talkingquickly

Not aimed at exactly this use case but the first two thirds of my book Reliably Deploying Rails Applications https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications is heavily chef focussed.

It's intended for use with Chef Solo but potentially the early sections on writing custom chef cookbooks may be of use.

True but I think people often assume, mistakenly, that SO will have a lower cost than RTFM. A great example is Postgres authentication, there are hundreds if not thousands of questions on this topic on SO, almost all of which would be answered by reading the very concise, very accessible section of the Postgres manual.

Not suggesting there's anything wrong with using SO for this but that the cost of reading the manual for these purposes would actually be far lower.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. What's more because of the focus on hyper growth, I think a lot of people are discouraged from working on valid problems which lack immediate potential for that kind of growth.

I feel like they may have lost any semblance of the "artist" part using that approach..

Or maybe four; http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours

I'd argue it does. Deserve as mentioned in the parent implies some sort of generally accepted human 'right'.

The length of the work day/ work week is fairly arbitrary and definitely up for debate, there are great arguments that actually a three day working week would make far more sense [1].

Imo describing a simple convention in terms of deserve discourages debate and so should be avoided. Something broader such as `a human being deserves not to have to work every waking hour to live` would have been more acceptable as it separates the underlying principle from arbitrary conventions.

[1] http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours

We built this for clothes (http://www.shopofme.com) a while ago. It did some fashion specific stuff on top of it but in essence the same principal, alerts when items drop in price.

Might be interesting to chat as I'm still running the site as a side project these days after the primary business model didn't work out. We built a fair bit of pretty solid tech for it so might at least be some knowledge share there? Contact details in profile.

If you're interested I'm currently writing a book on the subject of deploying rails apps, more info here;

http://deploying-rails-book.talkingquickly.co.uk/

I'd second this. Particularly CPU performance on Rackspace has been hugely worse than Linode on comparatively sized instances. To the point I've had to use 8GB instances on Rackspace for CPU bound tasks which are fine on 1 or 2GB Linode instances.

We're currently considering a migration from Rackspace to Linode for this very reason so we'll temporarily be running a complete version of our infrastructure on both and replaying traffic on both.

Once we've done this I'll try and post some detailed benchmarks.

Agreed, I think the author has mis-understood what it means. Quite a common one to get wrong though, for anyone wondering it generally means that stating an exception proves/ establishes/ implies that a general rule exists.

E.g. You may not play ball in the park within 20 metres of the road implies that the general rules is that you can play ball elsewhere in the park.

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

I've been thinking about building something like this for ages but never got around to it.

I'm working on a book about deploying rails applications and was hacking together a script at the weekend to extract words written per day from the git diffs. Will link it up to a version of this so can easily chart it and see when I'm slipping.

Looks like a great tool, good work!

Would that not mean that the cookie could still be re-used by a malicious user who had intercepted it, as long as the real user had subsequently logged in again?

I guess it reduces the attack surface (the genuine user must be logged in at the same time as the attacker) but doesn't completely solve the problem.

I'm about a third of the way through writing exactly that, covering deployment (capistrano) and basic server provisioning (chef), specifically for Rails apps. If you (or anyone) is interested my email/ twitters in my profile. Aiming to have it out end of 2013/ start of 2014 but would be happy to release it to a few people early for feedback.

Perfect, many thanks.

Absolutely, I've also done some proof of concepts like that but for production use the "in browser" experience didn't really cut it for my uses.

For me the exciting bit is being able to access devices from them.

E.g. I've been waiting for this for a while because you can write an app which communicates directly with an Arduino or any other serial device.

This means that a lot of special purpose desktop apps communicating with custom hardware can be written as Chrome apps and take advantage of the speed/ ease of UI development of web apps.

For one of the apps I maintain this will reduce the time it takes to make UI improvements from several days to several hours.

Slightly off topic but can anyone recommend a good book on algebra to get back up to speed before attempting to read these?

> Quote: "Opt-Out – The email must provide easily-accessible, legitimate, and free ways for you to reject future messages from that sender"

Precisely, there is no requirement for an opt out link. It seems hard to argue based on anything you've supplied there that replying to the email isn't covered by this. E.g. "Please reply to this email with the word unsubscribe" meets this guideline.

To quote the relevant section of the act:

"It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission to a protected computer of a commercial electronic mail message that does not contain a functioning return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, clearly and conspicuously displayed, that- (i) a recipient may use to submit, in a manner specified in the message, a reply electronic mail message or other form of Internet-based communication requesting not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from that sender at the electronic mail address where the message was received;"

Which explicitly states that providing a reply-to address which the recipient can reply to in order to opt out is sufficient.

