I just turned 30. I wanted to share 30 things I’ve learned in the past 30 years. Or at least the things I
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I just shelled out to wordpress.com to buy the No Ads upgrade. I think they’re good people. I hope you all appreciate it. Let me know if you do. Happy hacking, James You can hire James and his team at m9rx corporation . You can follow James on Mastodon for more frequent updates and other random thoughts. You can follow James on Twitter for more frequent updates and other random thoughts. You can support James on..
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I just shelled out to wordpress.com to buy the No Ads upgrade. I think they’re good people. I hope you all appreciate it. Let me know if you do. Happy hacking, James You can hire James and his team at m9rx corporation . You can follow James on Mastodon for more frequent updates and other random thoughts. You can follow James on Twitter for more frequent updates and other random thoughts. You can support James on..
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An excerpt from the Popular Science article in which they laid out their reasoning behind turning comments off. As John Gruber said , it’s hard to believe it took them this long. “A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty i....
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I just realized that my Fedora 19 installation didn’t have any of the GNOME games installed by default any more. I guess there’s no love for nibbles . Here’s a quick one-liner to get them all back: $ sudo yum search game | grep gnome | awk '{print $1}' | xargs sudo yum install - y Loaded plugins: etckeeper, langpacks, refresh - packagekit Package gnome - nibbles - 3.8 . 0 - 2. fc19 . x86_64 already installed an....
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I just realized that my Fedora 19 installation didn’t have any of the GNOME games installed by default any more. I guess there’s no love for nibbles . Here’s a quick one-liner to get them all back: $ sudo yum search game | grep gnome | awk '{print $1}' | xargs sudo yum install - y Loaded plugins: etckeeper, langpacks, refresh - packagekit Package gnome - nibbles - 3.8 . 0 - 2. fc19 . x86_64 already installed an....
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I always find it interesting when I realize that something I have been practicing or dealing with for a long time has a name. This time it happens to be race conditions. This is something you can’t avoid thinking about as soon as you have more than one routine sharing any kind of resource. If you’re not thinking about race conditions in your code, now is the time. A race condition is when two or more routines have access to the same re....
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This article was written for and published by Gopher Academy I was looking at a code sample that showed a recursive function in Go and the writer was very quick to state how Go does not optimize for recursion, even if tail calls are explicit. I had no idea what a tail call was and I really wanted to understand what he meant by Go was not optimized for recursion. I didn't know recursion could be optimized. For those who don't k....
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A week or so ago I was browsing /r/Python and I saw a link to a website called rise4fun.com , which is a Microsoft Research project that contains a lot of cool demos and tools that you can run in your browser. The demo I was linked to was a restricted Python shell that could be used to experiment wi...
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A week or so ago I was browsing /r/Python and I saw a link to a website called rise4fun.com , which is a Microsoft Research project that contains a lot of cool demos and tools that you can run in your browser. The demo I was linked to was a restricted Python shell that could be used to experiment wi...
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How to make your code more concise and well-behaved at the same time Have you ever had an application that just behaved plain weird? You know, you click a button and nothing happens. Or the screen all the sudden turns blank. Or the application get into a “strange state” and you have to restart it for things to start working again. If you’ve experienced this, you have probably been the victim of a particular form of defensive programming whi..
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In a similar vein , Marco tells the story of how he came up with the name “Overcast”. I love stories like this. Permalink.
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I absolutely love podcasts. Much to my girlfriend’s confusion, I might add. After Marco Arment sold Instapaper in April, after Yahoo! bought Tumblr. 1 in May, and after he sold The Magazine shortly thereafter, only in my wildest dreams did I hope his elusive next venture would lead Marco to create a podcast client. Then, last Sunday at XOXO, my dream came true. Perhaps that’s putting it slightly melodramatically, but to say that I — an....
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What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong in his Theory of Low-End Disruption
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stratechery.com
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12 years ago
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eng
Another great article by Ben Thompson, this time on Clay Christensen’s interesting disruption theories and Apple’s approach in making products that both defy them and motivate people to purchase en masse. Come for the insights into Apple, and stay for his dissection of Christensen’s widely-regarded theory; this article is well worth the read. Permalink.
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I realize in my last two articles, Instapaper 5 — in which I made a number of proposals for Instapaper 5 — and Betaworks Releases Instapaper 5 — in which I conveyed my mostly positive feelings on the new release — I likely appeared very critical of Betaworks and their continued work on Instapaper. This is not the case: while I do feel a better launch strategy entailing a service-wide design overhaul and one in which they added a lar....
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Looking again at that chart, and with the realities of these three markets in mind, it’s not so much that the iPhone has saturated the American-style and European-style markets, and ought to focus on the Asian-style one; rather, the iPhone has saturated the high end in all three markets the high end just varies in accessibility ($200 for American-style, $650 for Asian-style). And, if you accept that the iPhone is in roughly the same compet....
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By now I realize this issue has largely fallen to the wayside, as its various permutations invariably do seemingly momentarily after gaining any significant traction, despite the condemnation many so readily metered out. Regardless of its fall from the collective’s fickle favor though, the event and ensuing discussions nevertheless merit some examination. Permalink.
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Theron Conrey writes about using: BitTorrent Sync as Geo-Replication for Storage We got a chance to talk about this idea at Linuxcon. I'm not entirely convinced there aren't some problem edge cases with this solution, but I think it will be hard to tell as long as the BitTorrent sync library is proprietary. I did come up with a special case of Theron's idea that I believe could work well. The special case uses the optimization that t..
