cleaver

I know what you mean... However, the upgrade process has gotten a lot more reliable lately. At least less problems for me.

The key thing I noted when I visited the home page of DropBox is that I instantly understood what they do.

I compared DropBox to the Box website. After wandering around several pages, I left without being 100% sure if they could do what I wanted.

The ability to offer a clear, concise message should not be undervalued.

Quite ironic, isn't it, how "abuse@example.com" is a conduit for abuse?

Spammers effectively killed that RFC.

I never use a catch-all. Deleting email would quickly exceed available time.

I go through the trouble of creating a new email each time. I've considered writing a script to make it easier, but my current mail provider makes that difficult.

The key motivation is not security, but if any account starts receiving spam, I will have a good idea where it is coming from. It also lets me shut off mail from any source.

Some services will use that as the username, others allow me to pick my own. Using a password manager helps this whole scheme. Now that I do that, I could go to random email addresses and usernames.

I tend to create a new email address for everything I sign up for. This makes a little harder to check :)

EG: twitter@example.com, facebook@example.com, hackernews@example.com

It also makes it a little harder for people to find me on social media. Not sure if that's a bug or a feature ;)

I grew up as a space junky, with NASA still running manned missions when I was a kid. It didn't take me very long to understand the concepts of gravity on the moon vs. earth. I trust that if I asked grade-school me, I'd get the right answer.

While it didn't take long to get the physics of the problem, it took a lot longer for me to grasp the social side of things. Specifically, if your grade six teacher says something stupid like this, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from correcting her. I wish I could go back in time and clue me in.

OTOH, if it's a university lab at a science and engineering school, then give 'em hell.

Shenzhen looks impressive. I haven't been there, but it looks similar to the Zhongguancun district in Beijing.

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

It was a while ago, but I worked for a place that was writing software for boxes that could be used to collect telephone toll data from old bar switches in an Eastern European country. The sales manager thought it would sell better if it was on Windows 95. I suggested to him that they could at least use NT so you could lock down access better. His response was: "Oh, I told them that now their staff can use Windows 95 whenever they want." #facepalm

Another bright idea was that rather than just collect the information and forward it to a central hub (the ultimate destination), the data would be transferred according to the organizational structure... first area level, then regional, etc.

The culture at this shop was like this... sales spec'd the software and there was no push-back allowed from the technical staff. Fortunately, I didn't work on that project.

Maintenance costs would be one reason.

One of Blackberry's key barriers to innovation was that they were unwilling to cannibalize their existing revenue. It was quite substantial revenue, so I would understand the beancounters' reticence.

To connect a Blackberry to your own mail server, you needed expensive software and the enterprise level of network service. While BB did start to offer consumer data plans, you could not use them with your own mail server. When the iPhone came to Canada, I did the math and traded the blackberry for an iPhone.

Warrantless surveillance certainly happened in 1950, but there did not exist the means by which data about almost everyone could be vacuumed up and correlated. It's entirely feasible to have an intelligence file on the majority of US citizens. In 1950, you would have to be in some way exceptional to have a file with the FBI.

Aside from the technology aspect, there was no Patriot Act and it would at the very least be difficult to detain citizens long term without charges. Sounds less free to me.

I'm always a bit wary of posts that tell me to "Stop doing X". I'm also pretty comfortable with regular expressions. They take you outside of the procedural comfort zone, but are a valuable tool that will pay off to learn.

Still, it's worth a shot trying to create a tool like this. What I don't get is how they would handle subexpressions.

My understanding of the reason for total abstinence is while there may be a shoulder in the graph (eg. more than 5 drinks a week) beyond which FAS begins to take effect, nobody knows where that point is. It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to run a controlled test for.

It would be great if we could tell expecting mothers: "have two drinks a week, you'll be fine." We don't know, so "don't drink at all" is a reasonable statement.

You could replace "in Europe" with "40 years ago", perhaps. Maybe not "hard pressed", but alcohol consumption certainly was pretty common.

I'm disappointed in Scientology.

Anywhere that I have a say in the matter, FTP is disabled. I've been a fan of rsync for years and have a bunch of scripts that can make the whole process seamless. That said, I'm starting to be won over by git deploys.

The reason I've started to like git is deletes. You can handle them with rsync:

rsync --delete

The problem is that some projects have content uploaded in the same file tree (simple CMS installs). This might not be an issue if it was structured differently (symlink to another directory), but sometimes it's what I have. Using "rsync --delete" would remove newly uploaded user content. Yeah, I could use the "--exclude" option as well.

With git, I can just "git rm ..." and the file will be removed on deploy. Content can be mixed in the same tree and hidden with a .gitignore file. File content can be managed separately with rsync, if that's the best way. Just not FTP. Please.

That was my thought.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=secret.txt bs=1m count=200

^^^ this should do the trick!

It's a great technique for buttons, even without the nice design. I've wondered for years why this is not more common. Having a "submit" button change state is such better UI than those horrid messages warning you not to click twice—I still run into that from time to time.

My favorite bit of this history is that the first Lisp interpreter was written in Lisp.

(hmmm, maybe it would be a bit spammy if I recursed this statement several more times.)

> It's not going to work.

Whether or not it really is an attempt to go up against AWS, it won't work. IBM has not been successful in slim-margin markets like low-end hardware (or in this case hosting).

I currently have a dedicated server with Softlayer (at one point I had three). I actually started with Rackshack which was consumed by EV1, then merged with The Planet, then eaten by SL. I've been looking to move elsewhere, but this seals the deal. I believe IBM can't help but screw it up.

This is a good way to look at things. It is also very frustrating when there are administrative barriers to working the full stack. Not that I advocate handing out root password with your new employee badge, but I don't like it when it is easier to call the ops team than just take a quick peak yourself.

I'll be snapping up 2038.horse for sure. Once all our computer controlled hybrid vehicles stop functioning, I predict a booming market for horses.

I tried to register a Year 2038 related domain in the late 90's. Anything good was taken.

I assume the more interesting aspect of Y2038 will be the societal... Will we all be stocking our bunkers with 5 gallon pails of dried pinto beans and arming our personal attack drones?

I'd like to think we'll be a bit wiser, but somehow doubt it. Software is full of date related bugs and fails all the time. The world didn't end before, during, or after Y2K. I don't think it's ending in 2038.

Nothing wrong with features themselves, it's just the human propensity to develop new workflows around those features. Keeping the features away won't keep the new workflows away... I've seen an Excel spreadsheet used for "extra tracking" of Trello cards.

tl;dr - Jira

Alas, "Stay away from rebase" will get more clicks than "Git-rebase caused me some problems and I should be more careful". I've found rebase essential in maintaining nice clean feature branches. Occasionally I run into issues, but I make sure I can back out of any changes even if it means copying the whole damn repo to somewhere else on disk.

And if you drink a whole lotta lattes, you will start to feel stronger gravitational attraction to nearby masses such as the earth.

:) "New Java 0-day Vulnerability" is like the headline: "Dog bites man".

"New Java 0-Day Vulnerability Not Being Exploited in the Wild" is the "Man bites dog" headline. :P

Agreed. If you're using a tactic to get your way and with the assumption that you are the expert (and the other person is wrong) then you are missing out. In my experience, the best solutions came after those discussions where you get the other party to explain their motivations. The result was always better than I could have come up with myself.

When in a position of authority, I had the opposite problem: I often couldn't get people to disagree with me. This made it impossible to get to that discussion. (Maybe my ideas really were perfect, but I doubt it.)

SublimeText is a great choice... I especially like tools that are multiplatform. I use Thunderbird as my mail client for just that reason.