engtech

Did anything ever come from the book he was talking about writing?

He was 19 when he wrote that blog post.

I'd actually trust the OK Cupid guys to do an interesting take on this.

Their blog has been a fantastic source of interesting articles of the things they have discovered with their unique dataset.

http://blog.okcupid.com/

Safe Browsing Diagnostic page for techcrunch.com/2013/01

What is the current listing status for techcrunch.com/2013/01?

    This site is not currently listed as suspicious.

What happened when Google visited this site?

    Of the 694 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 49 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2013-01-15, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2013-01-15.

    Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including adsbyisocket.com/.

    1 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including wp.com/.

    This site was hosted on 3 network(s) including AS13768 (PEER1), AS22576 (LAYER3), AS1668 (AOL).

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

    Over the past 90 days, techcrunch.com/2013/01 appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 2 site(s) including ow.ly/, t.co/.

Has this site hosted malware?

    No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Next steps:

    Return to the previous page.
    If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google's Webmaster Help Center.

I had the same issue with my Galaxy S3 where trying to get my dad to understand how to use Google+ hangouts for video conferencing was very hard.

Having the hangouts be part of the Google+ infrastructure is hurting it's uptake because most people see Google+ as something they don't bother using because they're on Facebook instead.

awk script to convert abook to vcf vcard (found with a search, haven't tried it out)

http://blog.karssen.org/2010/05/24/script-that-converts-a-sq...

For those who haven't played Legends of Grimrock before: it's fun, but some of the puzzles are difficult to the point where you'll stop playing the game or look up solutions online.

Some of the puzzles are difficult to the point where even with the solution online it still means you have to repeat it 5-10 times to pass.

There's a small community modding new maps for the game: http://grimrock.nexusmods.com/mods/top/

Infographic on gun ownership around the world that was published by a Canadian newspaper after a public shooting at a mall.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/28/guns-ownership-aroun...

note that the black circle is not scaled by the population of the country so it isn't visually as useful as it could be.

Interesting take aways:

   * 88.9 guns per 100 U.S. citizens
   * 45.7 guns per 100 swedish citizens (next highest country in the world)

My carrier phone in Canada finally updated to Jelly Bean 4.1 last night. My dad has the same phone bought the same day and he's still on the pending list to get the update...

so, not fast?

I will be borrowing this: "its syntax isn't just simple, it's simplistic"

I've lost hours to the syntax errors in comments before. Coupled with TCL's bad error messages it's maddening.

   #syntax errors in comments are dumb
   
   proc test {a b} {
   } # test


   % source tmp.tcl
   wrong # args: should be "proc name args body"

How long does it take to find that one in a 1000 line file? It doesn't even give a file name or line number.

This also breaks, because comments are syntax.

   proc some_proc {a b} {
   
   } # some_proc

We use TCL for a couple of core scripts at work because most of the tools we spend millions of dollars on in licensing use TCL as their embedded interpreter (I work in EDA/semiconductors).

I find the most unproductive use of my time at work is when writing TCL code. Switching to TDD has helped a lot, but I still find the language maddeningly frustrating.

I hate that this is both valid syntax with wildly different meanings:

   set env(VAR) "value"
   set $env(VAR) "value"

I hate that TCL error messages have no prefix, so there is no way to grep for them (the 3rd party tools merge STDOUT and STDERR to a single log).

I hate that the TCL error message line numbers are RELATIVE TO THE PROCEDURE instead of relative to the file.

I hate that the language is fully interpreted and not compiled, so you can have a syntax error in a code branch that isn't triggered just lying there for months if you don't fully unit test every code path.

I do not understand how anyone could like TCL unless they were using a linting tool to give the robustness of debugging that most other languages have.

Because of our code base and the 3rd party tools I'm not able to lint our code and it is a brutally painful language to debug.

The craziest thing about looking through the warrants is the amount of charges that are either about property or drugs.

The media focuses so much on violence and sexual assault that I thought there would be more violent offenders in the mugshots.

"They simply avoid the problem in the first place, so not knowing is irrelevant."

