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Interesting and apparently very lucrative application of a business practice all too prevalent throughout this nation by an individual. Permalink.
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Speaking of talking about other writers’ tools and processes, here’s Shawn Blanc searching for a replacement to an integral part of his workflow as a writer, Simplenote. Not a day goes by that I don’t use Simplenote, and unfortunately I’ve noticed some of the synching problems he has. Nevertheless Simplenote remains the best on the market, and for that single reason I will continue to keep all my notes, to write all my articles, and to stor..
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Always interesting to read about another writer’s tools and setup, and Matt Gemmell’s style makes this piece all the more pleasurable to read. “What you’re seeing through the window is Outside. Now, I’m not a massive fan of Outside, generally speaking - I’m of the belief that we coped with Outside for a long time, until we finally invented Inside, and then breathed a huge sigh of relief - but it can really clear your head and restore so..
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In the previous post I gave a glimpse of the Javascript Promises Pattern (JPP). Now we are going to take a more in deep look into it and implement our (simplified) version of this pattern. First of all, let’s sow the code I we defined works: we had three operations (to make the example simpler, they all share the same code, but this is not a requisite), each of them expecting a set of arguments which are processed by an asynchronous ope....
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Kas Thomas on how to write an opening sentence, drawing on his extensive writing career as well as a number of books on the subject. I particularly liked how he pointed out the openers prominent writers use over and over again. Definitely something to keep in mind when writing. “These aren’t all the possible ways to start a piece, but if you’re completely stuck, one of them should work. If not? Surprise the world with something outlandi..
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Why We're Raising the Signature Threshold for We the People
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www.whitehouse.gov
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13 years ago
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eng
After the petition to build a Death Star and the petition to remove Ortiz from her position at the Department of Injustice (oops, a typo) all garnered the required 25,000 signatures, I suppose it’s not surprising. Sam Byford has more on this in his post After Death Star and deportation petitions, White House raises signature threshold to 100,000 on The Verge. Permalink.
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The Days When We Had Rest, O Soul, for They Were Long
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jacobbacharach.wordpress.com
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13 years ago
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eng
An interesting article posted over on Blogarach in response to Aaron Swartz’s death. Even more impressive is that it’s a single, extremely well-written sentence. Worth the read even if you are not following the tragedy that is Aaron Swartz’s suicide. Permalink.
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Thirty-eight minutes and eleven seconds in to the eighteenth episode of The B&B Podcast , Shawn Blanc, in response to Ben Brooks talking about the salient point of his Lion review, said, “If you can’t boil down your whole article into a tweet, what are you doing writing the article in the first place?” Amidst a discussion regarding Ben and Shanw’s recent Lion and Web OS reviews, respectively, this humble observation is easy to miss as it..
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An article from Ben Brooks posted in November of last year I had near the middle of my Simplenote list, burried beneath a slew of notes, ideas, and half-baked articles. I’m not interested in writing when it’s not about the writing. iBooks Author is neat, but I don’t want to learn it - instead I’ll just “publish” the book here as a series of posts, where I know what I am doing (somewhat) and where writing is about writing and not layout,..
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As you might already know, I like pushing the boundaries of what puppet is able to do. Today, I realized that I needed to include a class by variable name. A simple way to do this is possible with: $foo = 'world' class { "hello::${foo}::params": } I then realized that you could also do this with the standard include keyword: $foo = 'world' include "hello::${foo}::params" If you’re really insane enough to need t..
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As you might already know, I like pushing the boundaries of what puppet is able to do. Today, I realized that I needed to include a class by variable name. A simple way to do this is possible with: $foo = 'world' class { "hello::${foo}::params": } I then realized that you could also do this with the standard include keyword: $foo = 'world' include "hello::${foo}::params" If you’re really insane enough to need t..
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ShitRedditSays and The Downvote Brigades of Reddit (note: if you’re familiar with reddit and ShitRedditSays, you can skip to the next section.) As you probably know, Reddit is a site that revolves around voting. All users are encouraged to vote on things, which are then prioritized based on their total scores. Over time, Reddit’s userbase has grown a lot. It is now one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and nobody has enough ..
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Matt Alexander of One Thirty Seven made so many interesting points I had a hard time choosing an excerpt of acceptable length for this post. I ended up settling on this one though, reflective of the tone throughout his exceptionally well-written article We’re Boring, They’re Sexting : “Sitting on the front porch of our quaint weblogs and latte-art-filled Instagram accounts, we’re collectively yelling at the kids playing in the street u....
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Interesting, all the things people are starting to do with receipt paper. Sean Hollister tells of a DC restaurant that provides a collection of the latest news items printed on receipt paper when you ask for the check. Also mentioned in this article is BERG’s Little Printer , a neat thermal printer with a bunch of cool features . Permalink.
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As I concluded Defining an Industry I again found myself once again trying to decide whether I should continue writing or stop where I was. On the one hand I was happy with the article’s length, approximately 550 words. On the other hand though, I really wanted to spend some time talking about being overtaken in a market and about market cannibalization. Ultimately proposing that adhering to industry standards in a given market will not..
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Lately, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about disruption theory. I’m writing articles about podcasting, technology, and education, in which 5by5, Apple, and the likes of The Khan Academy are disrupting the incumbents in their respective industries to superb results. 5by5 proved the viability of business based on podcasts, and explosive growth in this space ensued as the medium gained increasingly widespread recognition outside o..
