The gentrification of San Francisco

Interesting:

City officials estimate that there are over 40,000 illegal in-law units attached to San Francisco properties, and they account for about ten percent of the city’s housing stock. Most of these units were constructed during World War II, when workers flooded to the Bay Area to take wartime industrial jobs; today, property owners often choose to rent them to lower-income tenants under the table. Historically, San Francisco has had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding illegal in-law units; ...

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Assumptions to avoid when starting your web startup

I have seen $1 million dollars wasted in what turned out to be a year long brainstorming session. I have seen self-doubts rationalized as doubts about a product, and honest doubts about a product transformed into tests of personal self-worth. I have seen smart people lose their bearings when they face the test of the market. Startups are hard, and the public’s reaction to your product is always personal.

Pasha Galbreath and I continue to give talks to first-time entrepreneurs ...

Criticker gives away all of its users passwords

Criticker gives away all of its users passwords in plain text. Of course the site is written in PHP. While you can make mistakes in any language, this kind of laziness is what you expect in PHP.

Every request contains the secret key in the url. So all I need to do is capture a single request sent by the app and I have the key. Easy.

My theory was that I’d get the list of users that the app had ...

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ONO sells for $9.5 billion and no one cares

Maybe it is the Europeans who do the right thing, and the Americans who get it wrong?

A Spanish cable company, ONO, built originally by Eugenio Galdon and mostly by my friend Richard Alden between 2001 and 2011, is in the process of being sold to Vodafone for around $9.5bn, and nobody cares. It is sad how entrepreneurial successes that don’t happen in the USA or are not related to the USA get so little press. ONO is a fantastic story ...

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Working with images using Clojure

I am intrigued by Mike Anderson’s “imagez” library:

How to monitor Clojure apps?

Interesting:

Powerful stream primitives

(where (or (service #”^api”) (service #”^app”)) (where (tagged “exception”) (rollup 5 3600 (email “dev@foo.com”)) (else (changed-state (email “ops@foo.com”)))))

Riemann streams are just functions which accept an event. Events are just structs with some common fields like :host and :service You can use dozens of ...

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How to bankrupt a successful software company

Interesting:

Quark 5 and OS9 was what we were used to, but it was pretty miserable. The things that stick out:

Restarting your computer and losing your unsaved work over software freezes was a regular part of your day. Like, many times a day. We had all these crazy workarounds to achieve certain effects like drop shadows or change-and-repeat. It was all pretty rudimentary and hard to standardize across many designers in a department. Shapes were pretty much a non-issue, so we had to ...

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The downside of Unit Testing

Interesting:

I’m back in Java-land these days, which is culturally very pro-unit testing. After getting exposed to it again for a few months again I’ve come to side with the author here. I’ve never really been comfortable with the amount of time certain people dedicate to unit testing, especially the TDD crowd, but in my hiatus something has arisen in popularity which has made it all the worse: mockito. Prior to mockito, unit testing was (more or less) limited to testing that ...

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Darren Holloway walks through the philosophy of Ring/Clojure

Darren Holloway has written a post that should be added to the wiki on Github where Ring is hosted. He covers all the stuff that had me the most confused when I started doing web development with Clojure. He offers easy examples in pseudo-code to get the basic ideas across. I wish every project on Github had an introductory tutorial written in this style.

An excerpt:

Ring Conceptually

Technically, Ring isn’t a framework or an application, but rather a specification ...

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What it is like to think you are talented when you are ignorant

Despite the “worst practices” approach, the thing worked.

I like this story very much. My own story is a bit different, circa 2000-2005 I built a CMS out of PHP, and I did eventually find good ways to structure it, and I remain an opponent of “object oriented programming”. But other than that, a lot of this story overlaps my own.

Despite what I now refer to as my “worst practices” approach, the thing worked. Every bad tutorial, every anti-PHP ...

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Emotional intelligence and success with Bitcoin

Or rather, maladaptive ways to deal with stress:

After Mt. Gox was hacked for the first time in summer of 2011, a friend asked Powell to help out, and soon, the San Francisco entrepreneur found himself on a plane to Tokyo. After landing, he rushed to Shibuya station, where he was met by his friend, Roger Ver, one of the world’s biggest bitcoin supporters who just happened to live across the street from Mt. Gox. Without bothering to drop off ...

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The difference between database indexes and database histograms

Several things occurred to me when I read this, some of them off-topic, including my use of MongoDb, and how I have been unthinkingly re-creating histograms without even giving them that name. I do not regard that as a problem with MongoDb, it gives flexibility by doing very little itself, everyone using it is hopefully aware of the need to re-create database functionality within one’s own app.

Then I asked myself the question: how does Oracle estimate that there are ...

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I still don’t get PAAS

This is the problem for me:

In my ideal world, deploying my apps wouldn’t require any platform-specific code, or if it did, that code would be portable between platforms.

If I have to be aware of my servers, at all, then I’m still doing sysadmin, and if I have to do sysadmin, I want all the tools of sysadmin. I don’t want to do sysadmin on a crippled account that limits my options. Maybe someday there will be a real PAAS such ...

