sketerpot

Considering that "Fred" deliberately burned down a client's factory during payment negotiations, I think that "asshole" is quite an understatement.

I was playing with FUSE, and had managed to mount a loopback filesystem. And then, for some ill-considered reason, I tried to delete the directory that I had mounted it inside.

I managed to Ctrl-C it before it ate any files in /home, but I still had some nasty cleanup work to get the computer back in working order again. Thank god for LiveCDs.

To anyone who learns the idiom, this code is fine, and perfectly readable. I don't even know Ruby yet, and it took me less than a minute to become fully comfortable with this kind of code. This isn't a huge barrier to "non-experts".

A periodic table will make the atomic number and element type easy to look up. You can get it on coffee mugs. It'll be fun.

This one isn't just a cache; it's a database with a simple key-value data model. It has very good clustering support. It can handle datasets too large for memory. It's fast, allegedly easy to set up (I haven't tried it), and you can communicate with it using existing memcached client libraries. I think it sounds like an interesting option.

I also think that, in a few months, Redis will probably have the same nice characteristics of Membase, but with a much nicer set of datatypes. Membase does everything I described right now, though, which is worth something.

To clients, it looks exactly like a memcached server.

Saying "probably" is a way of avoiding dishonestly over-representing his confidence in the marriage lasting. Obviously you're offended, but don't let that be an excuse to let your reasoning slip.

Why would any computer automatically run programs on USB sticks? It just seems like a really obvious security hole for negligible benefit.

Of course, it makes sense if you interpret it right -- but it looks at first glance like it's comparing absolute sales figures, rather than change from baseline for each.

I would actually really like for my search engine referrer headers to be blocked, even without the privacy concerns, for one simple reason: some web sites highlight the search terms they find in search engine referrer headers. That annoys the crap out of me, and I usually end up either closing the tab or going to the URL bar and adding and deleting a space in there, then reloading the page without referrer headers.

Web developers: please, please don't highlight search terms. What the hell is the point of that? Oh well; I guess it's soon to become moot.

I guess people will just have to use one of the many other BitTorrent search sites with similar features and torrent coverage. This sucks for the IsoHunt folks, but for the people actually sharing files, it's more of an inconvenience than a crippling blow.

Excellent basic guidelines. Some of these might overlap with yours:

* Give the user content that they can see at a glance. If you can glance at your web site without seeing content, fix it.

* Use readably large fonts. Even those of us who have good eyesight usually don't want to read small text, and there are a lot of people whose ability to read small fonts has deteriorated with age. You don't really need to cram as much text as possible onto one screen.

* Column width shouldn't fill the whole screen without a very good reason.

* Keep it simple!

I just wanted to point out, that is a really misleading graph. All the lines start at "100%", so the scales aren't comparable at all.

I remember the early 2000s. I devoutly hoped that Linux would get widely used in some way, even if it never really took off on the desktop. I wanted open source to be fairly common and well-accepted, and not just something that weird people wrote and talked about on Slashdot. And hacker-friendly open-source Linux-based smartphones would be great, but that was just too implausibly awesome to even hope for. I wanted pleasant languages like Python to get serious commercial use.

Now, all those things have happened or are happening. Want to get on board with cloud hosting in any way? The standard options involve Linux VM images. Languages like Ruby and Python are mainstream and well-supported. Android is disrupting the smartphone market, and has the kind of widespread commercial backing I never would have thought possible for an open, Linux-based thing. Microsoft is no longer an unstoppable leviathan; they've stopped being scary.

Occasionally I'll reflect on all this and chortle happily. I wasn't optimistic enough back in the early 2000s, and that's surprising.