colloquially “top-posting”, has another name: TOFU (text over, fullquote under). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
- In San Francisco, rain is a welcome respite. https://t.co/PRV54ffqBD
- This is cool. Containers serving lambda requests aren’t immediately discarded and can be reused. https://medium.com/@tjholowayc…
- I like how this idea is presented a lot, so for my own edification, did a short summary on the talk. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- And a great talk on pickling, gadgets, and chains; or how this class of vulnerability is used for code execution. https://frohoff.github.io/apps…
- Some detail on CVE-2017-9805, which seems like a likely candidate for the Equifax breach in Apache Struts. https://cwiki.apache.org/confl…
- RT @simonw: Hard to express the emotional reaction I had while reading this. Utterly horrifying. An amazing human story. https://t.co/1O9Jm…
- RT @craigkerstiens: Another great one from @brandur on atomic transactions to power idempotent APIs https://brandur.org/http-trans…
- RT @javisantana: reading every single article in @brandur 's blog. I don't remember seeing so much common sense in the same place: https://…
- Legitimately curious to see if Apple's upcoming event produces something I want to buy. Every recent product has been a Pyrrhic compromise.
- And if you end up doing anything cool with it, let me know!
- We now have an OpenAPI 3.0 spec for Stripe. More supported JSON schema means that it’s far more accurate than 2.0. https://github.com/stripe/open…
- Disturbing how public offices insist injury is tragically accidental. Our roads are built to trade safety for speed. https://twitter.com/benrosstra…
- Aside from Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Watchmen, Wonder Woman is by far the best movie that DC’s ever produced.
- A reminder that no one has a fucking clue when it comes to understanding side effects of modern monetary policies — including central banks.
- As Canada raises rates infinitesimally from 0.75 to 1%, some discussion on the effect on real estate and inflation. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- Published a short piece on how to use transactions to build an idempotent API hardened against race conditions. https://brandur.org/http-trans…
- RT @bufo_alvarius: Building Robust Systems With ACID and Constraints by @brandur https://brandur.org/acid
- Libraries for building CLI tools in Rust. Hope to start seeing more of these techniques in the wild. https://deterministic.space/ru…
- Here's a quick recommendation of _Black Science_ which has some of the most gorgeous imagery to ever come to comics. https://t.co/yNlCKhT5Tq
- Taming tarantulas at Mount Diablo (photo courtesy of @keiko713). https://t.co/r7B8UqAjvC
- Lots of talk of math/bits and test helpers, but little of Go 1.9’s best feature: vendor no longer included in ./… https://github.com/brandur/sor…
- There’s a `position: sticky` in CSS now?! And just like that, more JS disappears. I need more designer friends. https://developer.mozilla.org/…
- CSS variable support is at 70+% already. If you’re willing to jettison IE users, you can plausibly use them today … http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-v…
August
- I’m just going to pitch this one more time before shutting up and sending the first copy. https://twitter.com/brandur/st…
- Deferrable constraints so you can (for ex) insert two rows that reference each other despite FKs on both relations. https://begriffs.com/posts/201…
- In light of the soon-to-come movie, it’s a great time to get better acquainted with Philip K Dick’s work. https://www.theguardian.com/bo…
- A cautionary tale of rational engineering trumped by hardline marketing for a product with no technical merit. https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.…
- RT @yukihiro_matz: link: The Limits of Copy-on-write: How Ruby Allocates Memory — Brandur Leach: https://brandur.org/ruby-memor…
- RT @tenderlove: The Limits of Copy-on-write: How Ruby Allocates Memory — Brandur Leach https://brandur.org/ruby-memor…
- On the internals of Ruby’s heap, copy-on-write, and why Unicorns inevitably bloat to the size of their parent. https://brandur.org/ruby-memor…
- In 12 years not once did I notice that the Gorillaz made up a word in ”Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head”. http://www.definitions.net/def…
- Go 1.9 release Q: Is http://sync.Map typesafe? A: Yes, it uses interface{}. Possibly why people have trouble with Go dogmatists ...
- I’m loving WAL-G! Better throughput is good. Killing that taxing Python runtime dependency is even better. https://www.citusdata.com/blog…
- 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.) https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- And a friend pointed that Joe Armstrong wrote a very similar article about Erlang’s concurrency back in 2013. http://joearms.github.io/2013/…
- A++: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.… Async/await is a better model than callbacks or promises, but still forces code to be designed around it.
- On failing noisily and entrenched flaws becoming de facto standards. The subtle side effects of Postel's Maxim. https://tools.ietf.org/html/dr…
- RT @schneems: ACID + humans means a chemical burn or hearing colors. ACID + postgres means consistent persistence find out how: https://t.c…
- RT @craigkerstiens: Yet another awesome Postgres all about how Postgres and transactions work by @brandur - https://brandur.org/postgres-a…
- I published “How Postgres makes transactions atomic” which closely examines snapshots, xlog, clog, and the heap. https://brandur.org/postgres-a…
- RT @romainhuet: We think of @stripe’s API as economic infrastructure. Learn from @brandur how we safely manage API versioning. https://t.co…
- RT @stripe: How we future-proof Stripe’s API with versioning: https://stripe.com/blog/api-ve…
- Lessons learnt: Invest in regular tool sharpening. Procrastination will be the death of me.
- 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.
- I tried lldb’s `gui` mode for the first time today too. It needs a lot of work, but it’s pretty fun. https://t.co/7kEsoI3L1W
- 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. http://www.ad.nl/utrecht/groot…
- Precious little left over for homes, parks, and people. Imagine how beautiful a well designed city could be. https://twitter.com/mateosfo/s…
- A touching series of photography journals from Asia. http://www.calvertjournal.com/…
- Nice piece on partitioning from Citus. A bad key decision might take years to unwind, so think deeply in advance. https://www.citusdata.com/blog…
- Weird to see SF on the list though. While Oslo goes car free, we’ll spend ten years and $604M to make one street a little less car friendly.
- A list of major projects to improve pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure in urban centers around the world. http://www.businessinsider.com…
- Housing is zero-sum: property owners may get a more efficient and safer way to extract capital, but there are side effects.
- I find AirBnB as convenient as anyone, but full time units and increasing local rents are as natural as gravity. http://www.dw.com/en/airbnb-do…
- There's also an attached stationary boutique that sells Midori. This building has the most interesting set of shops… https://twitter.com/i/web/stat…
- And Heath News Stand is great. Easy place to find the best magazines like Nautilus, Drift, and the Surfer's Journal. https://t.co/NDeuEhRFcp
- Very meta: reading about Heath Ceramics from a magazine being sold inside Heath. https://t.co/00sHTNxrSt
- It’s a great day to rewatch Alan Kay’s excellent talk “Is it really complex? Or did we just make it complicated?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- We just added request traces to Stripe’s Ruby library for dead simple operational visibility. Please try them out! https://github.com/stripe/stri…
- And on that note, I’m going to start sending a very occasional newsletter. Go here if you’d like to receive it :) https://passages-signup.heroku…
- Put together a few words on what it’s like to publish an HTML email newsletter in 2017. https://brandur.org/newsletter…
- Also, “segregate witness” is such a great name for a fairly mundane feature. Let the marketing prowess of Bitcoin people never be in doubt.
- Best guide I could find to understanding today's Bitcoin Cash fork. In short, yes it's a fork, but a modest one. https://blog.bridge21.io/befor…
July
- TIL that HTML5 added `placeholder` for <input>. Love seeing clumsy JS replaced with good, standard implementations. https://developer.mozilla.org/…
- RT @hunleyd: #Postgres Job Queues & Failure By #MVCC — Brandur Leach http://j.mp/2uFT7so https://t.co/1f0FGOiAxB
- RT @mschoening: Dynamically typed languages... https://t.co/He9lfn2yHk
- Ensuring only one copy of a running program with abstract sockets (and no filesystem garbage). https://blog.petrzemek.net/201…
- RT @keiko713: EPIC TIME! cc/ @hone02 and @brandur and https://t.co/nZGjIOmnGx
- eprintln! is a great idea. In practice, printing to stdout/stderr is what pretty much everyone really wants to do. https://blog.rust-lang.org/201…
- Implementing a decoder for “Rack-style” forms (map[key][]=…). Complicated enough to be the best argument for JSON input that I’ve ever seen.
- Stumbled across B's Berlin issue at Kinokuniya. Beautiful work. The city's is so amazing that even magazines on it… https://twitter.com/i/web/stat…
- We used to envy Riak’s technology. It was probably never a good idea, but even so, the future seemed brighter. https://www.theregister.co.uk/…
- Bitcoin is better than HBO. Still priced at $2400, but the cliffs are starting to materialize out of the fog. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- Portland might just be the best North American city. https://t.co/sk4cnS3jec
- 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).
- The landscape photography in the “Fortitude” TV series is just ridiculously beautiful. (Filmed in Iceland of course… https://twitter.com/i/web/stat…
June
- Built on Rust and Google’s great CommonMark pull parser. So conducive to the problem that a safe implementation took just minutes to write.
- cmark2jira: A tiny Vim-pluggable program so you never have to type in JIRA’s needlessly divergent markup again. https://github.com/brandur/cma…
- Amazing. Again and again, the SFMTA demonstrates how to be committed to Vision Zero by way of hollow rhetoric only. https://twitter.com/Bob_Gunder…
- The soundtrack for Interstellar is exactly as epic as you might expect. https://open.spotify.com/track…
- I got a good chuckle from this piece on the confining shackles of relational data. https://www.mongodb.com/scale/… https://t.co/pVISVIlt3P
- From Pillar Point, where the Mavericks occur off the coast in winter. Beautiful area for day exploration. https://t.co/fJkvqrLrv0
- Great article on our bad habit of pushing problems into the future. Ask not when governments will default, but how. https://www.bloomberg.com/view…
- I spend more time formatting text in Confluence than writing it. It’s amazing how a tool this dull can become an industry standard.
- Compilation in Rust 1.18 is 15-20% faster; not bad for a point release. https://blog.rust-lang.org/201…
- Lets just hope that Wirth’s Law doesn’t catch up before release in December. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… https://twitter.com/sdw/status…
- But hailing iOS for productivity because it can sort of tile windows and access files now is crazy. Still looking for parity with 90s PCs.
- Yesterday’s Mac refreshes were the most encouraging thing to come out of Apple in years; hopefully a sign of return to undistorted reality.
- Gaiman's “Norse Mythology” is beautiful. Dark stories of gods who are heroic and wise, but also vengeful and childi… https://twitter.com/i/web/stat…
- John introducing Stripe Sigma. https://stripe.com/us/sigma https://t.co/gE8fXSnI7n
May
- RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome summary of modern advanced cloud database: https://brandur.org/cloud-data…
- And when I say “can’t” I mean “shouldn’t”. Turns out the people talking about database atomicity in the 70s were onto something.
- 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 https://brandur.org/cloud-data…
- A month on Headspace: meditated 29 of the last 32 days. Even the light accountability from an app seems to work. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Rust’s inclusive range operator will be `..=`. `..` vs `…` was always unintuitive at best, and dangerous at worst. https://github.com/rust-lang/r…
- New York 2140 was the best sci-fi I’ve read in a while. Neat premise and interesting prose. http://www.newyorker.com/books…
- It looks like we can expect faster Spanner operations to come! This is some very cool technology. https://twitter.com/WAWilsonIV…
- Exactly what gridlocked SF needs: public transit even less competitive with private parking and Uber/Lyft. https://www.sfmta.com/about-sf…
- RT @jasondmoss: A Comparison of Advanced, Modern Cloud Databases A non-exhaustive primer of modern cloud database solutions @brandur https:…
- RT @grescoe: Need a vacation from traffic? 11 gorgeous car-free places around the world (incl. Leonard Cohen's Hydra). https://t.co/Rie4EiZ…
- My attempt to sway the conversation :) https://twitter.com/craigkerst…
- When talking databases, we spend a lot of time on surface veneer when we should be focusing on the foundations for operable software.
- RT @craigkerstiens: Always enjoy what @brandur writes, another nice read on ACID and constraints - https://brandur.org/acid
- I’m a little in awe at how well managed Rust is. Instead of problems being rejected or ignored by territorial core teams, they get fixed.
