May 2013
1 post
5 tags
Some tips on getting started with Vagrant and Chef
We have recently switched from a manually configured development environment to a nearly fully automated one using Vagrant, Chef, and a few other tools. With this transition, we’ve moved to an environment where data on the dev boxes is considered disposable and only what’s checked into the SCM is “real”. This is where we’ve always wanted to be, but without the ability...
April 2013
1 post
2 tags
Why I'm not buying Bitcoins
I’m not an economist, but Bitcoin seems pretty scary to me right now. It seems attractive as a decentralized currency, but there are a few properties that are worrisome.
The value (exchange rate) has increased in the past few months past the point of “convenience money” for most. At an exchange rate of somewhere between $10 and $30, there are a large number of people who will...
March 2013
4 posts
How I do project planning (and why OmniPlan...
I do a lot of medium-term software development project planning (typically 6-18 months). Here are the steps I use for doing project scope estimating (which is a distinctly different thing from tracking progress against the initial plan). After figuring out what rough timeframe the project should be targeted for, we:
Figure out what the tasks are and break them up into logical groupings.
Chain...
1 tag
Changing ulimit successfully for databases on...
Databases are a pain, but one thing seems to bite more often than anything else, especially at scale: per-user limits. OS creators have thus far not seemed to have caught on and made these settings either easy to set or easy to make persistent. Typically, when you run a production database, that’s going to be the only thing running on the machine, so it’s okay if it uses all available...
2 tags
Ridiculously useful bash snippet to return actual...
From the MongoDB docs comes this very useful bash function. In a shell, do:
Then you can get the ulimit values of a running process with e.g.:
return-limits mongod
3 tags
Evernote, you really messed this one up, and...
So… Evernote was hacked. Yay. Except that their “recovery” procedure is seriously, significantly, embarrassingly flawed. I’m flabbergasted.
The procedure is as follows:
Log in with your old password.
Change your password to a new one.
Yes, that’s right. All you need to change your password is your old, compromised password, and there’s no other verification...
February 2013
1 post
2 tags
Security implications of oauth and leveraged...
So - twitter was hacked this week. Which happens to the best of us, and is going to happen more often in the future. They invalidated the passwords for 250k user accounts (though anecdotal reports would seem to indicate that it’s more than that). But here’s the strange thing - even though my password was invalidated and inactive, the oauth tokens for apps I’d approved access for...
December 2012
2 posts
2 tags
The difference between task and list managers
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the difference between task managers, to-do lists, and checklists, and why you’d want different apps for them. They’re three very different working patterns with different goals, and they require different UIs to be successful.
Disclaimer: I don’t make any presumptions of being an expert user of these apps. I am not a...
2 tags
Kickstarter status check
To date, I’ve backed 15 kickstarter projects, all of which have been funded. Of those 8 have delivered. I’m not going to go into detail on all of them for various reasons (some are gifts that I don’t want to spoil), but here are details on some of them.
On time or as close to it that I didn’t really notice:
The Cosmonaut, a wide grip stylus for touch screens: Drawing on...
November 2012
3 posts
4 tags
Wifi performance and the new iPad...
The iPad 4 (and iPad mini, though I didn’t test with one) claims to have up to twice the wifi performance as previous models. While trying to configure my Airport Extreme to get the best performance, I discovered some interesting and counterintuitive results about the settings. (This probably also applies to the newer Airport Express, though I don’t have one.)
tl;dr: The Wireless...
2 tags
iCloud Documents and OS X 10.9 wishes
OS X 10.9 is coming. Here’s are some improvements I’d like to see:
* First, fix iCloud Documents and autosaving. This is by far my biggest gripe with the current ecosystem. There are too many gotchas, and it’s too confusing. Here are the problems I see:
If a document lives in iCloud, the only way to access that document is through the application that created it. I understand...
3 tags
Yet another hiccup on the transition to the cloud...
Since the beginning, it’s been the case that when you restore a backup of an iOS device from iTunes, it doesn’t restore the apps as part of the backup. That makes sense in some ways - the app data is completely separate from your personal data, and the apps can always be restored from the store. In the past, this has always worked fine for me, and in the past few revisions of the OS,...
October 2012
1 post
3 tags
Initial impressions: the Kindle Paperwhite falls...