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From Christine Pelisek’s article on The Daily Beast, I thought these two excerpts were of particular interest: In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, NRA executive Wayne LaPierre drew criticism for suggesting that posting armed guards in schools could help prevent future shootings. Taft Union High School does employ an armed officer on campus, but he was snowed in on Thursday and did not make it to work. In another ironic twist, the shoo....
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Earlier today I stumbled across an interesting article called We Are In The Final Years of Our Internet over on Stupid Is Winning explaining why the author believes the internet as we know it is likely to gradually fade as a younger, more tech savvy generation comes of age. The author is hypothesizing that a generation raised on touch screens and iTunes is unlikely to use the internet in the same way it is used now, which will eventually ....
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When I was in college I would often skip homework or studying for a test. Why? Because I was inspired to work on something else.
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This was a busy week for actionHero! We are now up to version 4.2.2. Note that this release again changed some of the internal API’s.
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Paul Shawcross did an amazing job responding to the recent petition for the government to build an actual Death Star. An excellent article. Permalink.
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An interesting collection of thoughts and observations regarding the meaning of life. These are my two favorites, the first from Frank Donofrio: I have been asking myself why I’m here most of my life. If there’s a purpose I don’t care anymore. I’m seventy-four. I’m on my way out. Let the young people learn the hard way, like I did. No one ever told me anything. And from Charles Bukowski: For those who believe in God, most of the....
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Three months ago I installed Kippo in a low end VPS of mine. About a month after that, I got bored of manually checking kippo everyday so I made a small script to automate the process. Fast forward another two months and here we're.
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Being part of the subject of algebraic topology, this post assumes the reader has read our previous primers on both topology and group theory. As a warning to the reader, it is more advanced than most of the math presented on this blog, and it is woefully incomplete. Nevertheless, the aim is to provide a high level picture of the field with a peek at the details. An Intuitive Topological Invariant Our eventual goal is to get comfortable wit..
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Being part of the subject of algebraic topology, this post assumes the reader has read our previous primers on both topology and group theory. As a warning to the reader, it is more advanced than most of the math presented on this blog, and it is woefully incomplete. Nevertheless, the aim is to provide a high level picture of the field with a peek at the details. An Intuitive Topological Invariant Our eventual goal is to get comfortable wit..
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Being part of the subject of algebraic topology, this post assumes the reader has read our previous primers on both topology and group theory. As a warning to the reader, it is more advanced than most of the math presented on this blog, and it is woefully incomplete. Nevertheless, the aim is to provide a high level picture of the field with a peek at the details. An Intuitive Topological Invariant Our eventual goal is to get comfortable wit..
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I planned to work on a number of articles this evening, but then, after I got home a short while ago and opened Hacker News, my evening plans changed as I began to read about Aaron Swartz. Rather than attempt to write about a man I know little of and who I knew nothing of before this afternoon, here are the better articles I have seen floating around the internet: Permalink.
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Last month I published Introducing First Crack shortly after this site went life. In that post I outlined a number of goals I set for First Crack during its development, as well as a few of the advantages I believed my new CMS would have over the incumbents. Since making that post nearly two months have gone by. During those two months I have used First Crack exclusively, and I have not looked back. Permalink.
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The new Activation Blocks in Ninject are great for automatically resolving dependencies in the request scope. However they suffer from one…
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If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on support of Postgres 9.2 on Heroku . One of those awesome features, is pg_stat_statements . Its not commonly kno....
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If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on support of Postgres 9.2 on Heroku . One of those awesome features, is pg_stat_statements . Its not commonly kno....
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With From the Notepad: Perspective I started doing something the result of which I am very pleased with, and something I plan to continue in the future — an innovation of sorts: it’s not a post made in the traditional linkblog format, but it does draw some inspiration from it; it’s not a full-fledged article, it’s much more concise and to the point; it’s not an overly simplified, minified post condensed into a near-inscrutable tweet; it....
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When Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter entered into high school, he wrote her a short letter. In this letter, he cautioned against following in his own footsteps in becoming a writer, while simultaneously encouraging her to pursue her dreams and not to get discouraged when her work fell short of her expectations. “Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said..
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Are you really interested in learning how to Write a Search Engine from Scratch? Click this link and register your interest for my book about how to do so.][1] This is part 5 of a 5 part series. [Part 1][2] – [Part 2][3] – [Part 3][4] – [Part 4][5] – [Part 5][6] – [Downloads/Code][7] So we need to convert the indexer to a method that wont consume as much memory. Looking at how it works now we can determine a few areas that could be im..
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Are you really interested in learning how to Write a Search Engine from Scratch? Click this link and register your interest for my book about how to do so. This is part 4 of a 5 part series. Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Downloads/Code So previously we had 4 main issues identified. Im going to go with low hanging fruit and add a simple porn filter.
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Are you really interested in learning how to Write a Search Engine from Scratch? Click this link and register your interest for my book about how to do so.][1] This is part 3 of a 5 part series. [Part 1][2] – [Part 2][3] – [Part 3][4] – [Part 4][5] – [Part 5][6] – [Downloads/Code][7] At this point I had a large chunk of the web sitting on my disk waiting to be indexed. The first thing we need to think about is what are we going to ind....
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