- Very exciting progress on Rust’s incremental compilation towards a faster edit-compile-debug loop. https://blog.rust-lang.org/201…
- An aspirational piece on reducing moving parts, retiring things, and KISS at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. https://brandur.org/minimalism
- The Atrium under LinkedIn is such a beautiful space. The walls slide open around midday and it becomes open air. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Postgres is now available with HA on all three major clouds. No excuses left for using questionable databases. https://azure.microsoft.com/en…
- Fun walk up Mount Diablo last weekend. Looking forward to returning for tarantula season. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- RT @rdegges: YES. This is how you do technical management. https://t.co/g6Suq999tz
- I tried to summarize how Mongo came into its reputation of losing data (and how it can be durable today). https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Excited to say that Stripe webhooks are now signed and most of our libraries provide helpers to easily verify them. https://stripe.com/docs/webhoo…
- The chasm between the places we all understand to be beautiful and the smoggy hellscapes we build is fascinating. https://twitter.com/AndrewAPri…
- At this point a collapse of Canadian housing is preferable to today’s rough trend — a generational caste system based on real estate access.
- Wasm/LLVM unlock access to real typed languages, and we could be spending time pushing forward on that frontier instead.
- TypeScript is an obvious improvement over JS, but why set the bar so low? Is it just for backwards compatibility?
April
- I’m interested in OS packaging, but clueless about it. Here’s the patch to get Alacritty building into a .app/.dmg. https://github.com/jwilm/alacr…
- Partitioning, indexes, a short anecdote of Mongo v. Postgres, and choosing good databases. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Zeit's CLI-based domain purchasing is neat. We talked about that at Heroku since circa 2011, but didn't execute. https://zeit.co/domains
- A few words to disspell the common misconception that GraphQL APIs are inherently non-performant. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- And a great conversation about how apps exploit human weaknesses to hijack our attention, and what to do about it. https://www.samharris.org/podc…
- Great long form piece on why cascading makes CSS incredibly painful to scale (2016). http://mrmrs.io/writing/2016/0…
- gpg-agent/ssh-agent and shell env var injection, in theory: elegant example of the Unix philosophy. In practice: configuration nightmare.
- I started using ctrl-py-matcher for CtrlP matching in Vim. It’s a quantum leap forward if you’re in big repos. https://github.com/FelikZ/ctrl…
- Masterpiece from The Economist on how minimum parking rules and parking subsidization mandate terrible cities. https://www.economist.com/news…
- This 5-line POC was worth $10k. Lots of interesting lessons on why to avoid an overly permissive language in here. https://hackerone.com/reports/…
- After paying ~$480k for MRuby bug bounties, Shopify gave up, rolled out kernel sandboxing, and cut bounties 10x. https://hackerone.com/shopify-…
- Apparently at some point I took a wrong turn in life. https://twitter.com/dcurtis/st…
March
- I’m obnoxiously proud of my first patch to Postgres. Thanks @petervgeoghegan for some serious assists! https://github.com/postgres/po…
- RT @johnsheehan: This is required reading. Couldn't agree more with every bit of it. https://twitter.com/brandur/st…
- A few words on GraphQL and how to build the next frontier of compelling web APIs. https://brandur.org/api-paradi…
- 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.
- Okay, I was wrong about AirPods. They’re great. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- cURL’s author claimed that C wasn’t the cause of past security vulnerabilities. But then someone fact checked. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- Excellent discussion on maintaining an independent blog in the age of social media. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- 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.
- 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.
- As prices soar in Berlin, the fight against entropy begins. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0…
- Genius, Zapier. A few years in the Bay with a net worth under 7 figures is enough to give anyone existential angst. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- Instead of lowering the bar everywhere to egregious WYSIWYG interfaces, we should be raising it by teaching the world Markdown.
- Confluence is a perfectly bad example of optimizing for a little discoverability over any possibility of being able to use it productively.
- To the detriment of us all, time will show that Wirth’s law is more robust than Moore’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
- I’m embarrassed to admit how much I learnt from this article on unicode. It’s so good that I read it twice. http://reedbeta.com/blog/progr…
- Yes! We’ll be seeing The Grid again. https://twitter.com/rands/stat…
- This level of self-awareness and reflection is vanishingly rare amongst programming language designers. Bravo Rust. https://blog.rust-lang.org/201…
- RT @anildash: Another excellent recent writing on tech architecture, @brandur on idempotency: https://stripe.com/blog/idempo… Lucidly explains key…
February
- 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.
- 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.
- RT @Runscope: Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency by @brandur: https://stripe.com/blog/idempo…
- “Innovation” is the wrong word given prior art like EC2 client tokens. Thanks for keeping me honest @danfarina :) https://twitter.com/brandur/st…
- RT @happywebcoder: Another great API technique from @stripe: Idempotency keys https://stripe.com/blog/idempo… If I could, I'd pay @brandur to write…
- Idempotency keys in particular are a favorite HTTP API innovation from Stripe. https://twitter.com/stripe/sta…
- From running Mount Tam this morning. https://t.co/TInF7UIqYg
- Advice for the 99%: don’t use the tech du jour. Do use an RDMS with ACID guarantees. Probably just use Postgres. http://blog.sagemath.com/2017/…
- 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.
- Foundational software written in software that’s safe, approachable, and extensible is an important idea, and Rust is making it a reality.
- I just landed my first patch into Alacritty, a Rust terminal. There are so many reasons to like this project. https://github.com/jwilm/alacr…
- 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. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- RT @mattgreenrocks: Superb. We squander tons of technology and the user's time for eye candy. https://twitter.com/brandur/st…
- I wrote a contrarian piece arguing for user interfaces that are more like terminals, and less like the web. https://brandur.org/interfaces
- It’s sad to see such a vibrant ecosystem go. Once Firefox is on WebExtensions, you may as well just use Chrome. http://fasezero.com/
- Great talk on why lauding violence and silencing minute differences in opinion isn’t good liberal policy. http://5by5.tv/roadwork/54
- 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. https://backchannel.com/how-i-…
- I’m really jealous of Paris’ mayor. SF would be a better place with someone even half as progressive at the helm. http://www.independent.co.uk/n…
- My brother doing some Canadian sunbathing near Hidden Lake. Ambient high: -15C. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Some great timelapses of the new 35,000 metric ton Chernobyl sarcophagus being built and carted 300m into place. http://www.bbc.com/future/stor…
- My dad managed to capture the one second all day that my parallel looked decent too. https://t.co/c8jPIt9biK
- Backcountry ski trip up to Bow Summit yesterday. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Glad to not the only one that notices this. I don’t go to movies in Canada anymore because the ads are so extreme. https://www.reddit.com/r/canad…
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.
- I’d pay money for a Spotify client as fast and responsive as Winamp 2.* running on a 200 MHz Pentium in 1998.
- I’m very excited about Rocket. It’s Sinatra/Ruby with years more thinking to refine it to a far more perfect form. https://rocket.rs/overview/
- This would be an incredible tragedy for the interestingness of SF. I, for one, have resolved to spend more money. https://twitter.com/dnalounge/…
- Now that we’ll have AirPod reviews in about a week, here’s my prediction: they’re not very good.
- Going to check out the Rust Bay Area meetup tonight. https://www.meetup.com/Rust-Ba…
- 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.
- I’m also looking forward to assembling a write-up on how some of Rust’s memory safety features were hugely helpful in building it.
- It’s a huge honor for redis-cell to have been selected as the winner! What a fun project. Thank you Redis labs! https://twitter.com/itamarhabe…
- ”Team Tetris” and “success theater” are my new favorite organizational anti-patterns. https://hackernoon.com/12-sign…
November
- Was pleasantly surprised to discover that rclone’s crypt module is powered by NaCL. https://github.com/ncw/rclone/…
- Not the driest day in Napa, but incredibly picturesque. https://t.co/7bUcdUmPtv
- RT @simonw: Smart description of great logging practice - I also learnt Heroku-style key=value logging has a formal name, logfmt https://t.…
- Wrote a piece on “canonical log lines”, a cool idea for operational visibility at Stripe. https://brandur.org/canonical-…
- 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.
- “No Escape”, killing the Esc button habit in Vim: https://brandur.org/fragments/… (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 - https://news.ycombinator.com/i… by @brandur <- first module to written in #Rus…
- Microsoft dominating the front page right now. What an upset compared to five years back. https://t.co/mcoDWLf9jV
- I put a few old Star Trek scenes through Primitive. This program is incredible. https://github.com/fogleman/pr… https://t.co/BgMJxDY77x
- Been way too long since I was up here. https://t.co/BhokTNige8
- A+ commentary from Dan Carlin post-election. https://overcast.fm/+CxteFe0
- Also, I’m loving the improvement in visual hygiene conveyed by the new `?` operator: https://github.com/brandur/red…
- A site dedicated to tracking compile time performance in Rust. This work is as important as tuning runtime speed. http://perf.rust-lang.org/
- For anyone on stripe-ruby: I’d recommend upgrading to 1.56.1. We just squashed a pretty vicious memory leak. https://github.com/stripe/stri…
- The ~30 lines of code that bootstrap a Rust program that’s about to be run. Quite succinct and readable. https://github.com/rust-lang/r…
- $1/month hosting if you can fit into 64 MB. So many possibilities! https://hyper.sh/pricing.html
- Cross-compiled binaries and automated CI-based releases to GitHub going in < 2 hours with rust-everywhere. https://github.com/japaric/rus…
- rustfmt check on line length is such a killer feature. It’s barely even possible to deviate from language conventions.
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.
- Great seeing Rust take fast edit-compile-debug seriously. Of paramount importance day-to-day, but so often ignored. https://github.com/aturon/rfcs…
- 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. https://github.com/vimperator/…
- Learn more about Redshift gotchas in 30 seconds than the official docs will tell you in 3 hours. https://github.com/open-guides…
- 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.
September
- I totally missed that CloudFront added support for HTTP/2. That’s awesome. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/a…
- Death Guild has playlists going back to 1995. Amazing. http://www.deathguild.com/play…
- I’m absolutely loving GitHub’s new code review feature. Easily the best implementation of this idea I’ve ever seen.
- The new “Projects” feature is really fun to use too. With just a little luck, this could be the end of Trello and JIRA.
- GitHub Universe’s announcements were a lot more exciting than anything Apple did in September. https://github.com/blog/2256-a…
- A beautiful night in Calgary. https://t.co/u56hwpl4gG
- Hopefully we’ll see Salesforce go next :) http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/…
- DB migrations at scale (20 PB!) are nearly impossibly difficult, but laudable when pulled off. Bravo Yandex! https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- 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. https://t.co/YE0sRidBGl
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”. https://overcast.fm/+DuasjJ0Bc
- Another eel: https://news.ycombinator.com/i… 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. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04…
- GItLab’s slash commands are a game changer. https://gitlab.com/help/workfl… More of this and less clicking on little boxes please.
- Around here, you can tell that a new Tartine has opened without even looking at the sign. https://t.co/FRmI8QL6yI
- Goroutines and channels are perfect primitives, but there’s room for a worker queue abstraction in the language. https://gobyexample.com/worker…
- “taxpayers are subsidising housing borrowers to the tune of up to $150 billion a year, or 1% of GDP” http://www.economist.com/news/…
- Check out our new docs: https://stripe.com/docs Features a great new design, fast XHR loading, rich code snippets, and contextual API keys.
- Building a robust state machine to run cloud servers by @danfarina. https://www.citusdata.com/blog…
- 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. https://t.co/hJcpf3QXHS
- Reddit points out that Mr. Robot used real code from Metasploit (modulo the indentation catastrophe). Well done. https://github.com/rapid7/meta…
- The only reason we don’t have drivers doing this in San Francisco is that there aren’t any pedestrian-only paths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- Very sloppy indentation from Mr. Robot. They didn’t quite manage to capture the OCD of real hackers. https://t.co/fXQOh5wAXL
- RT @leinweber: Problem: I want to add/drop/change a column or index on a live db https://t.co/IObTrMLmVU
- The best pro-Postgres article you’ll read this year: http://githubengineering.com/g…
- I get nostalgic when reading engineering documents written as Gists. Their page layout and formatting is perfect.
July
- Like you needed another reason to never use Comodo, but here’s one anyway. https://thehackerblog.com/keep… Previously: https://letsencrypt.org/2016/0…
- A measurably more informed meta-explanation of Uber’s Postgres article earlier this week. http://use-the-index-luke.com/…
- Picked up the idea of verifying env vars in CLIs (liked Etcd) off a CoreOS talk at HeavyBit’s DevGuild this week. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- A few words on the unbalanced nature of hype when it comes to new technology. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Proof that it’s possible to build a compelling case for any idea. Jar Jar Binks is Supreme Leader Snoke: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarW…
- Beautiful magazine of the week: “Cereal”, a travel and style publication out of the UK. https://t.co/R7NXgMA2KB
- Great article on Lionhead. http://www.eurogamer.net/artic… ”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. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/…
- Wow, collapsable comments on Hacker News. I never thought I’d live long enough to see the day.
- Interesting take on underlying Marxist themes in “Spirited Away”. https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/c…
- A beautifully laid out page for Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design. https://www.vitsoe.com/us/abou…
- 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. https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech…
- 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.
