Sad news indeed.
I would say it is appropriate for any of you who have had the pleasure of knowing Jim to add some information to his Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Weirich for those of us who didn't meet him.
608 karma · joined February 8, 2013
Host of Developer Tea. Co-founder of Spec. Engineer with the head of an economist and the heart of a teacher.
I would say it is appropriate for any of you who have had the pleasure of knowing Jim to add some information to his Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Weirich for those of us who didn't meet him.
The purpose, in my opinion, was fairly ridiculous. I'll tell a reasonably brief version of the story.
I moved to Atlanta to attend Georgia Tech for my masters. One late night, I was driving and took a right on a red light that had a "no right on red sign" accidentally.
Don't forget to check for no right on red signs.
No traffic was around and luckily no one was endangered, but I did receive a ticket (clearly the Atl police had set up a trap of sorts). Should have paid attention, but no big deal.
So the court date is approaching, and so is my first day of classes. In the rush of getting ready for the start of the semester, I forgot my court date.
Don't forget your court date.
The next day, in a panic, I call the courthouse to pay my ticket and any applicable late fees. I assumed that a late fee would cover the infraction and we'd all be on our way.
I paid the ticket. I paid the late fee. I forgot about the incident altogether.
Fast forward a few months, I was driving on campus on my way to class, early enough to get a coffee (yes!). I get pulled over for not having my seatbelt on.
Don't forget your seatbelt.
The officer took a few minutes and came back to ask me if I had anyone who could pick up my car. Of course I'm thinking, "Do I have a flat tire or something?", and he lets me know he's going to have to arrest me and take me to jail.
So I was put in handcuffs, on campus, and taken to Fulton County Jail, where I was fully booked into a holding cell. I could not call anyone to come post bail, because your "one call" was only allowed to be a local call, and you had to know the number by heart. I couldn't post the bail myself via card, of course. So, I spent 36 hours there. My parents even paid my bail, but somehow the bail didn't take effect (even though others arrested after me got out on bail).
Strangest 36 hours of my life, by far.
All of my clothes and belongings were taken, as is protocol. Not a single guard seemed to have any sense of regard for me (or any other person being held), uniformly ignoring simple requests like "can I have some water?" and "what time is it?". I was in a common holding room with about 10 others for most of the first day, until they did our physicals and booked us all into overnight cells. I was woken up to a yelling guard at 3AM to eat "breakfast." Everyone who had been arrested the day before was chained together (as in, chains around my waist) and taken to a prison court to see a judge via a camera mounted on a TV. The judge essentially looked at my case and released me, and a few hours later I was finally let out.
Turns out, when you forget a court date, your license gets suspended. For me, that meant I had to have someone take me to Alabama to have it unsuspended.
tl;dr; The crazy part of the justice system is, once the ball gets rolling and protocol is instantiated, your lost time is chalked up to collateral damage and "due process." Your sense of safety, clarity, and rights are removed, even in minuscule clerical cases like mine. I can't even begin to imagine the ridiculous feeling of being in jail and sexually assaulted for months, much less years, over something slightly more egregious than a suspended license.
P.S. My arrest was completely expunged from my record, but you can still find my mugshot online. My dad laughs at it every time he sees it.
It wouldn't be effective if it became a complaint board.
Very glad to see that the CEO cares enough to comment, though. Good faith there, even if the op was "against the rules".
I definitely think that there's no doubt about it: the FiftyThree Paper sales will certainly take a hit, and the brand is diluted hugely, especially for those who haven't encountered it yet.
This was obviously a conversation that Facebook had, and chose to do it anyway - not sure exactly what the result of the conversation was internally, but it almost certainly had to have some phrase like "well, if they sue us, we can handle it."
Remember back when Prototype was the dependency, and jQuery was young?
Any thoughts on doing a browser-level extension to bypass the email step?
I do love the data retention of this though.
This is why programming is fun - you can make things that are quite literally worth money for your own self.
A problem - a real problem - is something that doesn't yet have a solution. An exercise already has a solution.
Svbtle used to self-identify your work as selected to some extent. Now, what's the differentiator between your work and everything else?
Don't say "content" please. That's obvious. But a link was more dependable to me if it was from Svbtle. Not anymore.
Tangentially related not, someone needs to put something awesome at that spot. It'd be the real life version of hijacking faecbook.com hits.
http://randomstreetview.com/#wrua5_dhcmy_2m_a_-3
Seriously, this is a fantastic thing you've made. I'm enjoying it immediately.
Good insight.
