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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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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 2 of a 5 part series. Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Downloads/Code The first implementation has a few issues that are pretty apparent. Chiefly is performance. Secondly it stores the index in a single folder which is loosely related to the fi..
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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 1 of a 5 part series. [Part 1][2] – [Part 2][3] – [Part 3][4] – [Part 4][5] – [Part 5][6] – [Downloads/Code][7] I imagine that if you have landed on this page you probably have an interest in search and search engines. Not only that, you have probably read the foll..
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A story of a game exploit Once upon a time I developed a somewhat popular web game called Forumwarz . At its peak, we were serving about 6 million dynamic requests a day off a single quad-core server. Forumwarz limits how many turns a player can take in a day. We designed it this way so that the competitive aspect of the game wasn’t simply a contest of who had the most time available to play. Players had to choose their targets wisely.
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And so commences the first Tea and Stuff meeting of 2013! It did begin rather late, as not all were present until 5:30. While waiting for all members to turn up, we cleared space for a recently acquired beer home brewing kit. Though we could not commence the beer brewing, as a few additional items are still required (e.g. brewing sugar). There is now room in the cupboard under the stairs for the fermenting pot thing, but in order to make ..
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And so commences the first Tea and Stuff meeting of 2013! It did begin rather late, as not all were present until 5:30. While waiting for all members to turn up, we cleared space for a recently acquired beer home brewing kit. Though we could not commence the beer brewing, as a few additional items are still required (e.g. brewing sugar). There is now room in the cupboard under the stairs for the fermenting pot thing, but in order to make ..
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We developed a cool algorithm to add informational trailer texts to SMS at Uboot. It was online from mid 2000 to mid 2011 (when Uboot stopped doing SMS). I developed this algorithm together with my colleague Mike. So that it doesn't get lost forever, here is a description of it :-) The general situation was this: The users may send SMS from Uboot to phones SMS have fixed length (e.g. single part SMS contains 160 characters) Th..
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ownCloud + DreamHost: Your own Unlimited DropBox for 13$/mo
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www.evantahler.com
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13 years ago
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eng
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A long time ago, I saw this in the Hak5 store . After reading about it in mossmann's blog , I found somewhat interesting that using this easily built device you can HACK THE PLANET . An ethernet tap is a passive device used to monitor traffic between two hosts using a third one. For more info on network taps read here .
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With this post I thought I would try something different: rather than writing a full-fledged post for each of the myriad notes I have created over the past months in Simplenote, I will begin posting whatever I have collected for the potential topic as I would a linked item: with the excerpt as a blockquote along with some commentary if I deem it necessary. With that, then, the first post taken straight from my notepad, in which I attempt to..
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I just got internet back after being without it since before Christmas. It was a tearful reunion, to be sure. Turns out, I was actually more productive than usual without internet. There's a one-word explanation for that, and it rhymes with "edit". ANYway, here's what got done: Analytics When you finish a play session, you'll see something like this: I haven't figured out the server side of this system yet, but all it really ..
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It is now 2013, and the IKS project , started back in 2009 to improve content management systems through semantic technologies, has ended. Alongside Apache Stanbol and VIE.js , the Create.js inline editing toolkit was one of the major outcomes of this European Union funded effort. This post outlines the current state of Create, and some of the things that will be happening around it in 2013. Increased CMS adoption Thanks to bein....
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