- Catching up on what’s possibly the only series more epic than “A Song of Fire and Ice”. https://t.co/3iSnZYe9sz
- 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.” https://www.reddit.com/r/sport…
- Picked up “Amazing Layout Design” today. It’s an absolutely amazing resource for design inspiration. https://t.co/Om6Cs5lPA9
- It’s time. https://t.co/6m0ONgZ5SI
- 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
- 8 years of < 0.5% interest, yet all but one member calls for +1-2% in 2017. Fantasy or dishonesty; take your pick. http://www.economist.com/blogs…
- It took four years to make even minor incremental progress on this deranged behavior. https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/iss…
- Do members of the Java community have feelings about Lombok? We’re considering its use in Stripe’s Java bindings. https://github.com/stripe/stri…
- I’m convinced that many savvy couples are buying artificial diamonds for each other and no one else has a clue. http://www.racked.com/2016/6/1…
- It turns out that like many other things, drawing up a meditation calendar was the easy part. Actual meditation has so far been elusive.
- Just what the world needed: annoying effects on text messages. Next up Apple will be announcing the revival of the <marquee> tag.
- Ran a short Calorie counting experiment last week. Conclusion: my eating habits are terrifyingly bad. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Apple, don’t totally compromise usability for perceived aesthetics. There’s still time to avoid this catastrophe. http://www.xda-developers.com/…
- One day I hope to see even _one_ North American city making efforts on this scale. http://www.citylab.com/cityfix…
- Japan is going to show the world the limits of debt-fueled growth. It’s more of a question of where the ceiling is. http://business.financialpost.…
- With masterful use of promises and callback abstractions, you can almost get back to readable source code. https://github.com/heroku/hero…
May
- RT @paulg: How journalism became "Go troll Twitter for something to get mad about." http://goo.gl/IBTCxH
- America’s saved. https://twitter.com/ped/status…
- A dozen Lambda users; a dozen different frameworks to manage it. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- RT @Michiel_DeWilde: Nice article of @brandur about static sites on AWS http://buff.ly/24OhXlu https://t.co/Y4ARt3qftZ
- “You are no longer half-human half-camera … wonderful if you want candid, real photographs.” http://www.newyorker.com/tech/…
- 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.
- A 2300-word document on how to build a 2-phase commit in Mongo to get consistency beyond the document level. https://docs.mongodb.org/manua…
- Head over to https://stripe.com/docs/api and bask in its newly ~instantaneous load time. Brought to you by @michaelvillar and @romainhuet.
- You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful day in SF yesterday. https://t.co/2T3YQBAqbq
- RT @gudmundur: New version of Pliny out (https://github.com/interagent/pliny), now with @rollbar goodness (https://github.com/interagent/pliny/releases/tag/v0.16.1).
- This episode of Surprisingly Awesome really helps to concrete the basics of musical theory. Highly recommended. https://gimletmedia.com/episod…
- This should've happened fifteen years ago. But as they say, better late than never. http://revolutionizehaight.org…
- RT @apiaryio: 4/16 @github offices: World’s first ever hackathon focused on #APIDesign. Co-organized by our @manp. Join us! https://t.co/pj…
- A very informative article on Kubernetes and its predecessors at Google. https://queue.acm.org/detail.c…
- If you’re in SF, you should considering coming to join us next Saturday at GitHub to talk about APIs! http://www.meetup.com/API-Craf…
- Using AWS Lambda as an online, serverless cron machine. https://brandur.org/aws-intrin…
- RT @gavingmiller: .@brandur great post on static sites: https://brandur.org/aws-intrin… Appreciate the SSL & CD part, was the missing piece for me.
- RT @yann_ck: Always great to read notes on languages from great developers: https://brandur.org/go Thanks @brandur.
- RT @tair: Excellent notes on #golang from a seasoned #ruby dev @brandur 👍Language features, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly https://t.co/KCR…
- RT @rwdaigle: logfmt is still the most pragmatic, functional, and concise log output format I’ve seen. Keep it simple, folks! https://t.co/…
March
- Amended this article for the first time in years. logrus-style logfmt with a human-readable message is a good idea. https://brandur.org/logfmt#hum…
- This is the single most concise example of the Go team’s “only we can be right” philosophy that I’ve found to date. https://github.com/golang/lint…
- It’s like Christmas every time a new Hardcore History episode is released. King of Kings, episode II. http://www.dancarlin.com/hardc…
- 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.
- 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. http://www.dancarlin.com/produ…
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- API Craft SF is holding an IoT event next week. You should come check it out! http://www.meetup.com/API-Craf…
- 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 https://github.com/Homebrew/ho… 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. https://t…
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. https://t.co/eJWJQb8lh5
- World’s most awesome club event: “We're dressing up DNA Lounge as Cyberdelia, the club from Hackers …” https://www.dnalounge.com/cale…
- Have been ignorant of CSS3’s “rem” (root em) unit all these years. It’s a far more sustainable way to build styles. https://github.com/brandur/org…
- 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.
- 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. https://medium.com/@octskyward…
- There’s nothing better for improving humility than attending your local Haskell meetup. First talk lost me in ~5 minutes.
- In memory of Bowie, the Lohner mix of Disco King, the only good thing to come out of the Underworld film series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- Clever Jaws parody poster. https://www.behance.net/galler…
- What you always suspected but could never confirm: the changes in T-short width/height by wash cycle. http://www.threadbase.com/unra…
- Crazy. You still can’t have both HTTPS *and* index documents when hosting a static website on AWS. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Food for thought on alternatives to moving the social responsibility of contract-level workers to corporations. http://timharford.com/2015/12/…
- How to get Vim to stop adding two spaces between sentences when you realign with `gq`: `set nojoinspaces`. https://stackoverflow.com/ques…
- After missing the target for a few years, finally ran 1000 miles in 2015. https://brandur.org/runs
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. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Excellent article on the effect of sensor size on ISO and aperture. http://northrup.photo/gear-bas…
- 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. https://drop-brandur.s3.amazon…
- Comic recommendation: Tokyo Ghost. Start reading for the art. Stay for the contemporary themes. https://drop-brandur.s3.amazon…
- Classic Haskell documentation technique: throw you straight into the deep end. Or maybe the Mariana Trench. https://hackage.haskell.org/pa…
- Breguet’s Marie Antoinette watch, designed to include every complication known at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Kramer preparing to enter a scene (via Reddit). https://i.imgur.com/jKgvheE.pn…
November
- Scala has the special distinction of being the only language that makes Objective-C look beautiful in comparison.
- A rare view of what technology inside a technology company is really like. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flo… (via @muyfine)
- Go’s ast package is worth taking a look at. Surprisingly digestible considering that it’s a non-trivial problem. https://github.com/golang/go/b…
- 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. http://apple.stackexchange.com…
- Winning comment of the Internet yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/i… https://t.co/snHiJChnuN
- The power of low interest rates: major recession and widespread layoffs; < 5% change in real estate prices. http://www.creb.com/Seller_Res…
- From 2002: the technology may have been worse, but the *nix desktop had a brighter future. https://anders.unix.se/2015/10…
- The major differences between Dreamforce and OpenWorld are one month and that one is red and one is blue. https://t.co/jhhufXhLWZ
- A chilly evening up on Twin Peaks yesterday. https://t.co/Lg0T7oFwEW
- Amazing work by Oslo and Madrid. http://www.techinsider.io/oslo… 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.
- In honor of the Rick & Morty finale (which was genius), here's the Johnny Cash cover of “Hurt.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- “It is now impossible, reckons Dr Zerbo, to test even a small nuclear weapon in secret anywhere on Earth.” http://www.economist.com/news/…
September
- Patrick Collison, Alan Kay, and Stewart Brand sitting over a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. http://t.co/WS8fls1d2C
- Daily tool sharpening: ripper-tags (more accurate ctags for Ruby). https://github.com/tmm1/ripper…
- Daily tool sharpening: github.vim (open in browser or get a URL for selected lines). https://github.com/solars/gith…
- Also, Starbucks went through with it and killed La Boulange. Bummer. Best duck confit ever. http://t.co/UBnYxQaerb
- And all of it is yours and mine. So let’s ride and ride and ride and ride. http://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”). https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- Not to mention that every frame of the movie is beautiful enough to print and hang on a wall. http://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. http://jtnimoy.com/blogs/proje…
- Day one of week between jobs: tennis, writing, and running. http://t.co/BuwzXpEVuR
- Tool sharpening today: textobj-rubyblock. http://www.vim.org/scripts/scr…
- The “important questions” section in RbNaCl's README is a classic: https://github.com/cryptospher…
- Ported RbNaCl's simplebox wrapper to Golang (simple API to fast crypto using XSalsa20 and Poly1305): https://github.com/brandur/sim…
- I'm incredibly excited to announce that I'll be joining the talented engineering team over at @stripe.
- 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. http://t.co/HxBAgT4m8t
- 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.” http://www.guilded.co/blog/201…
- I never cease to be amazed by the energy (and tolerance for pain) of the Haskell community. http://blog.ezyang.com/2015/08…
- Dropped today: a new GCRA-based (genetic cell rate algorithm) rate limiting implementation by @agmetcalf. https://github.com/throttled/t…
- RT @blakegentry: AT&T provides a great example of why every site should use HTTPS, even personal blogs. Just use free @CloudFlare TLS! http…
- RT @yann_ck: Great article on alerting by @brandur https://brandur.org/alerting
- RT @dmathieu: Awesome blog post from @brandur on designing alerts. https://brandur.org/alerting
- I really like the concise wording and unusual flow of this article on John Isner from the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/news/…
- Finally jumped ship from Rdio. This bug was the straw that broke the camel’s back. http://t.co/dnTKRgCFVI
- Slightly disappointed that Thrift generates language bindings exactly how you'd expect that it would. https://github.com/apache/thri…
- Four paragraphs on “The End of the Tour”. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Really interesting article on the Academy of Art University (privately owned post-secondary) in San Francisco. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka…
- "She said, 'Infinite Jest. Every guy I've ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
- Never thought I'd see the day. A Bond Seamaster without a tacky tiled 007 background or "gun" second hand. http://www.omegawatches.com/ne…
- A few words on how to improve legacy code. https://brandur.org/fragments/…
- Monodraw's diagrams look better than any text to SVG programs that I've tried. Plain text continues to dominate. http://t.co/zmNGr1ATSS
- 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! https://iterm2.com/images.html http://t.co/1kN5YMpHn1
- 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- 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. http://t.co/duYJPV7L3r
July
- RT @patrickc: Inefficient waste of what could be a bustling riverside freeway, like FDR Drive in NYC. #urbanplanning http://t.co/rSu3wgdHun
- RT @patrickc: One of the coolest urban design projects I've ever seen: http://gardenbridge.london. http://t.co/hfjn8EYgNY
- Nice article on SV and the Bay Area from the Economist this week. “To fly, to fall, to fly again” http://www.economist.com/news/…
- Top knot inspiration album from /r/mfa. http://imgur.com/a/pSrly
- Love the tweak to GitHub's build/merge section today. The subtle updates from their design team continue to impress. http://t.co/pdxmpC0zj1
- 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. https://github.com/fatih/vim-g…
- Write-up on what it's like to be doored, and how the motorist in question is at no risk regardless of negligence. https://nowtoronto.com/news/me…
- Excellent article on Canada's recent economic transition into a recession. http://www.macleans.ca/economy…
- 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.
- US infrastructure design: “... between 2009 and 2013 pedestrian deaths jumped by 15% as the economy recovered” http://www.economist.com/news/…
- 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. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- [Spoilers] Same thread. Some insight into how Ted in HIMYM may have narrated unreliably to justify the series ending. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskRed…
- Nice write-up on Reddit comparing the endings of the comic and movie versions of the Watchmen. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskRed…
- "Garden of Words" is one of the most beautiful movies that I've seen in recent memory. http://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. http://facebook.github.io/reac…
- At long length, the great reopening. Those are some nice looking tennis courts. https://flickr.com/photos/bran…
- TIL that `.\{-}` gets you a non-greedy Regex wildcard in Vim. http://stackoverflow.com/quest…
- Looking at the sizes of iOS apps is downright scary. For example, Facebook's almost hit 100 MB, and that's not particularly exceptional.