I really want to like the Kindle Paperwhite. It’s a beautiful piece of technology. I’m going to give it some more time before I decide, but my first impressions are almost overwhelmingly negative compared to the previous model I have (the $79 “plain” Kindle), even about the changes that have some benefits.
Some specifics:
When reading longform (books), I find that I...
September 2012
1 post
2 tags
Maps. It's not just about the data.
As you may have heard, people aren’t happy with the Maps app in iOS6. I think the problems I have with it are a little different from the standard map glitches.
There are data problems, to be sure, but I expect those to be fixed reasonably quickly, as people start to use the app and Apple can collect problems and fix them. (BTW, instead of just complaining, report data problems. Every pin...
August 2012
2 posts
Some thoughts about App.net and social networks
First: Twitter. I like Twitter. I use it daily, and it’s become invaluable to me for three reasons: 1) It’s a great realtime news network, both for discovery and searching, 2) I’ve had some interesting and fun conversations, in short bursts, and 3) For some reason, companies, especially small ones, respond much faster to general support requests issued via twitter than almost any...
4 tags
Mountain Lion seems to have (partially?) addressed...
Having installed Mountain Lion on several machines, turned the dynamic pager back on and run with roughly the same pattern of applications, I’m now finding that performance is vastly improved. I have not been able to replicate the same sorts of drastic slowdowns I was seeing under Lion, and I barely notice when Time Machine kicks in. However, I’ve heard reports that the VM subsystem...
July 2012
1 post
2 tags
The Uber Ice Cream Promotion is deliciously...
The Uber guys are PR masterminds. I am in awe.
Step 1: Take a service that’s beleaguered on all sides by impending legislation.
Step 2: “Pivot” to a new service - premium ice cream delivery trucks on demand! - that people are sure to love. Bravo! It’s a sure hit, but it’s so outrageous that no one really expects it work.
Step 3: Launch with insufficient capacity,...
April 2012
3 posts
Speed up the Dock animation in Mac OS
ben:
I don’t really use that at many defaults write terminal commands, but I read about this one recently and I like it a lot.
If you hide your dock, you can speed up the hide/show animation by using the following command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.5;killall Dock
This will make the animation much faster. You can also get rid of it completely,...
Some followup on disabling the dynamic pager in OS...
Some additional uncategorized thoughts on disabling the dynamic pager:
This is not a magic bullet. Anything that actually needs to use the disk is still going to take place at disk speeds. But it should take a whole lot of load off of the disk.
It’s evident that not everyone is seeing the problems I’ve been seeing, but there are enough people who have to make me think there’s a...
Something is deeply broken in OS X memory...
(Mountain Lion update: possibly fixed.)
I’ve been doing some investigation with Perry Metzger into what appears to be a huge problem with memory management in Lion (I, but not everybody, have seen this going back to Snow Leopard, though it’s worse in Lion. This may have something to do with the fact that I was running the 64-bit kernel on SL and most other people weren’t.)
The...
March 2012
1 post
3 tags
Two things that really helped speed up my Mac (and...
In my quest to speed up my Mac, I learned about two utilities that I wish someone had shown me years ago: say hello to ‘purge’ and ‘fs_usage’.
1) The absolute slowest thing a modern computer can do is hit the disk. fs_usage shows you all of the disk accesses in realtime, so you can have a look at what’s using the disk(s). It’s a lot of information and there are...
February 2012
1 post
2 tags
Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of...
Apple starts inspections of factories in China. It seems like this sort of thing was actually Apple’s plan for a while. Remember a few years ago when Apple hardware started arriving with tracking information starting in Shenzen? Why do that unless you want to highlight where all of the gadgets are coming from? Prior to that, most Americans had never heard of Shenzen or Foxconn, and now...
December 2011
1 post
4 tags
Horrible disk performance on Lion with external...
I’ve been plagued by poor disk performance on my Mac Pro for the past few weeks - spinning beach balls when changing applications, long delays to show directory listings in Finder, and general system slowness. Frustratingly, it seemed to be correlated directly to the number of external drives I had attached, and sometimes showed an inverse correlation with the speed of the drives (i.e.:...
