cabacon

Agreed. There was a nice post on HN recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714149) about combining fabric + vagrant to manage django deploys. The vagrant part handles the "use puppet or chef" part of provisioning, while the fabric includes the "run quick commands on the VM" part after the VM is already provisioned. I learned a lot from that!

I would love to see more details of the fabric+vagrant integration. For instance, you don't show how the prod/dev prefixes in your fabric commands are used to set the vagrant destination host, or the site urls. The vagrant way of things seems to be using "vagrant ssh". I know it sets up port forwarding to accomplish that, but how are you establishing the map of port# -> environment type? Just by convention, within the Vagrantfile?

I just don't buy into the "I didn't need X, so I will not provide X" argument. It is clear that toddler iphone apps are not required for learning. That doesn't mean they aren't good at what they do. And, even if they're merely neutral w/r/t learning, the kids demonstrably love playing with them.

The "love playing with them" seems to apply to sweets too. Kids love sweets. I love sweets. They're not the healthy part of the diet, but that's why they're intake-limited, not unmetered.

Mobile phones are useful too. When I was a kid, I was terrible about phoning home to let them know whose house I was playing at. Knowing that a kid has a mobile phone that you can reach them on is awesome. The other (cool?) stuff can just be a fringe perk for the kid.

So, I dunno. The alternative to minimalism isn't maximalism. Things like access to highly-attractive, disproportionately rewarding relative to their merits activities can be rationed. But I just don't see not letting a kid play with things that they think are awesome just because if they were to overdo it makes it harmful.

Indeed, the concept of self-metering is huge. I've never seen kids explode quite so spectacularly as when they are released from a restrictive regime into an environment where they have not learned the habits of self control.

You can also go for the INCITE or ALCC programs from the DOE: http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/

They award O(1 billion) hours to O(100) projects, and you don't need DOE funding to apply (or even be a US-based project). The catch is that your code has to be very scalable (to roughly 40k cores), and your science problems should be in line with the DOE mission.

If you don't need the https, you can just use proxy connect, per http://benctechnicalblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/ssh-over-conne...

You can use this to get ssh from places that only let you use the regular 80/443 ports.

However, see-also DNSSEC and http://benctechnicalblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/sshfp-dns.html

Though I guess DNSSEC puts you back at PKI ...

Huh. I find that shortcut consistency is actually a strength of the platform. Are you talking about inconsistencies between OS X's choice and the other OSes you use? Because otherwise, I don't see it. Only on the Mac do I know that I can use the same key combo (apple-,) to get to the preferences of an application, regardless of where it came from. And I'm not sure how apple-` is "more annoying" than alt-tab; apple-tab still exists for switching between applications. apple-` just switches between the windows of an application. I actually like that ability, and again, it's consistent across applications.

OS X may not be your cup of tea, and that's just fine. You just happened to attack what I perceive as one of its strengths, so I'm surprised by your choice of targets.

Minor nit: "my differences only make me that much more unique."

Unique is an absolute state. One is unique or not; there is no more/less about it. Per the dictionary usage guidelines, think about using something like: "rare, distinctive, unusual, remarkable, or other nonabsolute adjectives".

Sorry. This is my wife's pet peeve, and it has been drilled into my brain.

Can someone who understands this space well tell me where something like RepRap (http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page) compares to this, conceptually?

Daylite. It's mac-only, but I'm mostly using it for my own purposes, so that's not a dealbreaker.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

--Antoine De Saint-Exupery

See also historical recommendations: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1465816 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580073

The interesting bit is that their interconnect is Chinese technology. The rest of it, not so much.

Ugh! This sounds exactly like pseudo-context as described by Dan Meyer (http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=8002). There are so many awesome things to inspire someone in math, and slapping a popular movie character on rote drills seems like a misguided approach to motivating the challenge. I mean, on the one hand, good for you if you can find some trappings to make doing drills more fun. But while you're getting them to exercise skills, you're really missing out on the deep and fulfilling motivations that exist for math!