- My gods, it's happening. Hello again Midgar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- 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. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/…
- Copenhagen looks like a city from the future. Water, glass, and hard lines. http://t.co/JP4qg5z1Se
- The Danube at twilight. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
May
- Also accidentally discovered both Aquincum's ancient military and civil amphitheatres. https://www.flickr.com/photos/… https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- The ruins of Aquincum (modern Budapest). Marcus Aurelius wrote part of Meditations here while fighting the Quadi. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Selfie sticks are banned from events and places as diverse as Coachella, Wimbledon, WWDC, and Rome’s Colosseum. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki…
- This Berlin apartment has a park on its roof (six stories up) complete with bench. Well done. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Incredible show by Eluveitie. Turns out that not even in Germany do they know the words to Inis Mona though, haha. http://t.co/SWl1gXEwk8
- Arkona has one of the most epic live shows that there is. http://t.co/DeTYCvpPGo
- Jo Quail may have been my favorite performance at WGT 2015 so far. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- A write-up I did after investigating degraded behaviour in our job queue, and a shallow dive into Postgres MVCC. https://brandur.org/postgres-q…
- RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome post by @brandur in @PostgresWeekly this week around Postgres Job Queues and some semantics of them - https://t…
- 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. https://soundcloud.com/ludovic…
- Congrats @geoghegan86! It's been a long time coming. http://git.postgresql.org/gitw…
- A simple article on thoughts about Amazon Kinesis after a month in production. https://brandur.org/kinesis-in…
- Unfortunately, SQL code is the most clever and the least documented.
April
- Received a Sprig delivery in less than three minutes from order. Someone's got the traveling salesman figured out.
- The site of Waza 2 in the modern day. San Francisco is changing fast. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- 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. http://www.reddit.com/r/Watche…
- 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.
- RT @ped: the eagle has landed http://t.co/ZuowzG8QT9
- New guitar weekend! The Martin LX1. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
March
- 400 concurrent threads/connections in ActiveRecord 2.3 (and stable). Not bad Rails, not bad.
- $5 rides for a long time to come. http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL…
- 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. http://sockpuppet.org/blog/201…
- The Interagent HTTP API design guide is now available in Simple and Traditional Chinese. Incredible community work. https://github.com/interagent/…
- You have to appreciate the comedy though. By inbox zeroing, I’m compromising other inbox zeroes, so we all have to inbox zero harder.
- Some kind of crazy Gmail bug. http://t.co/x34h8q1iBO
February
- Preferred denim: Uniqlo → J. Crew.
- RT @SpotifyEng: Elegant APIs with JSON Schema @brandur https://brandur.org/elegant-ap…
- Manufacturing lab at Autodesk. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had one, but very cool. http://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. http://www.meetup.com/API-Craf…
- “Hacking involves mashing your keyboard until code appears, ... just like in real life.” http://theinstructionlimit.com…
- JWZ may provide one of the few honest narratives of what it's actually like to bike in SF. http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/0…
- And also the Source-based “Accelerated Back Hopping” which you really have to see in action. http://wiki.sourceruns.org/wik… http://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. http://flafla2.github.io/2015/…
- Overcoming the instinct to over-engineer and go all in on speculative technology. Every developer should read this. http://jasonpunyon.com/blog/20…
- Optimistic fire hydrant. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Great article on React's virtual DOM differencing algorithm. http://calendar.perfplanet.com…
- The most civilized Metallica concert. http://t.co/APATrFexx3
- RT @bradfitz: We need a hip acronym like REST which means "like REST without religious pedantry": SITU? Stuff in the URL? And "situ" ~ "in …
- Shout out to “can I use” for being a resource that provides clear, definitive answers rather than more questions. http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexb…
- Read “To Kill a Mockingbird” after the big Harpee Lee news. Excellent book, but one that probably doesn't need a sequel.
- Yesterday, the powder finally came! http://t.co/yULUsdTFvb
January
- The V2 AWS Ruby SDK is refreshingly solid software. https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk…
- Candid, low-star, and well-written book reviews on Amazon are some of the most useful user contributions on the Internet.
- µBlock now has a Firefox release! https://github.com/gorhill/uBl…
- 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.
- Where did we go wrong? http://i.imgur.com/VqoN5CJ.jpg
- Very interesting notes on iOS app and App Store viability in the Panic 2014 report. http://www.panic.com/blog/the-…
- In case anyone missed it on HN, this article on software quality is excellent. “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar” https://queue.acm.org/detail.c…
- I need those new 12″ MBA’s to come out soon. http://t.co/S8QDJsfalR
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. http://www.economist.com/blogs…
- This “my year, deconstructed” style of blog post is a great idea. http://blog.fogus.me/2014/12/2…
- I love Strava’s new “matched runs” feature. They have one of the few apps out there that continues to impress. http://t.co/1W42teuzkB
- Goth ninja clothing/inspiration guide. http://www.reddit.com/r/malefa…
- Now reminisce on what ye have lost. http://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. https://www.google.com/finance…
- The biggest risk to Rust's success is incredible complexity to accomplish modest tasks. http://stackoverflow.com/quest…
- A collection of emotive scenes from Miyazaki films. https://imgur.com/a/rX8ws
- This week's Economist cover nails it. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-guNx…
November
- “50 years ago, real prices started to climb ... If this is a bubble, it’s been inflating for two generations.” http://timharford.com/2014/11/…
- Randomly walked by a Brian Vaughan signing. http://t.co/ROVyhpJ6dn
- Q4 project. Overran Q3. http://t.co/UiUtJUBYIA
- 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. http://i.imgur.com/FY6zI4a.jpg
- Hah, the fight over the addition of ASCII art on Redis start-up. https://github.com/antirez/red… (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. http://www.economist.com/news/…
- RT @manp: I look forward to hosting another API Craft SF Meetup this coming Wednesday http://www.meetup.com/API-Craf… cc @smarx @lhazlewood @brandu…
- 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
- The expedition continues. No burning buses so far.
- A magnificent showcase of circa 1990's color cycling in HTML 5 (from games like Loom). http://www.effectgames.com/eff… http://www.effectgames.com/dem…
- “Crash Course World History” by John Green. Incredible work. https://www.khanacademy.org/pa…
- 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. https://github.com/a-warner/gi…
- Good earphones, but they fail so consistently that you could use them to track the calendar year.
- Sennheiser made good on about a year and a half worth of CX 300's. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
September
- Absolutely *fantastic* work by CloudFlare today. These people know how to ship. https://blog.cloudflare.com/in…
- Great article containing some history on the Omega Seamaster. http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/a…
- RT @doctorow: Wendy and Richard Pini's Complete Elfquest http://boingboing.net/2014/09/… http://media.boingboing.net/wp…
- `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: http://brandur.org/exit-status
- RT @craigmod: “Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the period of work.” —@cshirky https://medium.com/@cshirky/wh…
- I'm a big fan of Go's RPC. I've never had two processes talking to each other so quickly. http://golang.org/pkg/net/rpc/…
- I love GitHub consolidates multiple levels of directories if it detects that some of them are empty. Is that new? https://github.com/heroku/hero…
- Scenes from Star Trek: TOS stitched together into widescreen panoramas. Astounding work! http://cargocollective.com/nic…
- Do any experienced Gophers know of a better way to tackle conditional error recovery in Go? https://github.com/brandur/her…
- A proposal for type annotations in Ruby. I want this yesterday! https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/iss…
- More reason to love SO. http://sf.eater.com/archives/2…
- Tim Harford on Hyperbolic discounting. http://timharford.com/2014/09/…
- 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.
- 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 soft…
- cping: A tiny Go program to update CloudFlare-based DNS with your Dynamic IP. https://github.com/brandur/cpi…
- So much for amazing cross-platform support. https://github.com/mitchellh/g…
- 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. http://i.imgur.com/lTSL5AL.jpg
- RT @craigkerstiens: Awesome tool by @brandur for better exploring your structured log data - https://engineering.heroku.com…
- Six hours later, I already can't live without this. https://github.com/blog/1884-i…
- Amazing write-up on the survival of Marcus Aurelius's “Meditations” over the last 1800+ years. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHis…
- 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. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
August
- 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.
- RT @charleshooper: @brandur Hey right now the API Craft meetup page has 404 members #httpstatushumor
- 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. http://stackoverflow.com/quest…
- Great talks by @vinibaggio and company at @Medium tonight! https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- RT @johnsheehan: #apicraftsf This Thursday. I’m giving a talk. How about “Crafting a great webhooks developer experience?” @brandur @manp
- Nuget is now available on OSX! http://www.mono-project.com/Re…
- RT @stolt45: My @heavybit talk on Support for developers is up. http://www.heavybit.com/librar…
- Dead on: “bike lanes were little more than paint on the ground for the cyclists to help protect the parked cars lining every street.”
- A letter from Danish tourists to Canadians regarding our singular focus on automobiles and horrific sprawl. http://news.nationalpost.com/2…
- An amazing photographed deep dive into Rolex's 3135 caliber (and bonus disassembly of a helium escape valve). http://www.chronometrie.com/ro…
- A $4 X100S filter ring hack. http://brandur.org/x100s-hack
- Found this guy outside the office yesterday. A little over two inches long by my estimation. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- And I thought I was the only one annoyed by sidewalk faux pas. Introducing NY pedestrian etiquette: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07…
- Pro-tip for pushing to GitHub from a network where port 22 is blocked. http://stackoverflow.com/quest…
July
- Great article on the implementation of lists in CPython. http://www.laurentluce.com/pos…
- A reminder about Pacman's “kill screen”, one of the greatest integer overflow bugs ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P…
- “Buying something made in Detroit, in this calculus, is not much different than buying a fair trade Andean sweater.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08…
- Stack Overflow uses static methods and IL to squeeze out performance. Somebody should tell them about C/assembly. http://highscalability.com/blo…
- Also, Scala's `???` predef might be the most important programming language innovation of our time. http://www.scala-lang.org/api/…
- 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. http://www.davidverhasselt.com…
- Let's hope this fad launches, flounders, and blows over quickly so we can start thinking about the next thing. http://nymag.com/daily/intelli…
- 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.
- New York looks and feels exactly how it's supposed to. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- A tribute to the visual style of the 80's. The view of the future then was one of both optimism and pessimism. http://uzicopter.tumblr.com/
- The world just tilted a little. https://medium.com/code-advent…
- 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.
- Go Eugenie!
June
- “As long as driving on the roads remains easy and cheap, people have an almost unlimited desire to use them.” http://www.wired.com/2014/06/w…
- A great photo gallery of abandoned places and objects in Iceland. http://structor.pixu.com/galle…
- A type-safe `printf` written in Haskell. https://github.com/chrisdone/f…
- It’s funny to read about vi being described as “an editor with a roguelike interface”. (Which it is when compared to ed.)
- 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! https://channel9.msdn.com/Even…
- An amazing set of illustrated movie posters. http://abduzeedo.com/splendid-…
- Law of API Idealism: all API discussions eventually devolve into highly speculative echo chambers on hypermedia.
- 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.
- The scale of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig is breathtaking. Straight out of Middle-earth. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- This is one of those life changing tricks: get Vim splits co-operating with Tmux splits. http://robots.thoughtbot.com/s…
- I wrote a few short words on Swift, despite being completely unqualified to comment on the subject. http://brandur.org/fragments/s…
- Very cool that Swift draws heavily from Rust and C#. http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org…
May
- My slides from yesterday, "The Story of a Thousand Services." http://thousand-services.herok…
- The Neues Museum with its huge ancient Egyptian collection. I would have killed to see this place when I was five. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Also, Leicas sure haven't changed their styling much over the years. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- The German Museum of Technology in Berlin. Managed to see a Z1 replica, V-2 rocket, and flying wing. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- Apparently missed the last ever Spreepark tour by five days. It’s been sold. The world’s changing.
- In San Francisco, your edgy graphic tees proudly proclaim Berlin. In Berlin, they proclaim San Francisco.
- RT @naaman: really proud and excited to release the builds endpoints on the @heroku platform api https://devcenter.heroku.com/a…
April
- “... that you imply rather than speak; that if you speak something, you make it less.” http://theholenearthecenteroft…
- Wow. The original plan for “Star Trek: The Experience” in Vegas included a 1:1 scale model of the Enterprise. http://drop.brandur.org/star-t…
- “I’m a space pioneer. My mission is to transform industrial ruins into cultural spaces. I could save Detroit.” http://www.newyorker.com/repor…
- RT @Annasnova: What would Harry Potter look like as an ’80s Anime Version? Awesome! http://www.wired.com/2014/04/h…
- His gallery is well worth browsing as well. http://www.simonstalenhag.se/
- Great piece by Simon Stålenhag of Sweden — a beautiful mix of the mundane and the extraordinary. http://www.simonstalenhag.se/b…
- A colorized photo of the Lower East Side in NYC from the 1890's. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi…
- 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.
- Interesting piece on the Collision brothers, with a great bullet on why the Stripe office is no longer in SOMA. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2…
- RT @hirodusk: The Role of APIs in a Hackable World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?… (20m video) — in which I talk about smarthome, nmap, and “the c…
- Simple instructions force a GH pull request to reset its diff against your target branch. https://gist.github.com/brandu…
- By far the best article on SF housing and policy that I've ever read on the subject. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/…
- At our office you have to take the elevator because the stairs are broken. Surely this must be a unique problem.