I always see this as a quality that I'm missing compared to other coworkers. They'll go for the simple implementation with the complicated usage pattern while I always aim for the complicated implementation with the simple usage pattern (to a point).

We've had a lot of discussion of your simplicity-is-not-simple article which did a great job articulating the trade-offs.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/simplicity-is-not-a-simple-co...

I never thought I'd see verilog-mode, haskell-mode and scala-mode in one person's dot emacs file.

I'm in telecom semi and I know companies like Huawei are using a model where they have 100s of engineers in China with less than one year experience with senior engineers in other countries teaching them.

off-topic: you should edit your comment to get rid of the three spaces before your bullet point.

The three spaces indicates pre-formatted text, so it won't line wrap.

It creates scrollbars on your comment, so less people will be able to read your points.

The bigger problem I had with that snippet is the exposed string. I haven't seen the original video this is from, but I can't wonder but removing this hardcoded string was the bigger reason.

Encoded strings like this are a maintenance problem lying in wait.

How do you grep/search for it? These are all equivalent:

   if (page.hasAttribute("Test")) {…

   if (page.hasAttribute('Test')) {…

   string test = "Test";
   if (page.hasAttribute(test)) {…

   string cheese = "Test";
   if (page.hasAttribute(cheese)) {…

You make a really cool product I'd never heard about before. Definitely of interest to parents who let their kids play with an ipod touch.

Kudos.

(link for the lazy: http://smallworks.com/ )

I love your slogan: "brick your phone"

off-topic, but it's almost December.

I just came across a recipe for freezing coffee in ice cube trays, and then putting it in with Baileys and vanilla vodka.

This sounds like a winner for the annual "It's a Wonderful Life" every time they say George Bailey drinking game.

Why do I get the feeling that dcurtis' friends are going to endlessly chide him whenever they go out for dinner?

I wish one of my friends would write an anecdotal story like that.

Yeah, but for all that running it on Linux is a pain-in-the-bum, Netflix is on iOS, Android, and most set-top TV boxes.

I have 8 devices in my house that can play Netflix and only 1 ubuntu machine that can't -- but only because I don't want to go through the headache of patching WINE.

People have gotten Netflix working on Ubuntu before.

If people care about this kind of thing?

Back when I ran a blog, I did 60k hits in a day once on feb 14th 2007. I stopped writing it in 2008.

My old blog was averaging 15k views/month in 2010, and is now averaging about 12k views/month in 2012.

blog was actively written between 2006 to 2008

Here are the views/year summary:

   2006 -   454,315 views for the year
   2007 - 1,843,164 views for the year,
   2008 - 2,028,296 views for the year
   2009 -   865,304 views for the year
   2010 -   192,581 views for the year
   2011 -   157,805 views for the year
   2012 -   141,126 views for the year

http://engtech.wordpress.com

Short variable names are fine if the variable exists for a short time (eg: if the variable lives more than 5 lines of scope then use a longer variable name).

But don't use single character variable names. We've all gotten in the habit of using i,j,k as loop variables, but ii,jj,kk are absolutely a better choice for the simple reason that you can use any text editors' search function to find "ii" without any false matches, but "i" will have you searching all over the place.

TL;DR - using "ii" instead of "i" makes it easier to maintain code.

Setup was free when transferring from Rogers cable, I just had to buy a cable modem which I bought from Canada Computers.

Teksavvy has never been to my house, it was just a phone call to set up the cable modem.

If you're talking about the recent long gun registry, Canada has always had much stricter gun legislation than the U.S.

This website gives a walk through of the process required to legally obtain a gun in Canada:

http://www.howtogetagun.ca/

In 35 years of urban living in Canada, I've never seen a firearm that was not being carried by a law enforcement official. I do not know anyone who owns a fire arm.

This seems very different compared to some of the slogans I saw in the recent U.S. election where you could "vote and win a free gun". http://www.inquisitr.com/376318/vote-in-georgia-win-a-free-g...

"So, yeah, if a peaceful process of information flow could bring Afghanistan into the Twenty-First Century, I'm all for that."

I'm constantly surprised that when it comes to regime change that there isn't an effort to set up some satellites and air-drop some mobile smartphones with data plans designed with the same principals as one-laptop-per-child.

