Read an interesting article on Ars Technica this morning. Looks like Bitcoin had already made the rounds earlier this summer, but I guess I missed it.
Bitcoin is …
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I think our internet is rate-limited. That's annoying because I don't do any of the stuff that maybe deserves it (looking at you BitTorrent!). I haven't exactly quantified the problem yet, but the main symptom is a very reasonable rate of 300K or so dropping to 3K-5K after the first …
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I love finding out that some fluttering thought has a proper name.
Reasonable people should agree that simply having two sides to an issue doesn't make them equally correct. If you disagree, just take any issue you feel strongly about, consider the polar opposing, and decide if the you would …
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Google Web Fonts is kinda awesome. If you haven't checked it out already - basically it gives you a ton of new font choices that still degrade gracefully for older browsers. All you have to do is add a stylesheet to your page and specify the 'font-family'. It truly couldn't be …
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I've used Object Relational Mapping (ORM) libraries on a few projects in the past. Without getting into the many, many details, ORM bridges the gap between data storage in a relational database and Object-Oriented Programming. Simply, instead of writing SQL queries, you let the ORM library write them for you …
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Some interesting essays from computer history: Worse Is Better. The original essay considers the success of C against the arguably superior Lisps, which failed to gain widespread popularity. It seems hard to predict whether a particular product will succeed using Worse Is Better - lots of times, worse just sucks - but …
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This is super old and super cool - an article from 2007 in the New York Times about using Amazon/EC2/S3/Hadoop to produce static PDFs from 71 years (4TB) of NYT archives. I don't think I had even heard of Hadoop in 2007.
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I've been messing around with the Kohana Framework a lot lately. The simplicity of using the View Factory has led me to have a ton of little view snippets and it gets tricky remembering where they all live. So I started adding this line to the top of all my …
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Further proof that I'm a dork: this afternoon, instead of working on my apps, I was screwing around with pydot and matplotlib making visualizations of user engagement (on another blog). At one point it occurred to me that it might be interesting to plot the reading grade level of various …
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This took me entirely too long to figure out.. The goal was to reduce the load page and server load by converting PNGs to JPEGs. This method may be lack a bit of subtlety, as it always converts PNGs to JPEGs. Maybe sometimes you actually do want a PNG. Something …
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