- RT @github_rb: pliny - Base Sinatra app for writing excellent APIs in Ruby https://github.com/12-oz/pliny
- I always know when Giants games are letting out because inevitably it’s exactly when I’ve chosen to go for a run.
- The Chinese are aiming to have a Thorium reactor built by 2015, and the Japanese by 2016. Exciting times.
- The term “lost generation” is attributed by Hemingway to Stein, who attributes to the owner of a French garage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…
- When someone commented that Stein didn't look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…
- Great Heartbleed article including details on both the commit that introduced it and the patch that fixed it. http://blog.cryptographyengine…
- Heartbleed, the most metal name for a security vulnerability to date. At this point, I'm just waiting for the power riff.
- Related, Firefox is fast now. Who knew.
- Just spent ten minutes closing hundreds of Firefox tabs that I'd accumulated over the last year. It was like time travel.
- I wonder what percentage of fmt.Println errors are handled in Go code. http://golang.org/src/pkg/fmt/…
- You have to hand it to Microsoft: their conferences still have the best swag.
- Wrote a few words on “microservices” and 200-500 LOC micro-microservices. http://brandur.org/microservic…
March
- If you're a Heroku user, you should check out hk and its new shell completion. Easiest productivity boost ever. https://github.com/heroku/hk#s…
- An interesting thought by Felix Salmon on the over-aggrandizement of small ideas in modern web design. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix…
- “I can guarantee that you are wrong about where your code is spending its time if you haven't run a profiler on it.” https://code.facebook.com/post…
- Iceberg, an absolutely beautifully designed black and white newspaper by Socio in London. http://abduzeedo.com/editorial…
- Incredible (and quite subtle) illustration of your favorite Community characters. http://kyendo.deviantart.com/a…
- RT @sternocera: What I think of jsonb: http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com…
- “The most dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities of all.” http://www.theguardian.com/soc…
- It bothers me that the @ doesn't have a better name than “at sign.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A…
- Connection draining on ELBs is finally here! I've been waiting for this feature for two years. http://aws.amazon.com/about-aw…
- “Please note, all HTML-formatted email will be merrily rejected” http://eudyptula-challenge.org…
- A meticulously detailed analysis damning Newsweek/Goodman's conclusion that Dorian Nakamoto created Bitcoin. http://www.mikehearn.com/Hoste…
- It's great to see that a first-rate Bundler-like package management system is being built for Rust. https://mail.mozilla.org/piper…
- Rust has the distinction of being the only language I've found harder to get compiling than Haskell. Ownership move semantics are not easy.
- Spend my PLIBMTTBHGATY building an ultra-simple proxy in Rust. https://github.com/brandur/umb… https://stripe.com/events/plib…
- “Why are functions in Rust not pure by default?” https://mail.mozilla.org/piper…
- Just assembled my first Dockerfile for Ubuntu + rbenv + Ruby 2.1.1 + Nginx + Passenger + blog. Very cool experience. https://github.com/brandur/hek…
- This article does a great job of articulating the strong arguments for Docker. “Why Docker? Why Not Chef?” http://blog.relateiq.com/why-d…
- Another API Craft meet-up come and gone. There's no subject like Hypermedia to get passions flowing. Thanks @mamund! http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- My great aunt's place in Austin is one of my favorite examples of home design. Here's her outdoor "grotto." http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- I applaud the griefing ability of whoever started the Lady Gaga @ SXSWi rumor tonight.
- The mediator pattern, or the interactor by a different name. https://brandur.org/mediator
- The panel on start-ups in Berlin at the German Haus. It sounds like a pretty solid ecosystem out there. http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- Some great concept art for China’s new pedestrian-first city being built outside Chengdu. http://www.businessinsider.com…
- Austin's been seeing a bit of rain this year. http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- Great show by @madidiaz on the rooftops of Austin. http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- I'm really jealous of people who are holding film badges right now. http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- Google search suddenly looks so much better.
February
- RT @jxnblk: also have vim invites, hit me up
- 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.
- I am never going to get over these giant novelty discount cards. So much win. http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- “I can tell you everything about the Windows API, yes, even secrets those of Redmond have half-forgotten.” http://www.catb.org/~esr//writ…
- Master Foo discourses on the graphical user interface. http://www.catb.org/~esr//writ…
- RT @hirodusk: My journey into the Berlin startup scene: https://medium.com/wandering-c…
- Dark Tranquility. https://www.flickr.com/photos/…
- 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.
- Gravity is a truly incredible movie with an even better soundtrack.
- We're proud to host API Craft no. 3 at Heroku. Mike Amundsen is speaking about building clients for Hypermedia APIs! http://www.meetup.com/API-Craf…
- RadioLab about an old magic show and a trick lost to time ... until Penn Jillette dispels it in ~3 seconds. http://www.radiolab.org/story/…
- 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. http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.…
- The guy who did the History of Rome podcast has a new one: Revolutions, currently covering the American Revolution. http://www.revolutionspodcast.…
- I forget all too often that I can go and see the ocean every day. Glorious. http://t.co/5t3aNNWnzu
- I love the concept from Asana that Markdown is minimum required skill to contribute web content. http://eng.asana.com/2014/02/s…
- RT @dcurtis: A sad story about a CEO's aspiration and desire, and how it manifests itself in his company, Abercrombie & Fitch: http://t.co…
- Mission and 3rd in SF sometime after 1978. Just similar enough to be recognizable (photo by Janet Delaney). http://drop.brandur.org/mercan…
- This photo of the Mission has 200+ upvotes. Some say gentrification (negatively), I'd say it's San Francisco in 2014. http://imgur.com/PgjJfW8
- About four months into ownership, the iPad Mini (Retina) is now the only medium on which I will read a paper. http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- 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).
- This is some really great data viz and D3 work. Kepler's Tally of Planets. http://www.nytimes.com/interac…
- RT @mtrifiro: A beautiful and thoughtful paean to the "page" as a design element /by @brandur Lamenting the Death of the Page http://t.co/h…
- 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! http://developer.marvel.com/do…
- Healthy Anti-patterns. https://brandur.org/antipatter…
- I wrote an article entitled, "Why I don't want your SDK in production". http://brandur.org/sdk
- Very practical novel writing advice from somewhere in /r/writing. http://www.reddit.com/r/writin…
- Preview.app's tendency to save your files as you make changes is sociopathic.
January
- VOID's first shot at a mechanical movement watch. Elegantly minimal. http://voidwatches.com/store/w…
- Beautiful concept art by Flavio Bolla. http://flaviobolla.deviantart.…
- Well, just watched Eraserhead. You won't hear me complaining that Mulholland Drive is too weird again anytime soon.
- Mining Gitcoins.
- RT @hirodusk: A treatise on modern web design: http://motherfuckingwebsite.co…
- “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
- 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.” https://discussions.apple.com/…
- Awesome surf video from our very own Ocean Beach! http://vimeo.com/83332142
- Strava finally has an API! I made a simple dashboard to track my runs. http://brandur.org/runs
- Webkit's scaling model compared to Firefox's. Webkit stays proportional, allowing a large screen to be approximated. http://t.co/u1g0HDJqAA
- A cool hack for an element in that resizes proportionally in CSS. http://wellcaffeinated.net/art…
2013
December
- Although it looks like the @ viewport CSS rule will make it in eventually. http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-de…
- 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. http://lindafriedmanartist.tum…
- 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. https://www.imperialviolet.org…
- We released the Heroku API 525 times in 2013. How'd you do? https://gist.github.com/brandu…
- From 2010, but still one of the best articles on SSL/TLS and its performance considerations out there. https://www.imperialviolet.org…
- The greatest drinking game. OF ALL TIME. http://www.flickr.com/photos/b…
- Bitcoin's Gini coefficient. https://bitcointalk.org/index.…
- RT @hirodusk: “Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side but they love being closely managed on the career side.” http://t.co…
- And Felix Salmon's bigger picture view of the situation is pretty intriguing as well. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix…
- SF Streets' take on the Google bus protest situation nails it. http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013…
- In case anyone else was wondering about the boulders on 6th Street, they're a sidewalk extension pilot project. http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013…
- Five sections of the Berlin Wall in Paley Park, NYC. http://www.flickr.com/photos/9…
- You too, Brutus? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E…
- "... the dominant use case of bitcoin seems to be speculation, with a secondary use case for illegal transactions." http://blog.samaltman.com/thou…
November
- Ah yes, my old friend and favorite Golang error: "too many errors"
- Bullet point summary of the history of Detroit. http://www.reddit.com/r/explai…
- The beautiful and unfortunately named Federal Center South Building 1202 in Seattle. http://www.aiatopten.org/sites… http://www.aiatopten.org/node/…
- RT @ped: THE OCTOTROPHY IS COMING BACK HOME http://t.co/NMb99N47Vs
- 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! :) https://github.com/jruby/jruby…
- 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. http://t.co/Xmv0H1CLAO
- My favorite slide from Holman’s deck. Can we immortalize this with a meme or something? http://t.co/PpN1us6vwD
- Amazing talk on scaling GitHub (organizationally). There’s no video yet, but the slides say a lot. https://speakerdeck.com/holman…
- An account producing sci-fi plot ideas on an overvalued messaging service produces the best social commentary of its time.
- RT @tmaher: https://blog.heroku.com/archiv… 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- I appreciate Sightglass. They could operate in 1/10th the space and make everyone less comfortable (see: every Philz ever), but they don’t.
- Kyle Johnson's talk @ Google. Learned that there was even more that I missed in Inception, and about philosophy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- Join us Thursday at API Craft SF #2, and let's talk about APIs. Our guest speaker is @harmophone! http://www.meetup.com/API-Craf…
- The “Unpleasant Design” book that has a jacket made of sandpaper so that it destroys books that it’s shelved with. http://we-make-money-not-art.c…
- 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?
- RT @raulbleon: Had a great dinner w/@_ko1 @tenderlove @brandur @ebiltwin @schneems @yukihiro_matz among others. Thx @hone02 for organizing.…
- The JRuby birds of a feather at RubyConf was inspiring.
- Venue550, a new gaming space opening up in SOMA. What a phenomenal space. http://www.venue550.com/
- RT @igrigorik: secrets of the world's happiest cities: http://bit.ly/17zvhBc - hint: no, not more highways.. US planners, take note! great…
October
- RT @blakegentry: Wow, the FAA has instantly retrofitted all airplanes to be safe from interference by portable electronics! o_O http://t.co…
- 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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- Backstory and future of the "defenestration" building (old SRO on 6th with furniture coming out the windows) in SF. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/…
- 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. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2…
- Really enjoying Drudkh right now, a secretive Ukrainian black/folk metal band that's never given an interview. http://www.rdio.com/artist/Dru…
- Hoping for a Nenshi loss tonight so that we can import him down here and have him run San Francisco. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N…
- Photograph of San Francisco in ruins after the 1906 quake. Best experienced on a huge screen. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi…
- RT @TheBatman: 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…
- Your periodic reminder that /r/HistoryPorn (historical photographs) is pretty much the best subreddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/Histor…
- *top speed
- The 1930s era Schienenzeppelin ("Rail Zeppelin") with a top of ~230 km/h. http://i.imgur.com/j29CpIc.jpg
- Alright! Calgary's on the map for something besides excellence in drilling holes in the ground. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2…
- 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. http://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 threa…
- 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 housema…
September
- Configuring your JRuby Ruby version. http://stackoverflow.com/quest…
- 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. http://blogs.kqed.org/pop/2013…
- Transforming the old Bay Bridge into a park for adventure tourists. Great concept photos. http://gizmodo.com/transformin… http://img.gawkerassets.com/im…
- Playing an FPS so old that by default, A/D are not strafe.
- RT @leinweber: Current status http://cl.ly/Rcas/image.jpg
- Brian Vargo's absolutely beautiful HighLink. http://www.brianvargo.com/
- RT @heroku: Try Ruby 2.1.0 Preview 1 on Heroku right now: http://bit.ly/18lx3CY http://bit.ly/19uyduo
- git-cal: GitHub-style activity calendar for your terminal. https://github.com/k4rthik/git…
- I tried to buy two of the biggest ICBMs in the Russian fleet in 2001 and 2002. https://www.khanacademy.org/ec…
- 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! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…
- 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W…
- The beautifully designed 1931 map of the history of the world. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the…
- None of the major prizes offered by the British government for solving the "Longitude problem" were ever claimed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…
- Queen Elizabeth I's ROI from Sir Francis Drake's 1577 expedition was 4700%. £47 for every £1 invested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…
- This is not our office anymore. Such a weird feeling meeting the current tenants. http://t.co/06aaB41Hwq
- San Francisco in the mid-1800s from the Smithsonian. Mission Bay is a bay. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/…
- Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E… 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. http://www.theatlanticcities.c…
- RT @ghempton: So let me get this straight: bower just dumps a git repo into a folder for you and calls itself a package manager for the web?