Look at what Facebook and Twitter did for the Arab Spring.

I don't know that the homicide rate is because of gun control. I don't think it is possible to directly come to that conclusion given the other societal factors.

But it's an interesting data point.

This article tries to dissuade that control gun is responsible for the low homicide rate in it's summary.

http://www.guncite.com/journals/dkjgc.html

"The idea that Japanese gun laws should serve as model for other nations is not uncommon. Some Americans propose laws even more severe than Japan's.[124] Often, the suggestion comes as an offhand remark in an newspaper editorial, but even when the suggestion is advanced by scholars, the reasoning is often superficial and unpersuasive.

L Craig Parker, an American expert on the Japanese police, proposes that the United States adopt Japanese gun control and also other Japanese strategies, such as a National Police Agency. Parker's brief discussion of guns, however, simply recites statistics showing that Japan has less guns and less gun crime. His only evidence that gun control would actually reduce crime in America is a study by Dr Leonard Berkowitz arguing that guns cause aggression. Actually, what the studies by Berkowitz and others showed was that people acted more aggressively towards other people if the other person was associated with weapons; for example, motorists reacted more aggressively to other vehicles slow to accelerate when a red light turned green if the slow car had a rude bumper sticker and a rifle in a gun rack.[125]

Summing up the perspective of many gun prohibitionists, one Japanese newspaper reporter writes, 'It strikes me as clear that there is a distinct correlation between gun control laws and the rate of violent crime. The fewer the guns, the less the violence'.[126] But the claim that fewer guns correlates with less violence is plainly wrong. America experienced falling crime and homicide rates in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1980s, all periods during which per capita gun (p.40)ownership, especially handgun ownership, rose.[127] And Japan, with its severe gun control, suffers no less murder than Switzerland, one of the most gun-intensive societies on earth.[128]

Japan's gun control does play an important role in the low Japanese crime rate, but not because of some simple relation between gun density and crime. Japan's gun control is one inseparable part of a vast mosaic of social control. Gun control underscores the pervasive cultural theme that the individual is subordinate to society and to the Government. The same theme is reflected in the absence of protection against Government searches and prosecutions. The police are the most powerful on earth, partly because of the lack of legal constraints and particularly because of their social authority."

I found that article from this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-l...

If you find that staggering, then absolutely avoid looking at Japan homicide stats.

Japan is 0.4 per 100,000.

Japan has had the strictest gun control in the world for the longest time, and has a homicide rate to match.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

Here's an ars technica article going into details about why "STFU and buy an SD card" isn't necessarily a solution.

"As such, even the 16GB that Microsoft promises on the 32GB Surface may not be readily available to end-users. Surface does, at least, have a way of adding storage that Windows itself will never use for its own needs; it has a microSD slot that works with 64GB cards.

There are wrinkles to this support, however. Due to the sandboxing and security used in Windows RT, apps need special permission to use this removable storage. Apps that just have permission to access your music, picture, or document libraries can't use the SD card. Worse, it's not possible to add removable storage to the existing libraries; Windows requires that all library locations be indexed. As a result, it won't index removable storage, presumably on the basis that it might get removed, which would cause the index to include information about files that no longer existed.

There is a trick involving Junction Points to make Windows not realize that the SD card is an SD card, but that is hardly what one would call elegant or easy-to-use."

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/surface-disk-space-a-...

Ripped from a source you have legal access is undetectable in most cases.

Downloading a copy over the net that someone else ripped can be detectable.

That being said, I agree that piracy is just piracy. In my mind grabbing something from bittorrent/usenet is the same as using a VPN provider to stream from a different country, is the same as watching an illegal streamed copy on some website, is the same as ripping a copy from a friend/public library.

Did you pay to access it? Does the copyright holder make it freely available? No?

Then it's piracy.

I switched to teksavvy and it's great. It was twice as fast a Rogers and cheaper. I routinely use about 250GB/month on teksavvy.

I had a lot of problems with quota when I was on Rogers because my VPN connection to work could use up 30G/month when working remotely for long periods of time doing 60-70 hour weeks.