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How to Withdraw from Caffeine

January 7, 2011

I’m a caffeine addict, but I’ve gotten off caffeine quite successfully a couple of times: The first for 4 years, the second for 2 years. To stay off for a longer period you probably need a sponsor (as in AA) to keep you on the straight-and-narrow, but for getting clean over the medium-haul, here’s a [...]

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About Huckleberry Finn and the “n”-word

January 6, 2011

Perhaps you’ve read about the new edition of Huckleberry Finn, which replaces the word “nigger” with the word “slave” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/books/05huck.html?pagewanted=print).
This is inept on so many grounds.
First off, if you use the word “slave,” readers will not be able to differentiate between places where “slave” is a substitute, and where the very word “slave” was used [...]

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Forced password changes

December 29, 2010

Dear Online Services,
Do not force me to change my password. Ever. I use very long passwords that are generated for me that would take a long time (more than 10 minutes) to crack; and I know that you have software to disable the account after some number of attempts. Yes, LinkedIn, not all of your [...]

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ActiveRecord: Drop/Create database, run migrations, outside of Rails

December 2, 2010

Sometimes it can be convenient to drop and create databases, and run migrations, outside of Rails — or rake. Here’s one way to do it in code (Ruby 1.9.2):

require ‘active_record’
require ‘pg’

PG_SPEC = {
:adapter => ‘postgresql’,
:host => ‘localhost’,
:database => ‘7fff’,
:username => ‘postgres’,
[...]

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3rd-party logins: Use Twitter, not Facebook

December 1, 2010

I was thinking about voting for a friend’s app on Mashable, and I just want to note something about logging in to an app via Twitter vs. Facebook.
Use Twitter. Twitter has almost no metadata about you. If you log in, the target app gets to know almost nothing about you. Facebook, on the other hand [...]

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LinkedIn Groups: Low-quality discussions

December 1, 2010

So I get an e-mail summary of the discussions on my LinkedIn Groups, and man, are they weak. It seems to be the worst for medium- or high-volume groups. Below is an example.
First off, the “Most Active Discussions” come first. Doesn’t LinkedIn know that after 20 or so contributions, the value of each additional post [...]

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Wonder when Heroku will get off Amazon’s EC2?

November 14, 2010

I was reading this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635704575604993311538482.html
And it makes me wonder when Heroku will be ready to get off of EC2.

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Wesabe vs. Mint: Reasons why Wesabe failed

October 4, 2010

From the founder, emphasis added:
Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that. Instead, I prioritized trying to [...]

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Windows Live

September 23, 2010

In the processing of setting up HealthVault, it turns out that my personal e-mail address is associated with a Windows Live id. Who knew?
(And it’s been there since May 2, 2002!)

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