Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Your troubles are over, but only on the vanishingly small chance your household has both a Lisp programmer and an Etsy seller who’s tax prep is being frustrated by the Etsy seller tools for downloading all sales data. This ugly code will scrap the sales data.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
The security team at my ISP (dreamhost) found yet more infection in my blog. The appearance of a wordpress blog can vary by installing different themes. In the directory of one of these themes they found a file containing tool for giving a remote user a shell prompt (there is a version of the script here). [...]
This blog uses Wordpress plus a very few plugins. That’s built on PHP. So, it’s just asking for trouble.
Today one of my many fans, i.e. my wife, noted that my RSS feed wasn’t working. I’m a professional, so I provided the Guild’s standard response: “Works for me.” Actually it wasn’t working for [...]
Saturday, January 16, 2010
I’m inordinately happy to have finally puzzled out how to enable posting to my blog via email. The last few times I’d tried to get this to work something or another ruined my fun.
Wordpress tempts you into thinking that you can post by email. But the built in mechanism is flawed in enough ways to make [...]
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Back in the day I used to write code for graphic user interfaces. If you write code like that you develop a eye for details that hopefully are invisible to other folks. For example I happen to know that when you typing the mouse cursor is hidden and then later when you move the [...]
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Nice list…
Continuous deployment.
Tell a good change from a bad change quickly
Revert a bad change quickly
Work in small batches (at IMVU, large batch = 3 days worth of work)
Break large projects down into small batches
Have a cluster immune system
Run tests locally. Everyone gets a complete sandbox
Continuous integration server – tests to ensure all features that worked [...]
This is very good: How Complex Systems Fail (pdf) – hat tip to John Allspaw via his blog. I particularly like the swipe at root cause analysis. This is a nice complement to the wonderful book Normal Accidents, which I mention here.
Update: via @gully this cartoon is great too, I’ve added one frame here [...]
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Arising from my interest in impulse control, hyperbolic discounting, and will power I have been nursing an interest in how people enforce their personal rules. Say you wish to promise to go to bed at 10pm, or not to drink before 5pm, or to save 10% of your income, or call your mom once [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
This is such a great bug.
There’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.
The 17th is the start of a new “works correctly” [...]
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
We have a little joke around the house. When somebody starts complaining we occationally lean back and mumble – “Tell it to the blog.” It’s s cruel and unsympathetic pleasure. So … I’m here to tell it to the blog.
I love my MacBook Air but for the last week we have fallen into a [...]
Fresh Links…