October 2011
2 posts
4 tags
How to set up iMessage to work with multiple iOS...
iMessage is a great replacement for SMS on iOS5, but it’s not obvious how to set it up to work with the same conversations on multiple iOS devices. I’d thought that this wasn’t necessary, but I didn’t get messages in the right place until I made these changes. You’ll need to do this on all of your iOS devices. Only the iPhone is pictured here - the iPad setup is...
3 tags
Apple just threw a huge bone to existing iPhone 4...
This is a great example of Tim Cook’s operational brilliance. Apple just threw a huge bone to existing iPhone4 users in reselling their old 16 or 32GB phones by discontinuing those models. There’s going to be a large demand for them in the secondary market by people who want to mid-range upgrade to an iPhone 4 but want more than 8GB.
August 2011
1 post
3 tags
Impressions of Lion
I’ve now upgraded a few machines to Lion, and I’m pretty ridiculously happy with it overall (the main exception being the removal of Front Row, which I used all the time on my media center Mac Mini, which has caused me to downgrade that machine back to Snow Leopard).
Some random thoughts in no particular order:
My own personal feelings on the matter of natural scrolling are that I...
July 2011
1 post
3 tags
My friend Kate's iPad got flattened like a book.
My friend Kate’s iPad got run over on the highway. It got flattened like a book and separated into layers.
In her words: ‘The iPad2 was 3 weeks old and Ercu put it on the roof of the car and forgot about it. We found it 2 miles down the road, 2 days later. He said “there it is” and I said, that’s not it, that’s a catalog. I couldn’t believe it —...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
Apple _is_ iOS.
This hit me the other day. iOS and the app structure is modeled after the way Apple itself is organized. (I don’t have very much inside information on how the teams at Apple are structured, but from what I know, the metaphor feels right. I’d welcome additional examples that illustrate the point further.)
Small teams working on one thing at a time with constrained resources == a single...
May 2011
2 posts
Every project needs a graveyard
Developers don’t want to delete code because it might be used down the road. Every project I work on these days gets a “graveyard” folder in the main source tree where people can put code they don’t need any more but don’t want to delete forever or lose track of in the repository history.
I find that this makes a HUGE difference in keeping the source files cleaner....
All I want is a compact digicam that takes good...
Here’s what I’ve been looking for in a compact camera:
1) f/1.4 fixed 50mm equivalent lens.
2) 8mp APS-C sized sensor.
3) No noticeable shutter lag.
4) Aperture priority mode when shooting without flash.
5) Shutter priority mode when shooting with fill flash.
6) Fast autofocus.
7) Completely retractable lens, pocket-sized form factor (elph-ish would be nice, but slightly larger...
April 2011
3 posts
How to swap two variables without using a third...
Method 1:
> string1 = "sssss"
=> "sssss"
> string2 = "ttttt"
=> "ttttt"
> string1, string2 = string2, string1
=> ["ttttt", "sssss"]
> string1
=> "ttttt"
> string2
=> "sssss"
Method 2:
> string1 = "sssss"
=> "sssss"
> string2 = "ttttt"
=> "ttttt"
> string1 = [string1, string2]
=> ["sssss", "ttttt"]
> string2 = string1[0]
=>...
3 tags
A recent list of iOS apps I like
Facebook - iPhone only. On the iPad, I really like Social, but the authors stopped developing it and pulled it from the store. None of the other iPad clients even comes close, though Friendly is passable.
Dropbox
DuckDuckGo - front-end to duckduckgo search. Not necessary, but convenient to segregate search from general browsing
Omnifocus (nice on the iphone, stellar on the iPad)
Omnigraffle...
3 tags
A short ruby script to pull your twitter followers...
#!/bin/env ruby
require 'twitter'
username = 'fields'
def get_cursor_results(action, items, *args)
result = []
next_cursor = -1
until next_cursor == 0
begin
t = Twitter.send(action, args[0], args[1], {:cursor => next_cursor})
result = result + t.send(items)
next_cursor = t.next_cursor
rescue Twitter::BadRequest
puts "Bad request, waiting an hour to see...
February 2011
1 post
4 tags
What's really important about hashbangs -- #! #...
Recently, a few large sites have been redesigned to use a #! separator in their url structure, notably twitter and the entire gawker suite. In short, it lets them serve their entire site as one single HTML page with a chunk of javascript, and the browser handles loading the actual content of the page from the string after the #! separator. This has been causing a fairly loud uproar in the internet...