- I was just sent "Scala for the Impatient". I fit the target audience perfectly. http://logic.cse.unt.edu/tarau…
- Was pleasantly surprised to discover that rename scripts are no longer needed for Bitlbee's Facebook support. http://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoF…
- RT @hirodusk: Black Rock City 2013 as seen from a drone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… (4m video)
- They found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. http://www.economist.com/news/…
- Good HN comment describing why exceptions are kind of bad, but good in the real world. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- Developer accessible APIs. https://brandur.org/accessible…
August
- Not sure if this place is empty due to the long weekend or if burners and hipster climbers are a perfect overlap. http://t.co/obB9fLSAmg
- Scrivener attempts to make non-HipChat XMPP clients somewhat workable by converting soft mentions to hard mentions. https://github.com/brandur/scr…
- An API for M:tG. Amazing. http://mtgapi.com/ `curl http://mtgapi.com/api/v1/fetch…
- RT @gregburek: This is how we deal with database corruption, from @deafbybeheading: http://www.bitrotincarnate.com…
- 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. https://gist.github.com/elliot…
- Beautiful and mysterious landscapes. http://500px.com/Karezoid
- RT @friism: The cause to make San Francisco safe for bicyclists requires many martyrs: https://medium.com/p/1456bbd01… What do you think @mayoredle…
- There's a plan on the books to reshape Folsom into a pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly 2-way street. http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp…
- 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 http://t.co/nFk2J4htj4
- 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. http://www.theatlantic.com/mag…
- Dutch disease, where a country's increase in exploitation of natural resources leads to a decline in other sectors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…
- Back from the Midwest. API Craft was a great gathering, and Detroit is great. It may be the Berlin of North America.
- Land torpedo. http://t.co/lqyTh2Ebzt
July
- Epic elevator. http://t.co/6wgu6BCe9D
- Scoping and OAuth 2. https://brandur.org/oauth-scop…
- We're very pleased to announce Heroku OAuth. https://blog.heroku.com/archiv…
- Half of Iceland now wants the old centre-right parties back; a purely nostalgic vote – like voting for the year 1997. http://www.newstatesman.com/po…
- From the ridge up to Grotto yesterday. http://t.co/1mO38Agwnq
- The curious story of the novel "The Cuckoo's Calling" makes a fascinating case study. http://rdd.me/9c8npc59
- Cthulhu's type signatures (Yesod in Production). http://joelt.io/entries/yesod-…
- The intro sequence to "Vikings" is pretty epic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- Owl City's "The Midsummer Station" album art is great. http://umrg.edgeboss.net/downl…
June
- rss2imap, a project that could be the answer to the problem that we'll probably never have an RSS syncing standard. https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2…
- Zeus is amazing, and customizing it is much simpler than expected. https://github.com/burke/zeus
- Perceived service quality accounts for two percent variation in tips. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/f…
- Here are easy steps to get a Twitter OAuth 2 access token for direct API access. https://gist.github.com/brandu…
- 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. http://www.calgaryherald.com/n…
- 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 :} http://herokuapihackathon.even…
- The family tree of Indo-European languages. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi…
- There isn't a new retina MacBook Air, but there is a new Hans Zimmer soundtrack on Rdio.
- Lucius Cornelius Sulla (on an ancient coin). http://www.forumancientcoins.c…
- Discriminating input. JSON vs. x-www-form-urlencoded vs. query params in Rack. https://mutelight.org/params
- 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. https://brandur.org/service-st…
- Any protips on how to build a minimal ACL implementation? I'm terrified of overdesigning such a thing.
- A refreshingly objective look at Go. http://dehora.net/journal/2013…
- Tracing request IDs. https://brandur.org/request-id…
- Incredible article on why the right maintenance option for your local city-based highway is demolition. https://medium.com/changing-ci…
May
- The scarcity of Magsafe 2 adapters makes them a more tenable currency than Bitcoin.
- Check out Heroku's brand new V3 API. https://devcenter.heroku.com/a…
- 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. https://plus.google.com/116276…
- By stubbing/mocking absolutely everything, all you're really testing is your double graph.
- Great article on verbose mode in Ruby. http://mislav.uniqpath.com/201…
- 5k loc, 4 if statements, 0 exceptions. http://mth.io/talks/haskell-in…
- 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. http://abduzeedo.com/fantasy-l…
- 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! http://www.slate.com/blogs/bro…
- 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. http://blogs.atlassian.com/201…
- 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. http://t.co/j7kNB6SY3R
- Unbounded queues, capacity planning, and alarms. Railsberry. http://t.co/ODiPnroDn9
- The Satoshi blocks are valued ~$100M at current exchange. None have been traded. https://bitslog.wordpress.com/…
- Reminder that in 2008, a JRPG starring Charles Barkley in post-apocalyptic NY was made. The trailer is amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- "A quick survey of the carriage I was in found about 80% were holding an Apple iPhone." (Japan) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl…
- Epic finale episode of Spartacus. Just makes you want to read about Roman history all night.
- The genesis blocks. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- We all know that tail calls are a virtuous language feature. https://mail.mozilla.org/piper… [Rust]
- The Hobgoblin. http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013…
March
- When I look at the implementation and security options available on http://blockchain.info, I'm embarrassed for every bank ever.
- Probably the real reason that banks have such weak password restrictions: IBM mainframes. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- "Oil is a metaphor for winning the lottery," said Ivar Froeness, a sociology professor at the University of Oslo. http://www.reuters.com/article…
- Alibaba thus sits at the heart of “bamboo capitalism”. http://www.economist.com/news/…
- Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off. http://www.marco.org/2013/03/2…
- 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. http://t.co/ul1AgN3EYZ
- I love using the expression, but did not know that Timbuktu is in Mali, West Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T…
- 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. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Min…
- Plain English explanation of today's Bitcoin block chain deviation. https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
- Yep. That's pretty much the reason that I stopped signing e-mail. http://xkcd.com/1181/
- I remember how bright the future looked when Microsoft launched OData. The Netflix OData API will be gone in a month. http://developer.netflix.com/b…
- 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. http://books.google.com/books?…
- A clever trick for required named parameters in Ruby 2.0.0. http://stackoverflow.com/quest…
- The Hugh Ferriss collection of drawings. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lib… 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I…
- window_switcher.pl for irssi will change your life. My days of typing in window numbers is over. http://wouter.coekaerts.be/irs…
- 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. http://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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U…
- 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. http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Ro…
- psql + gnuplot (without leaving psql). Incredible. http://news.ycombinator.com/it…
- Reading about Cocoa Auto Layout. The fact that there are alternatives to Interface Builder is (good) news to me. https://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.
- "Now I will render your books unreturnable." - Doctorow
- 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. http://www.neatorama.com/2013/…
- I thought they'd invent their own DCVS before giving into an open alternative. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visual…
- Great story on a recent super battle in EVE Online, a game where in-game items have direct value in real world money. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming…
- The final book (finally). Started this series on the back of a bus in elementary school. http://t.co/5JIwcUvn
- Two letter find in Vim. This is huge. https://github.com/goldfeld/vi…
- 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. https://research.tdwaterhouse.…
- Install the original Half-Life on my Mac. The day has come!
- env['rack.hijack'].call http://blog.phusion.nl/2013/01…
- Just re-read this excellent article today explaining why you should pick JSON or XML for your API, rather than both. http://www.mnot.net/blog/2012/…
- 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.
- The lake. http://t.co/xb1HNHK8
- Found this comic I owned as a kid in an antique store. I'm officially old. http://t.co/pmyTJaSj
- I don't mind cold weather, but I do miss daylight.
- /r/music is jokingly going through a metal phase. http://www.reddit.com/r/music
- The JavaScript Problem. http://www.haskell.org/haskell…
2012
December
- The scariest situation. https://d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfr…
- All I see here is a Dead Like Me tribute (Homeland). https://d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfr…
- 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. https://mutelight.org/sinatra-…
- (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. http://stackoverflow.com/quest…
- All APIs seem great until you try to do something with them. It's a recurring problem in the industry.
- The History of Rome. http://thehistoryofrome.typepa…
- Advice from Dad: always start with a book's 1-star reviews. http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-At…
- The location of the world's tallest tree has never been revealed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H… (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. http://imgur.com/a/UlfIu
November
- San Francisco ranks 18th in per capita funding to bicycle and pedestrian projects. http://www.sfbike.org/main/cit…
- For years I assumed that Ruby profilers were bad because the debuggers are bad. Turns out the profilers are actually awesome.
- Bolinas. http://t.co/E6zCacTe
- Sinatra's last_modified behaves in exactly the right way.
- Cross-section of Kowloon Walled City. https://d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfr…
- Even DNA Pizza is closed. It's either Thanksgiving, or the end of the world.
- Simulacra & Simulation. Neo's hollowed out book in the Matrix. https://d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfr… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
- Kreuzberg, Berlin. AirBnB neighborhoods are the best new thing I've seen on the Internet in a while. https://www.airbnb.com/locatio…
- So angry that this isn't a real product. http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff…
- Post-rock Tuesday. http://postrocktu.es/day/2012/…
- The asset pipeline in Sinatra. https://mutelight.org/asset-pi…
- http://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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I…
- They also brought along an old Apple signed by the Woz. http://t.co/hXq7pAwX
- A small, but working, version of the Babbage Difference Engine from the Computer History Museum. http://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. https://d27b09pbxmowkb.cloudfr…
- 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. http://www.reddit.com/r/IWantT…
- 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. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10…
- Hardcore history. The latest series is on Genghis Khan and the Mongols. This is amazing stuff. http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.…
- Windows RT. "The RT acronym does not officially stand for anything." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W…
- Clay Shirky is a great speaker. http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_…
- Imperative Reaction at DNA; music I discovered in 2007. Taste doesn't change much. http://t.co/oFaMQcIH
- The Bay. You could take this shot from your Motorola Rzr and it would still look amazing. http://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.
- Hold fast or die. http://t.co/kNbcpytL
- “We never talk about closing the streets,” said Gil. “We talk about opening them to people and closing them to cars.” http://www.theglobeandmail.com…
- 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: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012…
- 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? http://www.ghostcultmag.com/20…
- Market Street is no place for cars. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
- 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. http://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.
- Slides for my talk, Composable Applications with a First-class API: http://composable.herokuapp.co…
- I have a bad feeling that I might be missing a Red Hot Chili Peppers performance right now.
- Helsinki. http://t.co/Bq7ETbPC
- Affinity's Metropolitan, the bike ridden by Wilee in Premium Rush: http://affinitycycles.com/fram…
- Eluveitie + Wintersun 2012 north American tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- 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. http://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. http://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. http://t.co/eOxrTHdd
- 1 SSL Endpoint, N Apps: https://mutelight.org/1-endpoi…
- I love the simplicity of DNSimple's metrics system for a domain: > Over the last thirty days we've answered about eighty thousand requests.
- slabText for jQuery: http://www.frequency-decoder.c… Absolutely love it.
- Seriously enjoying Reamde. Certainly Neal Stephenson's easiest read to date.
- Simultaneously love and hate the syntax that CoffeeScript lets you get away with: https://gist.github.com/358908…
August
- "Revolver" explained in two parts: (1) http://www.reddit.com/r/movies… + (2) http://www.reddit.com/r/movies…
- 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.
- 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.
- Get caps lock working for you. Caps lock as Tmux prefix: https://mutelight.org/caps-loc…
- Experimenting with Caps Lock as Tmux prefix. So far so good.
- Premium rush: one stupid stunt movie that I *will* go see. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- So next week someone will invent another DSL that makes Twitter easier to use, but your bank will be writing new COBOL. http://blog.jelastic.com/2012/…
- Clive Owen is a wearing a London 2012 sweater in the siege scene of Children of Men (a 2006 film). Nice touch. http://drop.brandur.org/childr…
- 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. http://www.stevenpressfield.co…
- RT @ekryski: with @brandur @markhazlett @TheEricAnderson @joshuapinter at the top of Sparrowhawk. #yyc http://t.co/vxhwB6m8
- Ensiferum’s new video for “In My Sword I Trust”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… (warning: metal)
- Amazing climb up Rundle East yesterday w/ @markhazlett, @BryceMEvans, and co. Easy to miss Alberta in the summer. http://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: https://the-surf.org/philip-k-…
- Inglewood is such a great community. Additions like Gravity continue to make it even better. http://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' via: http://superuser.com/a/71890
- 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: http://www.flickr.com/photos/m…
- Sunday Streets is a guaranteed win every time. http://t.co/faIJx1IQ
- PATCH is not safe, nor idempotent, and allows full and partial updates and side-effects on other resources. http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/…
- Microsoft will open source Entity Framework: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/…
- MathJax looks amazing anywhere: http://facts.brandur.org/harmo…
- Improvements to Vim setup: ctrlp.vim >> Command-T. Vundle >> Pathogen.
