|
I've been spending a few evenings researching the best way to integrate subscription-based payments for my new SaaS project. I was curious if there were any new start-ups implementing a web-based appl...
|
|
I've been spending a few evenings researching the best way to integrate subscription-based payments for my new SaaS project. I was curious if there were any new start-ups implementing a web-based appl...
|
|
I just wanted to post some thoughts on the topic of selecting software components with regard to the maturity thereof. I think overall the programmer community is by default gung-ho about the bleeding edge. We like the shiny new toys with the bells and whistles. Once something's been around enough to have its weaknesses well understsood, we find it very frustrating to have to continue to work with it. I'm not going to offer any specific rec....
|
|
The fundamental tool of any engineering discipline is the notion of abstraction. If we can build a set of useful, easily-described behaviors out of a complex system, we can build other systems on top of those pieces, without having to understand to worry about the full complexity of the underlying system. Without this notion of abstracting away complexity, we'd be stuck writing our webapps in assembly code – if not toggling them in to our f..
|
|
The fundamental tool of any engineering discipline is the notion of abstraction. If we can build a set of useful, easily-described behaviors out of a complex system, we can build other systems on top of those pieces, without having to understand to worry about the full complexity of the underlying system. Without this notion of abstracting away complexity, we'd be stuck writing our webapps in assembly code – if not toggling them in to our f..
|
|
Hi Mike, I would have contacted you via e-mail but it bounced back. I noticed your blog and link to the Skyline Soaring Club in Front Royal, VA. As one of the champions of the sport of gliding and soaring, I thought you might want to share the intriguing line up of speakers that are coming to Wave Camp at SoaringNV in Minden, Nevada on your blog. I know the camp is some distance from Virginia, but your fellow enthusiasts may be inte..
|
|
i use gnu/linux . it’s probably no secret. what is more of a secret, is that i secretly (well actually not so secretly) love using gedit for editing text. i still use vim , echo ( gnu bash) and emacs (but only for org-mode ). vim is really, really great. but for day to day full-screen coding, i love working in gedit. i only have one [1] longstanding gripe, and today i believe that it is solved. here is the magic combination which ..
|
|
i use gnu/linux . it’s probably no secret. what is more of a secret, is that i secretly (well actually not so secretly) love using gedit for editing text. i still use vim , echo ( gnu bash) and emacs (but only for org-mode ). vim is really, really great. but for day to day full-screen coding, i love working in gedit. i only have one [1] longstanding gripe, and today i believe that it is solved. here is the magic combination which ..
|
|
I’ve recently started using Mercurial , which is a distributed version control system . DVCSs initially struck me as a solution looking for a problem. SubVersion seemed good enough for our purposes at work, but we decided to try out Mercurial for one iteration to see what all the fuss was about. Perhaps the most significant difference between SubVersion and Mercurial is that Mercurial uses a local repository. This subtle distinction s..
|
|
Qaiku , the conversational microblogging service that launched a year ago had a refresh that launched today. While it hasn't yet convinced the twittering masses, it has already proven itself as a lot more thoughtful platform for the Finnish online community, and as a valuable workstreaming tool . The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels....
|
|
This article is a summary of a seminar I had on the topic. If it seems like it’s a continuation of an existing discussion that’s because, to some extent, it is. If you haven’t been discussing exchanging your app server, this article probably isn’t very interesting to you. By putting the application server inside my application instead of the other way around, I was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
|
|
I just updated the "Columns" macro for the MoinMoin wiki. This allows you to lay out a wiki page in two to ten columns. This makes it easier to get lots of info on one page in certain situations and I've used it to great benefit on my personal wiki where I organize my stuff. Here's the MacroMarket page where my update has been posted for discussion . The original author may not like it, so it might not become the canonical fork, but th..
|
Function which will either build an associative array of the GET URL variables on the current page, or return the value of a specified GET variable in JavaScript.
|
|
After my previous post got posted to reddit, there was a bunch of interesting discussion there about some details I’d handwaved over. This is a quick followup on some the investigation that various people carried out, and the conclusions they reached. In the reddit thread, lacos/lbzip2 objected that in his experiments, he didn’t see tar closing the input pipe before it was done reading the file, and so questioned where the SIGPIPE/EPIPE was..
|
|
After my previous post got posted to reddit, there was a bunch of interesting discussion there about some details I’d handwaved over. This is a quick followup on some the investigation that various people carried out, and the conclusions they reached. In the reddit thread, lacos/lbzip2 objected that in his experiments, he didn’t see tar closing the input pipe before it was done reading the file, and so questioned where the SIGPIPE/EPIPE was..
|
|
i decided i’d compile a short list of features / functionality which should be added to the new nokia N900 to make it totally pro. it’s pretty good as it is, despite it not working with the bell networks. i’ve attempted to order this list in order of importance (more or less). all the closed source bits must become free software under a GPL or AGPL license. it should support a fully encrypted file system. if i lose my phone, i ....
|
|
i decided i’d compile a short list of features / functionality which should be added to the new nokia N900 to make it totally pro. it’s pretty good as it is, despite it not working with the bell networks. i’ve attempted to order this list in order of importance (more or less). all the closed source bits must become free software under a GPL or AGPL license. it should support a fully encrypted file system. if i lose my phone, i ....
|
|
A coworker and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensati....
|
|
A coworker and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensati....
