Archive: 2013
Leaving Stripe
I just realised that last thing I wrote on here was that I had a job. That was six months ago. Well, I don’t have one any more: I left last week.
I seem to have a job
I’m not quite sure exactly how it happened, but I’ve got a job. One minute I was quietly doing some contract work at home on yet another Rails app; the next, I was halfway around the world, in a place I’d never been, interviewing for a job. Which I got.
Pandering to prejudice
It’s hard to express how profoundly depressed I am by the current state of politics in the UK. I mean, I try to avoid it, but I keep on hearing about it.
£53 a week
Ian Duncan Smith claims that he could live on £53 a week. I don’t doubt it. I could easily live on £53 a week.
Writing Rails apps without wanting to kill everybody
I don’t think it’s any secret that working on a significant-sized Rails codebase is not nearly as free and easy as any number of make-a-blog-in-fifteen-minutes screencasts would have you believe.
Rail Travel Vouchers
I complained earlier about receiving compensation for a cancelled train in the form of £25 Rail Travel Vouchers rather than a more fungible means of exchange, but they’re not as useless as you might think, at least if you live in London: you can turn them into Oyster credit.
One does not simply … (Turbolinks edition)
The web is a profoundly broken medium in many ways. The network is unreliable, servers are unreliable, and the human beings who write code for dynamic services are most unreliable of all. Nonetheless, amongst all those problems, one that I’ve never really found significant is the milliseconds taken to load and process a page’s JavaScript and CSS—and if that were an issue, I think my solution would be to optimise and minimise the JavaScript and CSS, not write more of it!
Thesaurus attack!
I received a scam email today that had obviously been put through some kind of automatic synonym replacement filter with results that were both amusing (see below) and pointless (because it was flagged as spam anyway):
One trillion bytes
I see that Google are offering 1 TB of free online storage as a sweetener for people who buy the rather expensive 239 PPI Chromebook Pixel:
Using UPnP IGD for simpler port forwarding
If your router or ADSL modem supports the UPnP Internet Gateway Device protocol (and most of them do), you can forward ports to services on your network much more easily and more flexibly than through the admin interface.
LRUG lightning talk: 1 + 2 = 3
Along with eight other people, I presented a lightning talk at LRUG on Monday night. Twenty slides, twenty seconds each, with automatic advance, a bit like Pecha Kucha or Ignite.
Lubuntu 12.10: problems and solutions
In my ongoing quest for computing minimalism, I’m using the LXDE desktop environment (via Lubuntu) on my new laptop in place of XFCE, which (via Xubuntu) I’d been using for the past few years. I’m happy with it: it’s fast, flexible, and it doesn’t get in the way. It didn’t quite work right out of the box, though. The fixes were all simple, but not so easy to find.
Notes from FOSDEM 2013
Given that FOSDEM has been going for thirteen years, that it’s all about open source development, which I’ve been involved with for about the same length of time, that it’s held in Brussels, where I used to work, that it’s enormous (about 5,000 attendees), and that it costs nothing to attend, it’s perhaps surprising that I’d never been before. In fact, I wasn’t even really aware of it until late last year.
Casualties of war
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. —— Aaron Swartz, Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008.
Mulled wine: theory and practice
In this part of the northern hemisphere, it’s the time of short days, long nights, miserable weather, historically implausible religious stories, and mulled wine. Well, it’s a bit past— Saturnalia is probably peak mulling time—but it’s still cold enough out to keep on mulling, and I’ve been iterating my recipe.
Stupid security questions
Wanted: Adblock for paper tickets