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Theron Conrey writes about using: BitTorrent Sync as Geo-Replication for Storage We got a chance to talk about this idea at Linuxcon. I'm not entirely convinced there aren't some problem edge cases with this solution, but I think it will be hard to tell as long as the BitTorrent sync library is proprietary. I did come up with a special case of Theron's idea that I believe could work well. The special case uses the optimization that t..
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Slices are used everywhere in my code. If I am working with data from MongoDB, it is stored in a slice. If I need to keep track of a collection of problems after running an operation, it is stored in a slice. If you don’t understand how slices work yet or have been avoiding them like I did when I started, read these two posts to learn more. https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2013/08/understanding-slices-in-go-programming.html https..
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Hi All, I wrote this a while back for myself and finally got around to polishing it enough to release into the store. It’s a really basic app which will connect to your flurry account and show you new users and number of sessions while your out and about! http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/flurrystats/94d9ad3c-61d2-4ce6-8a61-60b4b8b1fe87
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An Ant Hill is a masterpiece of nature. Hidden from the human eye it grows intricate, complex and deep. It’s a beautiful structure crafted by one of the most humble creatures. But in the world of Colosseum’s and Eiffel’s tower it is generally overlooked. How do we define creativity in such a context? Is creativity … Continue reading Creativity: Taj Mahals and Ant-Hills
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I’m here in New Orleans hacking up a storm and getting to meet fellow gluster users IRL. John Mark Walker started off with a great “State of the GlusterFS union” style talk. Today Louis (semiosis) gave a great talk about running glusterfs on amazon. It was highly pragmatic and he explained how he chose the number of bricks per host. The talk will be posted online shortly. Marco Ceppi from Canonical gave a talk about juju and glust....
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I’m here in New Orleans hacking up a storm and getting to meet fellow gluster users IRL. John Mark Walker started off with a great “State of the GlusterFS union” style talk. Today Louis (semiosis) gave a great talk about running glusterfs on amazon. It was highly pragmatic and he explained how he chose the number of bricks per host. The talk will be posted online shortly. Marco Ceppi from Canonical gave a talk about juju and glust....
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SoundCloud has a service-oriented architecture, which allows us to use different languages for different services. With concurrency and…
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Just over a decade ago, the dotcom bubble burst, and for the next 3-4 years, the IT industry (and IT job market) was in a slump. During the last presentation I did for Game On 2.0 on August 29th, one of the audience members asked me what the dotcom bubble actually was. I supplied the standard Web answer of “overspending in the IT market” and “mismanagement of IT resources” (or something like that).
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Just over a decade ago, the dotcom bubble burst, and for the next 3-4 years, the IT industry (and IT job market) was in a slump. During the last presentation I did for Game On 2.0 on August 29th, one of the audience members asked me what the dotcom bubble actually was. I supplied the standard Web answer of “overspending in the IT market” and “mismanagement of IT resources” (or something like that).
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I have been working with some of the above products at work for the past couple of weeks and I just cam
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SoundCloud has a service-oriented architecture, which allows us to use different languages for different services. With concurrency and…
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Today is an interesting and perhaps historic day in the domain industry. GoDaddy has acquired Afternic and SmartName from Name Media . Name Media is probably best known for the BuyDomains brand. They own one of the largest portfolios of domain names in the world at nearly 1 million domains . GoDaddy is the largest player on the consumer side of the domain market by a wide margin. However, they aren't the biggest player and/or have....
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Today is an interesting and perhaps historic day in the domain industry. GoDaddy has acquired Afternic and SmartName from Name Media . Name Media is probably best known for the BuyDomains brand. They own one of the largest portfolios of domain names in the world at nearly 1 million domains . GoDaddy is the largest player on the consumer side of the domain market by a wide margin. However, they aren't the biggest player and/or have....
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Today is an interesting and perhaps historic day in the domain industry. GoDaddy has acquired Afternic and SmartName from Name Media . Name Media is probably best known for the BuyDomains brand. They own one of the largest portfolios of domain names in the world at nearly 1 million domains . GoDaddy is the largest player on the consumer side of the domain market by a wide margin. However, they aren't the biggest player and/or have....
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Every so often I like to take a break from the whole technology gamut and read something else. Preferably, something exceptional like Coronado High from The Atavist. Telling the fascinating origin story of what grew from a few California kids running drugs to a multi-million dollar narcotics empire, Coronado High is much more than a fantastically-written, gripping tale of a bygone era. I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it for you though: thi..
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Every once in a while, Letters of Note posts something great, a letter I just have to share. This is one such letter. For me , the last one was a speech William Safire wrote for President Nixon in preparation for a disaster during the moon landing; perhaps the best speech I have ever read. Permalink.
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Last week I acquired access to the Instapaper beta prior to its launch alongside iOS 7. I chronicled that story in I Finally Understand Bias . Since then, I have put off writing about the beta for a number of reasons: as a beta, the onus would have been on me to explain every single aspect of the new design or include numerous screenshots. Unlike the Federico Viticcis of the world, I did not find that prospect particularly appealing. Mor..
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Every once in a while I come across an application that is so comically insecure that I feel the urge to blog about it. The application in question is a .NET application to manage care homes and provide a Medical Administration Record for residents. Staff login to the app using a username and passwo...
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