|
|
I am preparing to conduct a retrospective for my team at my current client site. To guide me, I have been reviewing notes from previous retrospectives I have either attended or led. In doing so, I have noticed an emerging pattern of behavior that can significantly impact the success of a retrospective. Here are a few key factors that I believe are most important: Retrospective Belongs to the Team Possibly the most important observation I’ve..
|
|
Tuesday night I gave a talk at a local Java User Group (that’s four JUG appearances this year, hoorah!) on RabbitMQ and demonstrated not just using it communicate between two java processes, but also as a way of communicating asynchronously between a node.js application and a java application… I have to say it was pretty awesome and I really think it opens the doors for integrating node.js applications seemlessly into an existing java infra..
|
|
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience, I’ve concluded that they’re often wrong. I like to say that complex systems don’t usually fail for complex reasons, but for the ..
|
|
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience, I’ve concluded that they’re often wrong. I like to say that complex systems don’t usually fail for complex reasons, but for the ..
|
|
Through the last years developing websites for various types of clients - from small start ups, retailers, organizations to bigger companies - I've come to realize one thing pretty clearly. Everybody loves Flash. Well, almost everybody...
|
|
Through the last years developing websites for various types of clients - from small start ups, retailers, organizations to bigger companies - I've come to realize one thing pretty clearly. Everybody loves Flash. Well, almost everybody...
|
|
I’ve recently started trialling JRebel at work. JRebel is a piece of software that hot-swaps your code so that changes made in your IDE are reflected in your application server without requiring a restart. The benefits of this idea are fairly obvious. I no longer have to wait 1 - 2 minutes for JBoss to restart each time I correct a spelling mistake etc. The time saved by not restarting probably make the product worth the $US149 licens..
|
|
When picking iteration length for an agile project, there are mainly two forces that you have to balance: The rate of learning is proportional with the number of iterations, rather than the length of the project. This means that shorter iterations help you get better faster. But each iteration has some overhead with sprint reviews, retrospectives and planning. You don’t want this overhead to dominate the effort spent on the project.
|
|
Intro People want to start working on apps in Rails 3.0. Rails 3 is supporting ruby 1.8.7 and ruby 1.9.2. These instructions will assist you with getting Rails 3 and ruby 1.9.2 installed. I’m tossing this up here to have something to point people to when they have questions. I’m making a few assumptions: You’re on OS X Snow Leopard (x86_64) (Most of these instructions will work on any *nix box. Leave a comment if you have trouble.) Yo....
|
|
Now I've been collecting spam for a little over a year on spambotlove.com. The purpose of which I do not know, yet. I kind of forgot about the project until just recently, so I started harvesting some stats from the database. Currently we have 729,255 records in the database. That's 3 MB of data.
|
|
Now I've been collecting spam for a little over a year on spambotlove.com. The purpose of which I do not know, yet. I kind of forgot about the project until just recently, so I started harvesting some stats from the database. Currently we have 729,255 records in the database. That's 3 MB of data.
|
|
since i do much research on the internets, i often find myself in a web browser. my favourite of the lot is epiphany . this post isn’t about its merits or failures, but about the awesome way to make my location bar be exactly how i like it: monospaced. just add the following into your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file and then restart epiphany. feel free to modify as you wish. # ~/.gtkrc-2.0 style "Epiphany_Locationbar" { # leave out the fon..
|
|
since i do much research on the internets, i often find myself in a web browser. my favourite of the lot is epiphany . this post isn’t about its merits or failures, but about the awesome way to make my location bar be exactly how i like it: monospaced. just add the following into your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file and then restart epiphany. feel free to modify as you wish. # ~/.gtkrc-2.0 style "Epiphany_Locationbar" { # leave out the fon..
|
|
So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more. Like so many good ideas, it all started with a fundamentally simple premise. On December 21, I sent the following message to Zephyr (MIT’s internal IM system – like Twitter crossed with IRC, except older than either..
|
|
So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more. Like so many good ideas, it all started with a fundamentally simple premise. On December 21, I sent the following message to Zephyr (MIT’s internal IM system – like Twitter crossed with IRC, except older than either..
|
|
Networking has received yet another performance boost. I discarded Panda3D's network classes in favor of Python's sockets. I also switched to a single-threaded, non-blocking system that performs significantly better and clears up the messy Panda3D threads that were acting very strangely. I also improved the connection process; both the client and server now send packets to each other while connecting, in an attempt to punch through even the..
|
|
At approx 6:30am on Monday 21st Feb 2000 my boss, my colleague and I took the first version of Uboot online. It certainly didn’t have all the features it needed back then, it took us one extra week to add an address book to the messaging functionality, for example. And it didn’t have any photo sharing, video sharing, blogging, or the e-commerce functions that it has now. It’s actually amazing how fast we did develop the first version: a..
|
|
First post Then I imported the blog entries from the SpamBotLove blog (it was a tumblr blog), so there are older entries here
|
|
_Ok, this is my first blog post here, so it probably sucks. If you value your time, don't read this._ When writing code these days, I keep running into these dilemmas. With the way the web a...
|
|
PHP Sourcecode so that a non CodeIgniter PHP script can access data stored in the users CodeIgniter session.
|
|
First post Then I imported the blog entries from the SpamBotLove blog (it was a tumblr blog), so there are older entries here
|
|
_Ok, this is my first blog post here, so it probably sucks. If you value your time, don't read this._ When writing code these days, I keep running into these dilemmas. With the way the web a...
|