- Disappointed that there wasn’t a track on the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack called “Discombobulate.”
- Good read from Linus on reverting a faulty merge: http://www.kernel.org/pub/soft… 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. http://www.theglobeandmail.com…
- Pier 39. http://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.
- 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. http://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. http://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. http://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: http://news.ycombinator.com/it…
- Workers who used a hot cell trained to use its mechanical manipulators by threading a needle with string. http://www.wired.com/wiredscie…
- How does CloudFlare work? http://www.quora.com/How-does-…
- Why is it so common to see Enumerable#inject used when the alias #reduce is available?
- Building an API with .netrc: http://mutelight.org/netrc
- Returned $3 tire levers that broke while levering a tire. It was satisfying.
- How?! http://i.imgur.com/QR7iI.jpg (via @exdevlin)
- Julian Assange's commits to Postgres: http://git.postgresql.org/gitw…
- Meet PagerDuty co-founder at party. COMPLAIN ABOUT UI.
- 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: http://www.ottsworld.com/blogs…
- Staring into Spreepark is like looking into an exclusion zone. Very quiet. Can only nothing but birds chirping.
- Link: http://swaaanson.tumblr.com/po…
- 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: http://mutelight.org/bin-conso…
- Is there justification for why Sinatra uses the `at_exit` hook to start up? https://github.com/sinatra/sin…
- Most badass climbing wall ever. http://t.co/mCqZ8dPp
- Watched the latest Game of Thrones on my 11" MBA. Felt very guilty for doing so. It deserves better.
- Great blog: http://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: http://mutelight.org/ruby-debu…
- 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): http://mutelight.org/authbind
- In case, like me, changing an app over to heroku-postgresql:dev wasn't the most obvious thing in the world for you: http://mutelight.org/heroku-po…
- 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. http://t.co/fhRkIWMP
- The gentlemen's agreement for graffiti in Berlin is only paint over something if you can do better. http://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. http://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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- Berlin ping pong. http://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. http://t.co/mdyAOgll
- [America's] not-so-friendly neighbor: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05… (via @josephbreihan)
- The most accurate depiction of apartment hunting in San Francisco I've seen to date: http://avnergeller.blogspot.co… (via @michellegreer)
- Agora Collective in Berlin. http://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. http://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. http://t.co/jf886oew
- Oh, and forgot to tweet this. Check out our new SSL endpoints: http://blog.heroku.com/archive…
- Finding the Wiggle, a route that nearly became a park, but didn't because this is North America and roads are better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F…
- First K&L wine club shipment is in. Now waiting for a special occasion. http://t.co/FIh1mUHb
- That's a sizeable messenger bag. http://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.
- http://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: http://netsplit.com/2010/12/03…
April
- Schneier / Prisoner's Dilemma on a game show: https://www.schneier.com/blog/…
- See that hipster d-bag walking his fixie up the last hill towards the Panhandle on Page St? That was me.
- Pool. http://t.co/BTbTyncB
- .NET Entity Framework automatic migrations made it to HN front page! http://blog.appharbor.com/2012… Nice work by the good people of AppHarbor.
- Decommissioning my old running shoes. They've been around the block a few times. http://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. http://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. http://t.co/pcYBmeyg
- Delores on a nice Saturday is a San Franciscan's version of going to the beach. http://t.co/wDw34w8F
- Don't like crazy Gmail redesigns? Try Mutt.
- Improbably nice today in SF. At Westfield buying emergency shorts.
- Terrible website, amazing posters: http://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. http://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: http://www.gracecathedral.org/…
- 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: http://www.slate.com/articles/… 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 http://37signals.com/svn/posts…
- The day I leave SF, I'm taking this sign with me. http://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: http://photography.nationalgeo…
- 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): http://www.dnalounge.com/calen…
- It's unnatural that I still can't order IKEA furniture online.
- PG on writing and speaking. http://paulgraham.com/speak.ht… "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. http://t.co/49RxGoA6
- Slate magazine's "Where’s _why?": http://www.slate.com/articles/… (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. http://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 http://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?! http://t.co/pzXtbcrC
- OH: there's a real life flash mob out there! http://t.co/z9cF6Jmu
- Ghostland Observatory. http://t.co/B14dXjxh
- Staying sober was worth it. The head of Xprize makes it on stage. http://t.co/FBSTaXmT
- Seems impossible, but we're still talking about startups well into drinking hours at #sxswi. http://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: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear…
- 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: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti…
- Wholesale .com/.net registrations are $7.85 (from $6) after the last price increase built into Verisign's contract. http://blog.easydns.org/2012/0…
- Harmy's Star Wars Despecialized Edition HD (actually a real thing): http://originaltrilogy.com/for…
- Why isn't PostgreSQL using my index? http://www.revsys.com/blog/200… (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. http://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 http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co…
- 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: http://www.pret-a-voyager.com/… (Could have used this 3 months ago!)
- "Frostbeard" the Viking. http://t.co/rCBJD78P
- SNOW DAY! Skied open to close. http://t.co/fwTR0PZe
- RE: Mountain Lion Gatekeeper. How long will that 3rd option be around? https://s3.amazonaws.com/rando…
- Blue skies make for some nice pictures, but we could use a nice 20 cm snow dump up here. http://t.co/9T8hjjum
- It's Unicorn philosophy not to support persistent connections: http://unicorn.bogomips.org/PH… 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. http://www.antipope.org/charli…
- 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: http://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. http://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 ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…
- SF PL's process for getting a library card is pretty streamlined. Beautiful library too.
- House party @ HQ.
- Blue skies in SF today. http://t.co/AICkLw7Z
- Emilie Autumn last night. Her style is billed as "Victoriandustrial". http://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. http://t.co/76H724EZ
- Power outage at Heroku HQ! No effect on the cloud platform though :)
- `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: http://soundcloud.com/inferno-… 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. http://t.co/qcrcT4t2
- The Great Gatsby @ Noir City as shown by Castro Theater. Best part was audience dressed as if from the earlier 1900s. http://t.co/k8InwxBr
- Added monthly headers because these days I tweet with what can only be described as obnoxious frequency: http://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 ;) http://maxtaco.github.com/coff…
- 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. http://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: http://img3.lln.crunchyroll.co… 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.
- Norway's largest gas field in the North Sea is called the "Troll field". Metal.
- 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. http://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: http://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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- Drinking Hoegaarden and doing laundry at Brainwash. This is the true San Francisco experience. http://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: http://www.whatcodecraves.com/…
- 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). http://t.co/sEOFxqeU
- Forgot to mention this SSL branch of the camper_van gem that some Herokai put together the other day: https://github.com/dpiddy/camp…
- 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. http://t.co/XJIaxZUZ
- As @Isabelle puts it, this is why you put up with high taxes to live in California ;) http://t.co/Oh7LeUnA
- Looking onto San Francisco from the top of North Peak in McNee Ranch State Park. http://t.co/fGI9lG9U
- It seems like it would just be annoying, but I'm really liking Google's two-factor authentication.
- #waza the poster: http://t.co/H9DewlCw
- DeVotchKa. #waza http://t.co/L9P5N96m
- The founders. #waza http://t.co/14ZvwhYV
- Rob Pike and gophers explaining concurrency vs. parallelism. #waza http://t.co/cGNsLuib
- Adam showing off his MUD during the keynote. #waza http://t.co/ytXg4Bz2
- James opening #waza. http://t.co/gBfJwDg8
- #waza http://t.co/8KAVN6SG
- Pyrrhic Victory Pt. 1 by Orphan Hammer, a wicked metal band from my hometown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- #waza tomorrow. It's going to be amazing: http://waza.heroku.com/
- 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. http://t.co/ugX665BO
- This is work today. http://t.co/bDdxyE0S
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: http://mutelight.org/articles/… (internationally portable Wikipedia)
- Canada -- skiing near Golden a few days back. http://t.co/bc1I2UcI
- + Phoenix Downs (thanks for hosting @exdevlin!). http://t.co/a6lMqRUY
- Arkham Horror (we won!). http://t.co/1FjrS0oG
- Impress.js just blew me away: http://bartaz.github.com/impre… 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. http://johnpolacek.github.com/…
- Happy New Year! 2011 held significant change for me. 2012 should prove interesting.
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: http://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. http://imgur.com/a/co8js
- Rocking some code at Kawa. Seriously missed these delicious chai lattes. http://t.co/BIHR2hrc
- Pretty rare to see Calgary this quiet. http://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: https://plus.google.com/100838…
- 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: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw… This is one of those things that I had no notion even existed!
- http://brandur.org/Dorian now fixed up and deployed on Heroku. No more ordering problems in charts and elsewhere either. http://brandur.org/twitter
- Highlight of the day: my mom receiving a robot for Xmas. http://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.
- Genius: http://devcenter.heroku.com/ar…
- 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. http://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.
- *than This proof reading thing is seriously not working out for me.
- 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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… Thanks for digging that one out Aaron ;)
- Grab PCKeyboardHack to map Cap Locks to Escape (keycode 53): http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyrema…
- The Japanese showing us some serious love: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamai…
- 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. http://t.co/maIz7CiQ
- First business cards I've had that I'm pumped about carrying with me. http://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: http://news.ycombinator.com/it…
- Attempted to build a synth at GitHub last night. Impressive place. http://t.co/VJnqQfkH
- Really good explanation for why OSX clipboards don't work under Tmux: https://github.com/ChrisJohnse… (+ 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. http://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
- I proofread e-mails after sending them instead of before. And it's got to stop.
- Went to a Japanese style bath in Japantown. Extremely relaxing. http://www.kabukisprings.com/i…
- 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. http://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. http://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 http://twitter.com:443 2>&1`
- Today I learned that ginger beer is totally gross.
- Trusted root certificates extracted from Mozilla's bundle: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caext…
- 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. http://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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
- Longboard reassembled. Now just have to wait for the buzz from this bulldog to wear off, then time to go cruising. http://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.
- Junk is evil. I'm floored by how much of it I've managed to accumulate.
- 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! http://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: http://runkeeper.com/user/fyre…
- Hotel bar closed at 12? Come on!!
- Reader's Cafe at Fort Mason. Chillest cafe I've ever been to in my life. http://t.co/IRJKoF4R
- Pendulum bobs for Long Now's clock. Right is aluminum test. Left is tungsten, denser than uranium, and very heavy. http://t.co/d7Qnp6J0
- Stopped in at @heroku for lunch: http://starving-samurai-42.tum…
- Plan B in case apartment hunt proves impossible. In SF, #occupy holds some nice oceanfront property near Market. http://t.co/XxGcv5lG
- Pic from my run this morning. The fog here is still cool to me. http://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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
- Important article on creativity and isolation: http://blog.oxplot.com/2011/11… + HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/it…
- Back in #yyc. What's with this white stuff?
- Cannes from above (the famous theatre is the seaside building on the right). http://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. http://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. http://t.co/vMWt1quX
- Nice la Belle. http://t.co/Ejnl3IgX
- Louvre was a lot better than expected. Hordes around the Mona Lisa, but elsewhere was okay. Breathtaking collection. http://t.co/cTFmekS7
- At a concert. On a boat. http://t.co/p7jrRnvP
- The only cheap thing to do in this entire city: http://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. http://t.co/DX76dorM
- First thing I saw in Paris above ground. http://t.co/9G7SCMKv
- Flight to Paris delayed 2h+. Probably because of mist. (This is why trains are better.)
- 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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
- 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: http://t.co/BREqjMYq
- Prague. 4 am. Only time to catch the Charles Bridge unoccupied. http://t.co/FJZHFv8B
- 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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K…
- 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: http://www.originalskateboards… 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: http://t.co/h7H6AiyB
- Energy here is actually measured in kcal instead of our made up unit of Cal (with a capital 'C').
- Municipal pride. http://t.co/vwiOyLOf
- Rad hostel too. The lockers even have power outlets. Reading trip advisor beforehand was most definitely a good idea. http://t.co/3A87aQXY
- In Bruges.