January 2011
1 post
Feedback to Skype on the new v5 beta
Dear Skype:
I very much dislike most of the changes in the Skype 5 beta - nearly everything I do with Skype has gotten more tedious. Some features that were poor in earlier versions have gotten worse.
Some examples:
1) I often keep many many chats open at once. The interface for how to create a new ad hoc chat with multiple participants is completely inscrutable. I almost _NEVER_ want to...
December 2010
3 posts
2 tags
What's the rationale for null-terminated strings →
1 tag
25 tips for intermediate git users →
Very helpful.
October 2010
2 posts
2 tags
How to use MongoDB to collect summary stats
When you have a lot of disparate jobs running in lots of separate processes across many different machines, it’s really helpful to collect various stats from them about how they’re doing. I’ve found mongodb to be very helpful for this. For my purposes, storing daily counts is sufficient and keeps the collection from getting too big.
The thing that makes this particularly easy...
Piping command line output to the clipboard on OSX
Apparently, you can pipe output to the pbcopy binary, and it will put the output of the command directly on the clipboard. Useful!
I have a ruby script that dynamically generates my email signature to include links to a few of my recent posts, and it’s really handy to be able to copy this directly to the clipboard instead of having to go through a file.
...
August 2010
3 posts
Here's a little bookmarklet for turning github...
rdoc.info is a great resource for seeing the documentation of ruby projects. Here’s a little transforming bookmarklet you can click on while on the main page of any github project to take you to the rdoc.info page for that project.
Just drag this link to your bookmarks bar:
rdoc lookup
Depending on your browser’s security settings, you might have to edit the text of the address...
Maniacal Rage: The Problem with Facebook's... →
Here’s the thing about Facebook that really gets under my skin: They are slowly incorporating the features from every other independent web application on the internet. This is not inherently a problem—companies get bigger and they begin to have the resources to widen their feature set—the issue…
Except that Facebook has never competed on feature set - they’ve been very careful to...
3 tags
Converting Pages files to HTML
For some reason, Apple removed the “Save As…. HTML” option from recent versions of Pages, and wants you to go through iWeb instead. I found that to be fairly cumbersome, and iWeb seems to want you to make a whole formatted site instead of just dealing with an individual page. I tried converting through .doc or .pdf as well, but the results were pretty terrible. The best solution...
June 2010
1 post
2 tags
Some iPad apps I like
For connecting to my home Mac, I use Desktop Connect outside the house, because it’s got ssh proxy support. iTap VNC is a nicer client, and I use that while I’m in the house. iSSH is a decent ssh client, and is supposed to have VNC support but I’ve never been able to get it working.
Netflix - stream videos and manage your queue
AirVideo - install a server on your Mac and...
May 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Eye-One Display 2 is much better than the Spyder...
It’s certainly possible that the Spyder 3 is worlds better than the Spyder 2 was, but I recently replaced my ailing Spyder 2, and decided to try an Eye-One Display 2 instead. The Spyder software has never worked really well under Snow Leopard, it’s always taken a pretty long time to run. With multiple monitors, that adds up. After I took the Eye-One out of the box, I immediately ran...
1 tag
How Google should approach Social
After several false starts, Google is looking to turn over a new leaf and hire a brand new “head of social” to define their social strategy. Yes, I have a lot of critical things to say about Google, but I think it’s an interesting exercise to think about how they could unseat Facebook. So here are some random unorganized thoughts about how Google should approach their social...
April 2010
2 posts
1 tag
HTML5 presentation in HTML5 →
Nicely done.
2 tags
A brief review of interesting things about the...
Here’s my brief review of the iPad so far:
1) There are some annoying but real hardware limitations. I don’t expect them to be fixed until the next rev, roughly a year from now. Notably, the device needs more RAM than it has. This may be mitigated through software revisions to be more clever in using what’s there, but it’s a ding. The battery life is awesome, but it has...
March 2010
12 posts
Good article on technical aspects of lens... →
Tim's Daft Junk: Tuesday Night Tech - MongoDB UI... →
This week I’m focusing on UI options for administering MongoDB. Sure, you could use the javascript command shell “mongo” from the command line, but a lot of individuals out there are churning out viable options for administering the popular document-oriented database. All of these tools are…
