I wonder why Apple included the word “originally” in “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript”? If you are building a platform of unhackable devices then you need to control the gateways to hacking; i.e. the tool chain and the application distribution channel. So the clause above’s purpose is to due [...]
n2n is a nice peer to peer vpn. Here are some hints, mostly so I’ll remember them. There is a minor bit-o-confusion on the Macintosh. The edge nodes all use tun devices, rather than real ethernet devices, to plug in. You’ll need to install tun devices by hand. Then these devices will not show up [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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