OSS authors are not held to a standard defined by all of you - they are welcome to express themselves however they want. For instance, my mother would find Brainfuck quite offensive. That doesn't mean the author should change the name.
I think the play on words is quite clever. I also think that if anyone is being marginalized, it is the "bro" - identifying the stereotype and calling out common the stereotypical language habits ("bro ...no").
And now for my personal opinion... If you're worried about the cultural implications of the names of software (rather than things that ACTUALLY marginalize women, like lower average salaries, micro-aggression and objectification, and massive imbalance of gender in the hiring process), then I think you're probably never going to be happy with anything unless it's vanilla. The fine line between comedy and tragedy in the artistic side of programming is often misunderstood, so for now I'm going to go gem install bro.
As a second note, why don't we say things like Homebrew marginalizes the alcoholics or those addicted to coffee? Because that's silly, right? Right. Fight more important fights with the same vigor.
You'd expect a comment like "I'm caught up with some day job work at the moment" to show up, but this one is clearly pulling humor into the situation, so I think the responses are relatively in matching humor.
Specifically, if someone gains access to your physical computer and they figure out your LastPass password, what happens next?
If you choose to use LastPass, make sure you do it with a fantastically long, entirely random password.
Example: "3BA^h<VQgj+nL%KP$ (this was completely randomly generated at http://passwordsgenerator.net/)
For a little reasoning, look into how passwords are generally hacked. Usually, hackable passwords consist of words or l33t words (l!k3 th!5) that are somewhat related to the person. A massive number of people use the same words or patterns for these things, so a brute force attack informed by a l33t-smart dictionary (minus the definitions) often is the cause for a hack like this. Furthermore, in different languages, there are more frequently used letters and spelling conventions, which can inform the dictionary's ordering or choice of words. (Think: colour vs color)
However, if the person does indeed use a random sequence of characters, the average person doesn't usually go outside the alphanumeric range. If the password is only lowercase, that's 32 characters. If it contains uppercase, that's 62 characters.
So then, we can take that information and use it to understand the complexity of a brute force algorithm based on possible permutations and other info.
Take a look at this: http://www.passwordmeter.com/
(Disclaimer: I do not hold any type of CS degree or formal training in cryptography. I've listened to a few classes online though.)
I suppose whenever someone does indeed hack into the system, we'll finally find out the specifics of the weaknesses.
I agree that programmatic things should be done with programming. I also think that for those who are coming from CSS, the barriers are lower with something that has the shape of CSS.
And, the other part of this argument for pre-processors is that they "work." If I were to approach most junior front-end devs with a given programming language versus SASS to generate their CSS, most of them would pick SASS simply because of syntactic familiarity. Not a particularly compelling reason methodologically speaking, but the natural shift does make it a reasonably easy transition from purely declarative to pseudo-dynamic.
The purist in me agrees, but the practical implementation says these things are valuable.
It's not about Turing completeness. It's mostly about DRY and flexibility.
For instance, imagine using theme prefixes or conditionals.
For-loops are fantastic for grid systems.
The point of this article isn't "should you use a pre-processor" - it's pointing to the fact that if you use one, SASS has more natural structures for common tasks like for-loops or conditionals, both of which are indeed useful.
I plan on doing this for our team pretty soon.
I wish so bad that there was at least some kind of address for this. I highly doubt it will hit mainstream attention anytime soon again unless some kind of publicly accessible (read: marketable) scandal occurs to bring the news media around again.
If you'd like, you can shoot me an email (address is in my profile) and I'll email you when it's back up and running.
If you leave your code in a broken state, it will take some practice, but the idea is that it will liberate you from having to try to carry the cognitive load, because you have a natural reminder.
Also, if you are juggling 30 things, you're likely not writing your code well as a principle; limiting your work in progress will allow your "breaking" to be limited to a specific function/algorithm/task/unit test (or whatever).
Write a function that captures your TODO's, and set an urgency level. If the urgency is high, make it a fatal error (or whatever in your given language).
This is a great way to make TODOs much more functional and actionable.
Take a look at some of the weird tags you can find on Last.fm. It's valuable, but different than "categorization." It's more like "relationship."
As a part of the application, I also built a D3 visualization quite similar to the one in this article for the tastes of the individuals and the tastes of the location.
It's amazing how much you can learn about a person's taste, given the combination of their genre tastes. <hipsterbash> For instance, you can safely assume that if the person likes hipster-electro-pop, their love for old western twang country might be out of irony. </hipsterbash>