aquark

This looks great! Any thoughts on hooking it up to a graph layout algorithm so you can specify the graph without the co-ordinates?

Yes, they are different. But that just makes it a substitution cipher with unique keys.

A one time pad requires a key as long as all the messages you want to encode since each key bit is only used once.

The actual docs for the sdk are at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb448854(v=of...

A link from the github page might be helpful!

Of course it really is frameworks all the way down. Unless maybe you're building systems by laying out your own transitors.

The trick is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of any given framework and match those with the constraints of your project.

Would this have any affect on whether issuing banks accept or reject payments?

This part of the process seams especially opaque and I've had far more customers than I would have expected have cards declined for no discernible reason.

I wonder if shared merchant accounts are a plus or minus here.

Good point. My javascript solution uses two hidden fields with very similar names. One that the script fills in and one that it doesn't.

Bots will either hit both or neither and get rejected. Screen readers/toolbars may be an issue, though the names would be hard to think what to autofill with. It has never come up in practice -- the reject message tells people to email us directly

If you have javascript turned off, you'll need to email directly too -- and the site won't work so there probably isn't much lost!

Cool idea -- what kind of spam protection can it offer though?

I'm not worried about the email address being in the open, but my original contact page form was getting hundreds (thousands?) of spam submissions a day until I implemented some simple javascript 'traps' to filter out the bots.

I've still not worked out why a bot wants to fill in a contact form with spam anyway, seems like a real waste of time.

That is an interesting point. You can of course always buy an annuity to benefit from the risk spreading whilst retaining control over your pension funds up to that point.

Are there products that let you do this pre-retirement as opposed to at retirement? If so they certainly don't seem as popular as the traditional save-to-65-then-buy-one approach.

Except, if you are running customer supplied code on the instance then you've made the sandboxing problem that much more difficult.

I'd much sooner have a clean VM to run my tests on than have to think about the ways the previous user might have left things in an insecure state.

I agree ... I've used Evernote on and off for years for occasional notes. And I still have to hunt for the 'new note' button everytime I want to click it.

In a traditional 'desktop style' app simply ported to the web this may be possible. But in a multi-user app that may not be the case.

What if the record you deleted was subject to some kind of uniqueness constraint. If another user has added a record that has the same data, then flipping the delete flag off again would not violate that constraint.

Sure, it could be handled by checking if the constraint is violated. but you rapidly run into a lot of code to implement that one feature and dealing with thinking of and testing all the edge conditions makes it much easier (& cheaper) to focus on other features.

I played a bit with both and they both worked well.

Tarsnap: easier to set up and use Duplicity: fully open source, and I think the restore speed was significantly faster ... but I've not properly benchmarked it apples-to-apples.

If you are backing up a lot of frequently changing files (eg. database backups) then tarsnap's bandwidth charges (probably caused by the underlying EC2 charges) can swamp the storage cost. Running duplicity against rsync.net avoids this.

If you cancel out of the Facebook sign up there looks to be a totally unthemed normal sign up page at http://webbify.in/accounts/signup/ ... looks interesting but possibly not ready for prime time!

Having an option to show the effective monthly rate (incl. the amortized up front cost) for light/medium/heavy reserved instances would be great ... I always end up creating a spreadsheet for those.

This would be very interesting to try -- I don't trust the GPS accuracy of my phone over short distances, so using GPS to detect pace changes could be error prone.

As an extra advanced trick: adjust the stride length for incline changes ... though I don't know how you get that information accurately enough!

Looks great.

Would still love to see a non-developer centric site to point customers at so they can understand who/what Stripe is in order to integrate with our site via Stripe Connect.

I don't think I'd characterize it as a loophole per se, since it requires being legally declared dead in the first place.

That is a pretty big hurdle to have to jump through!

Sounds like the author was acquired as well: "I’ve accepted a Software Engineer position at Planetary Resources starting in November"

I've used one of these 'vertical mice' for years: http://www.evoluent.com/

You'd have to pry it from my dead hands ... works, is comfortable, has lasted years and comes in a left-handed version!

Does anyone have any experiencing with OVH's dedicated cloud offering?

I'm looking at this as an option vs a small AWS deployment. Seems to offer a lot of the flexibility of virtualization at a much better price/performance point than AWS.

This definitely looks useful. I have a bunch of templates generated with the mailchimp tools that I've not touched in ages. Doesn't help that I've since forgotten how their tools work. Something like this would be a great way to prototype and quickly update them. I can cope with remembering how to copy and paste into a window even if it is once every six months.

But the 'Generate HTML with Inline Styles' button isn't appearing as a button (and doesn't do anything when clicked on) when running the latest Chrome on Win 8.1

I'm getting external monitoring failures that are firing on and off, but have no problem reaching the servers or the site.

Interestingly newrelic is reporting the site down at the same time it is reporting a normal level of load on it.

You could SiriProxy (https://github.com/plamoni/SiriProxy) as input to this to handle to speech-to-text part

I'm running this at home and it works great for adding custom actions to Siri

Anyone know how the fees in the industry break down then ... $3bn is < 0.05% of the transaction volume ... that seems tiny to me!

Though all I know is the headline rates quoted for most common processors where <2% seems very aggressive. Who gets the other 1.95% of that?

Do you mean square or stripe?

I don't see how Braintree and Square are interchangeable for anything other than physical point-of-sales use cases ... which doesn't seem like Braintree's sweet spot

Would be great if they could A/B test the text used. I found the JFK portion harder to read/understand and I don't think it was entirely the colouring.

Still, I think it is a cool idea and will give the bookmarklet a try for a while.

The usage report is cumulative, not instantaneous. The act of checking probably isn't a significant fraction of their phone usage.

So if for a given usage pattern the screen does consume 60+% (which is what I often see) then keeping it off all the time certainly helps ... but also makes the phone a lot less useful!

Same here -- I rewrote all my javascript code in Typescript and am very happy with the result.

No longer am I concerned about errant semi-colons or a stupid typo in a method name on an error handling path that a unit test missed.

tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/) handles encrypted database backups, but I've never had to restore. Production database is replicated to two other machines (different data centers) anyway so needing to fall back to a backup would require a huge disaster.

But other than that: * everything is in source code control, with clones of the repository in a few places * AMIs for the production machines (copied to multiple AWS regions for redundancy) Only taken every couple of months since they are just a pull & build away from being up to date. * Google/Dropbox for email, documents, etc using TrueCrypt for sensitive stuff

I don't really see the need for a full traditional backup process. When I did use one, I never found the time to fully test the restore process frequently so would have to doubt how robust it was anyway!