"If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough brute force." -- anonymous

There's a used book sale I know about that charges a fee on the first day of the sale, and is free thereafter. It's basically a tax on the resellers, who all want to get access to the mis-priced books. If you go to used book sales, you're more likely to go on the free days, and hence won't see the resellers.

I like the game programming story about the black triangle to illustrate this point: http://rampantgames.com/blog/2004/10/black-triangle.html

Particularly followed up with a pitch for the book to teach you how not to do these things that didn't happen. I agree that interviewers forget that an interview is a two-way street; you're pitching yourself as a fit for the interviewee as much as they're pitching themselves as a fit for your company. But it's such a good point, I was sad to have the fun anecdote turn out to be a marketing pitch for a book instead.

+1 for divvy, especially if you switch back and forth between an external monitor and the laptop display at different resolutions. I have a ton of app-hotkeys setup to resize everything to the aspect ratio I like after swapping resolutions.

Check out jumpcut too. It has a mode to pop up a bezel where you can keyboard your way through the various copy/paste buffers you've used. I use quicksilver, but I also run jumpcut just for its paste buffers.

If anyone found this interesting, you should check out "In the Pipeline", a nice insider blog in the pharma industry: http://pipeline.corante.com/index.xml

As a free bonus, his "Things I won't work with" sub-series is a great humor read about dangerous chemicals.

Quite related, I think, is preterition: the act of mentioning something by saying you won't mention it. I seem to encounter it from computer/math people a lot, it's nice to have a name for the action.

To pick nits, the iPod touch lacks the camera and GPS. An unlocked iPhone is more expensive than a locked iPhone. None of that makes the grandparent post correct, but it does bear pointing out that your alternatives are either inferior or cost more than $200.

There's the chrome adblock extension that is safari-enabled now too: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepj...

It doesn't look like there's a binary you can just install yet, but if you grab a (free) Safari Extension Developer certificate from http://developer.apple.com/safari/ you can build/install it yourself. It seems nicer than the old SIMBL adblock stuff, and will presumably be kept fresh because it's used by Chrome users too.

I'm still looking for a "keyword in location bar -> expand an URL" extension. E.g., typing "wiki foobar" in the location bar expands it to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foobar automatically. Is there one of those for Safari 5 yet?

I thought this was a clever way to get people to sign up for a google account if they didn't already have one for mail/voice/youtube/etc. The background was annoying, but if you wanted to change it, you had to create an account and use your own photo. Then it leaves you logged in, and they get search histories tied to individual accounts.

That's probably just paranoia, but seems like a side-effect they won't mind even if it wasn't their main intent. It's also part of the reason I won't stay logged into people's free webmail services after I'm done reading my mail, though.

I prefer to think of it as having bugs you just don't know about yet. Does anyone use the app besides you?

Try _Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity_ by David Foster Wallace.

co and ci are the old RCS commands, and they're why you can do "cvs co" and "cvs ci" with CVS.

For what it's worth, I found that the aesthetic of Aikido was typically appealing to people in the math/computer science fields. While I hold no strong opinions about its ability to make one a good fighter, I did think it was enjoyable, grounding, and beautiful. That combination seems to line up with the original poster's appreciation of Kendo.

"Ban the Debugger" was an unfortunate name for this post, because obviously debuggers are useful. Having worked in support, I always opened up a bug when log/console output was insufficient to pin down the problem a customer was having. The notion of (temporarily) banning the debugger seems great. I've seen some logging standards that you could follow, but the output still wouldn't be enough to nail down the cause of an error. If the failure of one test in (A && B && C) results in a single error, how were you supposed to know which of A/B/C caused the problem?

So, yes please, have some failure cases setup ahead of time, and send the logs to the developers and see if they can figure out which failure mode it was without getting any live access to the program. But don't call it "banning their debugger." :-)