The full text of the act is available here: http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0723041/canspam.pdf

> Absolutely false and universally discouraged -- never reply to a spam e-mail.

Bit of a myth, clicking an unsubscribe link gives the spammer basically the same information, e.g. that it's a valid email address. The spammer ignoring an email which meets this requirement is in exactly the same position as if they ignore an opt out link. Clicking on links in unsolicited emails is if anything far more risky than replying. Yes the link can be copy pasted but 99% of people won't know to do this.

>> I might be missing something with can-spam though? > I'll say.

Very much appreciate you taking the time to reply but based on the responses and reading through the site you reference it looks like my original interpretation of can-spam is accurate. If any lawyers out there who've been involved in cases care to weigh in I'd be very interested.

EDIT: Provide the relevant text from the act which confirms that an email reply is a sufficient opt out.

Not a lawyer so don't count this as advice but as far as I know, there's no requirement under can-spam to provide an opt out link, just that you make it clear they can opt out (e.g. by replying). [1][2]

That's a big difference if you're using database's such as the OP to find contacts to email personally and individually but in a commercial context.

I might be missing something with can-spam though?

[1] http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-com... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

I've got an rpi running as a NAS with USB External HDD's and it works a treat.

Took about half an hour to set up, everyone on the network can access it easily and my WD TV Live will happily play video directly off it without any significant time buffering.

Personally haven't had any issues with speed or maintainability, would definitely recommend giving it a go.

I built such a system with an Arduino a while ago using the bluetooth shield (a huge energy hog). They key was adding some basic "sleep when inactive" routines, it wasn't that creative, if I remember rightly it was about ten extra lines of code to have it sleep for a while if it detected it wasn't in use.

The one gotcha was making sure the board being used had a reasonably efficient regulator on it, some of them have regulators which draw a (relatively) huge idle current so putting the chip to sleep has almost no impact.

Hope that's of some use!

Please do, I'm also curious

think you might have an extra w there...

I don't think they create an account for you, they just compute a score based on your activity on social media accounts you already have.

So if you have a twitter account, they can generate a score for the twitter user using publicly available information and then if you sign up to klout, link these existing calculations to the newly created account.

This post from flurry [1] suggests that a big chunk of revenue is going to a small proportion of very successful developers (there was a HN post about which companies they were but I can't find it now).

That said it also suggests that revenue is increasingly moving down the long tail which may be a sign small app companies may become more viable.

[1] http://blog.flurry.com/bid/88014/The-Great-Distribution-of-W...

Indeed, and had the permission been on the extension itself rather than a dependency and there been explanation of why it requires the permission when other rest clients dont, I'd probably have given it a go.

I'd be really interested to hear more about why the dependency is there and what the interplay between the two extensions and the cloud bit of the service is?

Looks really interesting but shame it's dependant on https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/websecurify/emclbd... which requires "access to your data on all websites"

REST does look interesting. Tried to give it a go but it's dependant on also installing the "Websecurify" extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/websecurify/emclbd...).

Websecurify looks interesting in itself but requires "access to your data on all websites" permission which means doing a load of research into what it's actually doing etc etc which seems like a lot of effort just to try out a rest client.

Best of luck to them though, Postman made by workflow testing API's hugely more efficient so if they manage to improve on that it'll be a great tool.

Also worth considering Postman (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-clien...) I particularly like that it allows you to save groups of requests into "Collections" so you can have quick access to all the main API calls from one app.

You can also export these collections and share them with other team members.

This is particularly useful for sanity checking before deploys e.g. just running through each API call to make sure users can login and perform primary actions.

I'd agree with you on the slider not being a good use of space. But I'd argue that it does get some other things right which a lot of uk government sites fail on.

In particular the simple presentation of the primary services people access with the option to expand out for other less frequently used ones. This is a huge improvement on, for example http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/home.htm

I have to use that site quite regularly and pretty much the only way to get anything is googling site:www.lambeth.gov.uk with the service you're looking for.

Agree accessibility could be an issue although looking at the fairly prominent accessibility section at the top of the site, it does look like they've at least considered it. I don't know enough about accessibility to evaluate whether what they've done is sufficient.

Perhaps holding this up as how they "should" be designed is a step too far but to me it looks like a step in the right direction.