October
- ... and the audience that night: http://t.co/jq0krxKN
- Pretty cool pic of Matt's Amsterdam crew breaking. http://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: http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org…
- Occupy Amsterdam: http://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. http://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. http://t.co/368qQxxE
- Reading my first book on the Kobo Touch and it's a great experience so far. Good book too. http://t.co/RpiJFOqW
- Delivered this morning. Really, really good timing: http://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): http://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: http://t.co/BsD1nAbQ
- Awesome card with hand sewn surf board too. (thanks Lara!) http://t.co/2WEittmz
- Impromptu going away dinner with my oldest friends. Emotional moment for me. http://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. http://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: https://plus.google.com/u/0/11…
- 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: http://kutkh.bandcamp.com/albu… (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: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix…
- Verdict: iPhone 4S and iOS 5 are major, major win. Goodbye Android.
- The most important article on Vim that you will ever read: http://blog.carbonfive.com/201…
- ANNOUNCE: I've accepted a position at Heroku down in San Francisco. So psyched.
- Made this Kobo case out of a Canada Post envelope and duct tape: http://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: http://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: http://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: http://flic.kr/p/as7hsN Drangey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…
- 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. http://bikecalgary.org/node/26…
- 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: http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/…
- 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: https://github.com/brandur/fac… 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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1…
- Evil genius: "fraudster Bernard Madoff filed Benford-compatible monthly returns" http://timharford.com/2011/09/…
- 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: http://video.ch9.ms/ch9/a586/4… 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.): http://woodlands-junior.kent.s…
- 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: https://github.com/brandur/par…
- I've been doing my Git commit messages so wrong: https://github.com/blog/926-sh…
- 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: http://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: http://youtu.be/OW-J2pQrlsw Please, take my money.
- I'm sold. http://imakewebthings.github.c… 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: http://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: http://cjsw.com/program/rage-c…
- "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: http://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: http://j.mp/pUy8KD (scan.l) Use those tools to write your own language: http://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: http://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! http://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): http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/x-clipb… (+ how to setup a consistent system clipboard)
- Reading history: http://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: http://reddit.com/r/longboardi… The hivemind seems to hate Original (what I board, haha).
- Moved http://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: http://www.columnal.com/
July
- Signature capture via FaceTime app in OSX Lion: http://j.mp/prF6M1
- Just launched a cleaner version of http://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: http://youtu.be/vKmQW_Nkfk8
- Took all night, but I redid my Facts command line interface with better docs and to leverage Thor: https://github.com/brandur/fac…
- For a nice laugh on data warehousing and "enterprisey software", go to page 54: http://tigerorigami.com/slides…
- `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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…
- 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: https://github.com/brandur/tmu…
- 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: http://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: http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/named-g…
- 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: http://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: http://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: http://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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… via @youtube
June
- Next guitar project is Asturias by Isaac Albeniz. It's way too ambitious, but Youtube helps a lot: http://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." http://longnow.org/clock/
- Simple side-by-side live and sandbox Rails deployment with Nginx and Phusion Passenger: http://mutelight.org/a/simple-…
- 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: http://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 http://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: http://www.airships.net/
- Looks like Google's new schema.org microdata format http://j.mp/schemaorg is working with the new HTML5 draft: http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/ie-js
- Royal Board Shop in Calgary runs longboard clinics on Wednesday and Saturday night rides: http://royalboardshop.com/blog…
- 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: http://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: http://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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… "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: http://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" http://j.mp/surfraw
- Finally using CSS reset for new projects. Better late than never I suppose. http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools…
- 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: http://codex.wordpress.org/Chi…
- Foreman, a process manager for local development: http://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: http://stackoverflow.com/q/221… The case for Git/Hg kind of makes itself.
- dbext: The Last SQL Client You'll Ever Need: http://mutelight.org/a/dbext, part one of the Masters of Vim series: http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/xdebug
- The Rails Guides are *really* good these days: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
- Redesigned my blog Mutelight: http://mutelight.org/a/redesig… (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 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u…
- 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: http://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): http://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: https://github.com/brandur/zen…
- 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: http://news.ycombinator.com/it…
- Really like this guy's personal site and Tron legacy article: http://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): http://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: http://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: http://brandur.org/twitter (and a graph)
- Wrote some simple Ruby loaders for tweet backups from Tweetake & TweetScan: http://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: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl… 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: https://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: http://j.mp/dIPxLO
- The South by Southwest Experience: http://mutelight.org/a/41
- Mobility: http://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`: http://j.mp/icPPH5
- Got my haircut yesterday at Birds Barbershop on Congress. Me: is this where the hipsters get their hair cut? Them: yes.
- #ie9party #swsx is rad, but I'd need quite a number more of these before considering #ie as a valid browser option, ... even while drunk.
- 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: http://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: http://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
- Had a nice conversation today with @notinla about IP-based geolocation. Nice to consider something I hadn't worked with in 5+ years. #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?
- Just finished up at the really cool @aboutdotme booth at #sxsw: http://about.me/brandur Met @michelle_olivia & @evandeaubl.
- 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." http://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: http://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: http://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: http://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. http://j.mp/gMY11x
- Awesome. Use the 'whenever' gem for periodic tasks in Rails: https://github.com/javan/whene…
- 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: http://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: http://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: http://www.quora.com/Brandur-L…
- It just struck me that I'm going to be a PHP coder again. http://najafali.com/php-is-bet…
- 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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M… (e.g. Dëthkløk)
- Quick notes on SQL's `LIKE` operator (from Use the Index Luke!) http://j.mp/gUJgtF: http://facts.brandur.org/compu…
- After relying on surfing and skiing for all my exercise for three weeks, it's back to reality. Going to the gym.
- #hwy1 east of Golden moving again! /cc @DriveBC
- 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: http://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: http://surf.brandur.org/articl…
- Extend Vimperator to have an image source copy action with ';m' http://j.mp/ejlk47
- DSH, (kind of) like LINQ for Haskell, but safer: http://hackage.haskell.org/pac…
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: http://surf.brandur.org/a/fire
- The Shortcut (or, the perils between Tamarindo and Guiones): http://surf.brandur.org/a/shor…
- On the importance of rash guards: http://surf.brandur.org/a/rash…
- Day One: http://surf.brandur.org/a/one
- Tamarindo, and meeting the tour's crew: http://surf.brandur.org/articl… (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! http://surf.brandur.org/
- Am officially booked and registered for #SXSW Interactive 2011. Anyone else from #yyc going to be there?
- 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": http://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: http://youtu.be/HFFGguX2SZM
- My new favorite blog: http://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: http://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: http://flic.kr/p/96QshN
- The spammers are winning the game of Internet search: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=205…
- 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: http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/39 (including screenshots of Aeon!)
- Aeon65 for XBMC is unreal: https://github.com/pix/aeon/wi… (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: http://j.mp/fWVO2H
- My new watch: http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/38 (same content as the tips and tricks videos, but faster!)
- A plug for Swype: http://mutelight.org/a/37
- Getting closer to having my Jan/Feb vacation booked. Surf camp in Costa Rica: http://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": http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/35
- If you read one article about .NET make it this one: http://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: http://danielchoi.com/software…
- 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! http://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?! http://j.mp/8Yfn8d Coolest event idea ever. #neilgaiman #houseontherock
- Working around PowerShell's set-alias: http://mutelight.org/a/34
November
- Why I track my reading and you should too: http://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: http://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: http://brandur.org/books
- The most ambitious girl (or any person) at work: http://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#!): http://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.
- Just finished Towers of Midnight. So epic. #wot 13 #tofm
- 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: http://mutelight.org/a/30
- Nice. This is team Camel deep in thought, pondering life, the universe, and Scrabble strategy: http://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: http://github.com/fyrerise/nan… #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: http://j.mp/cUmhGi
- Windows Phone 7 code samples are here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink… (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: http://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: http://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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… (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: http://j.mp/cQBfbd
- Our intern discovered that Silverlight <object> data/type attribs must be EXACTLY as shown by M$ to work in all browsers: http://j.mp/9bqhW3
- Surprisingly productive night: got a poor man's version of Rails/Amazon Cloudfront integration working for global video streaming via RTMP.
- OH: P1, "What does it mean when people say they 'dodged a bullet?'" 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 http://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: http://github.com/fyrerise/fac… (+ command line client at facts-cli) Demo here: http://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: http://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: http://tokyohackerspace.org/ak… I want to go back to Japan now.
- Columbia adopts the ideology of American exceptionalism, launched by the 1893 Worlds Fair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B…
- 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: http://is.gd/foqjp Brilliant work by @rstudios!
- "All of this data can wait until later – and much of it can wait until never." http://tweetagewasteland.com/?…
- 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: http://github.com/indirect/jqu…
- Today I filled a glaring hole in my CSS knowledge; learnt about collapsing margins: http://reference.sitepoint.com…
- #newtwitter is a hit. Facebook should certainly be jealous of design this far beyond them.
- Just met one of the guys working on http://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: http://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: http://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": http://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: http://henrik.nyh.se/2008/07/r…
- Adobe Reader's bloat ballooned so I used Foxit, which in turn ballooned so I used Sumatra: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/sof…
- 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 --> http://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 http://youtu.be/p4ZzqWhvOVA *worship*
August
- My personal goal for today is to read the entire OData protocol doc: http://www.odata.org/developer… 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. http://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 ... http://fb.me/EwJEt8Z8
- How to use Ctags in Vim >> Term: pacman -S ctags; cd <source>; ctags -R; 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: http://j.mp/a6IFyP
- Implementing on OData web service for Stack Overflow: http://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: http://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. http://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: http://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: http://mutelight.org/a/26
- First blog post in five months! Building a command line environment for .NET development with Rake: http://mutelight.org/a/25
- Losing the birthday edge: http://tweetagewasteland.com/2…
- Don't escape characters in Ruby strings -- http://rors.org/2008/10/26/don…
- 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: http://runkeeper.com/user/fyre…
- (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. http://j.mp/a07ihN
- Awesome site built by Simon Willison and his wife to document their world travels: http://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: http://vimeo.com/12231666 Seriously loving this ad campaign.
- Try the VS 2010 Pro Power Tools: http://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: http://www.inspiredbyiceland.c…
- 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. http://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: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL…
- 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: http://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: http://wiki.github.com/philc/v…
- 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: http://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.
- #VS2010 going in at work this week, but the #ViEmu beta for it is still 3-4 weeks out. This could get ugly.
- I'll convert my MVVM presentation into a blogazine article complete w/ infographics. Any nice diagram libs for JS? http://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: http://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. http://brandur.org/tmp/wildhun…
- Ctrl+S freezes output in some terminals and makes them appear locked up. Ctrl+Q reverses the effect.
- VS 2010 Ultimate = $11,899 MSRP. http://www.microsoft.com/visua…
- 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 --> http://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 http://www.artlebedev.com/mand…
- Muse live is just as frakkin' awesome as the stories say: http://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: http://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. http://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: http://news.ycombinator.com/it…
- 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 http://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 http://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: http://flic.kr/p/7KPbHu
- Being in Vegas is all about having an A++ team: http://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
- 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? http://haskell.org/haskellwiki…
- 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: http://mutelight.org/a/24
- Programming is an easy way to procrastinate: http://blog.cubeofm.com/progra…
- 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": http://mutelight.org/a/23 (the regex system makes this somewhat unintuitive)
- how to actually use regular expressions in Haskell: http://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). http://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>
- 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: http://barcampcalgary.com/ (it's like being in San Fran)
- #rhinomocks How to change the result returned by a stub method call: http://j.mp/9UPQTU (this might save your life someday)
- Come see our latest restriction! http://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): http://j.mp/84Rww9
- just pushed a cleaned-up copy of the Geotools.Net project to Github: http://github.com/fyrerise/geo…
- All articles explaining monads read the same: okay, makes sense, *nod*, yep, makes sense, WTF?! Still, best one so far: http://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: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07…
- Olafur Grimsson refuses to sign bill to repay $5B for lost foreign savings in Icesave: http://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
- 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 http://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: http://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! http://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: http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-l…
November
- my hair is getting pretty crazy even by my standards: http://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: http://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: http://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 http://mutelight.org/a/22
- tv shows always get computers right. thanks to numb3rs, I finally understand IRC: http://youtube.com/watch?v=O2r… (via #irssi)
- #itsalltext got nuked again by this bomb: http://trac.gerf.org/itsalltex… 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. http://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() http://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) http://mutelight.org/a/20
- the origin of the word "guy" (referring to a man) comes from the first name of Guy Fawkes http://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): http://j.mp/1Yx7XJ
- Swallowing an Extensible Exception in Haskell (noob Haskell post): http://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.
- Tokyo recipes: http://bit.ly/X89Ip Includes Redis set implements written in Lua for Tokyo Cabinet. Nice!
- Icy >>> Cydia
- my next project: XenServer on my MBP http://citrix.com/freexenserve…
- A new day -- and a new release iteration
- preparing for our pirate party tonight, looking fun already: http://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