The many problems with Bitcoin

Interesting:

I’m actually shocked that Mt. Gox did not lose money to a database screwup. There are so many flawed NoSQL databases out there that, if you adopt the technologies advertised as “hip” on techcrunch, you’ll most likely end up with a broken exchange (more on this in subsequent blog posts, because there are many funny examples that deserve their own discussion). It is quite easy for well-meaning developers to build an exchange on a database that loses transactions, or to ...

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The new Formal blogging

Like Chris Bertram, I have a certain nostalgia for the world of blogging that existed during the years, roughly, 2000-2008. I sad that the conversational aspects have moved to Twitter, and now the blogs are mostly op-eds, rather than conversations. I am also surprised to see it now being treated as something to be done formally.

To be fair, may of the new initiatives, such as The Conversation, Politics in Spires, and the LSE Blogs are great, content-wise. But they ...

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Russia mobilizes troops to occupy parts of the Ukraine

Russia mobilizes troops to occupy parts of the Ukraine.

I am speculating. What could Putin really hope to accomplish? And at what expense?

I am looking at Wikipedia:

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

Ethnic groups (2001)

77.8% Ukrainians

17.3% Russians

4.9% others / unspecified

The Russians are concentrated in the eastern-most provinces, and also in the Crimea.

Russia has 145 million people, the Ukraine has 46 million people, so in terms of the ratio of people, Russia invading the Ukraine would be a bit like the USA invading Mexico. Russia also has a ...

What is correct HTML syntax?

Matias Meno of Colorglare asks the question “TO CLOSE OR NOT TO CLOSE?”

This is from Ian Hickson in 2006, regarding the emergence of HTML5:

Regarding your original suggestion: based on the arguments presented by the various people taking part in this discussion, I’ve now updated the specification to allow “/” characters at the end of void elements.

To which Sam Ruby responded:

This is big. PHP’s nl2br function is now HTML5 compliant. WordPress won’t have to completely convert to HTML4 before people who ...

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Greedy bankers, the lazy poor: moralizing wealth

Interesting:

Sadly, Mr Rooney did not respond in the manner of one of his celebrated predecessors. But he should have, because the chant is wrong. Mr Rooney is not getting £300,000 a week because he is unusually greedy: in the improbable event of being offered such money, who among us would turn it down? He is getting it because he is unusually powerful – a power which is not entirely due merely to his exceptional skill.

Palace fans, then, are committing ...

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Corporate welfare in the USA, from state and local numbers

$110 billion just from state and local governments. And of course the Federal government adds in a lot more.

State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.

Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 ...

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Assortative Mating plays no role in current income inequality

Rarely does one see such blatant lying. Here a group of economists post a graph that very clearly contradicts everything they say, yet they go ahead and say it anyway.

The authors conclude that “rising assortative mating together with increasing labour-force participation by married women [emphasis added by me] are important in order to account for the determinants of growth in household income inequality in the US.” So, right out of the gate, a key influence not trumpeted in the headline ...

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Who should be in charge when policy actually matters?

Take the title of this post and change it so it is about technology:

Who should be in charge when technology actually matters?

I am intrigued by a Paul Krugman post in which talks about policy mattering.

Change the word “policy” to “technology” and this gets at my complaint about many of the tech disasters I’ve seen in recent years, from the companies I worked for, to stuff I read about such as the roll out of the website for Obamacare.

So ...

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The culture of girls and computers

Interesting:

It Really Is about Girls (and Boys)

Twelve-year-old girls today don’t generally get to have the experiences that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they get lured away by child molesters or worse—become fat! That goes doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then, in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting ...

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Bloated software promises a stability which might be a liability

Interesting:

IT organizations are facing accelerating pressure to support companies’ growing need for business agility, innovation, customer responsiveness, and adaptability. This pressure doesn’t stop with so-called systems of engagement. It goes all the way back to systems of record. In fact, the distinction between the two is starting to erode. Enterprises are responding to this pressure by upgrading application architectures within and around the system-of-record tier. They are starting to view the “stability” of their legacy applications as a liability rather ...

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Drupal is bloated software

Stuff like Drupal offers ease of use for standard operations, and yet, when I work with clients, I find they have very few “standard” operations. Everything needs to be customized, and that is where Drupal becomes difficult:

Drupal, much like many other CMSs, follows a development methodology that I call reverse development. It is the simple idea that the most fundamental moving parts of the technology have been already built for you, or are modifiable using a trivial UI, and ...

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What is a Spruce Goose software project?

I have worked on software that was just like this:

Now the Spruce Goose was trying to fly. People couldn’t take their eyes off it. Who could comprehend its size! Three hundred-foot wingspan, seven-story tail, 200 tons of plane with room for 700 soldiers. It upstaged even the ocean liners lounging nearby. There it was, $25 million worth of prototype seaplane, skating along toward take-off, engines cackling and fuming. Howard Hughes, America’s most publicized aviator, designed it, swore by it, ...

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