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damncabbage

3,050 karma · joined August 2, 2010

Ruby/Haskell/JavaScript webdev based in Sydney, Australia.

  rob@robhoward.id.au
  http://robhoward.id.au
  http://twitter.com/damncabbage  
  http://github.com/damncabbage
submissionscomments
damncabbage··on A new Gmail inbox
> I think that labels become problematic because the more things you label, the closer looking at "All emails labeled X" looks just like a search.

Labelling is a way of demonstrating intent, though. I want to see tax-related invoices for the organisation I'm helping out with; not everything actually has the words "invoice" in it, or mention the organisation.

Either you need to introduce AI for me to teach, or let me impose search information on the email itself. Tagging is just a way of doing the latter.

damncabbage··on Should String Be An Abstract Class?
Unless it's in a URL. (This is why URL-safe Base64 versions exist... Which can then in turn be inappropriate for other places.)
damncabbage··on Kim Dotcom has a patent on 2-step authentication
Sorry. I think was Poe's Law[1] in action again.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law

damncabbage··on Kim Dotcom has a patent on 2-step authentication
None of this would benefit anyone other than Mr Dotcom.

(Payback to who for what exactly?)

damncabbage··on The Yahoo board has approved a deal to pay $1.1 billion in cash for Tumblr
Of a sort. It was rewritten in C++ and Perl (http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...), but is still an active product in its new form.
damncabbage··on \d less efficient than [0-9]
Ditto PHP:

  php > var_export(preg_match("/\d/", "1"));
  1
  php > var_export(preg_match("/\d/", "۳"));
  0
damncabbage··on Git pull --rebase until it hurts
I'm very confused. I work entirely from private feature branches; I use GitHub pull requests to manage merging those into master, but never touch master myself.

Does this fit into the above workflow at all, or is it only for those who are working off master or sharing branches with other developers?

(I usually follow something approximating this flow: http://julio-ody.tumblr.com/post/31694093196/working-remotel...)

damncabbage··on Don’t Launch Your Product
"Our plan was simple. Launch the app and generate enough buzz for 25-50,000 downloads ..."

Is this ever a realistic goal?

damncabbage··on Dumped by Google
What do you use for spam filtering?

I've had terrible trouble with SpamAssassin in the past; can you share an effective config, and are there pre-built spam/ham databases around so you don't need to go through the entire training process?

Are you checking RBLs on a regular basis, or is an SPF record and a reputable VPS provider enough to keep you off blacklists?

Any other tips for someone wanting to try their hand with a VPS + Dovecot + Postfix setup (assuming a Linux sysadmin background)?

damncabbage··on San Francisco Hangout Becomes Casualty of Tech Boom
Some particularly good ones:

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/09/28.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/10/09.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/09/11.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/06/13.html

* http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/06/01.html

damncabbage··on What you can do with the Gimp
And unfortunately some more basic features. :(

I've been using GIMP for the last eight years now, and I still run up against:

* Bad text handling. Can't kern individual letters, just coarsely set tracking for the entire block; this is particularly bad given Linux's decidedly average font rendering.

* Fuzzy Selection needs a lot of manual cleanup.

* CMYK. I have to jump over to Adobe tools on the Macbook whenever I want to work with things destined for print.

I'm not a professional graphics/design guy; I'm a mostly-backend web developer who dabbles in graphics and print design on occasion. I want to love GIMP, I really do. :(

(I'm running GIMP 2.8 on Ubuntu 12.10; I've been a Linux user since Red Hat 7.2, so it's not a Noobuntu issue.)

damncabbage··on [dead]
From the first image:

  1: ALONE
  2: BROWN

... Very classy, 4chan. :-|
damncabbage··on The best QBasic game ever?
It's not white-space sensitive; "FOR" is the start of the loop, and "NEXT p" is something approximating the end (a goto or sorts).
damncabbage··on Explosions near Boston Marathon finish line

  "One of those, a person in whom there is some interest, is
   a young person who was here on a student visa,"
  "Being aggressively questioned now."
I hope this is just NBC News being over the top.
damncabbage··on The Worst Password Tips
A hardware keylogger, sitting between keyboard and machine? No.

A software trojan, that can capture keystrokes, mouse movements, selected text, screenshots... Most certainly yes. :(

damncabbage··on Show HN: Hospice.io – Vagrant configurations generator
Why?
damncabbage··on Show HN: Hospice.io – Vagrant configurations generator
It's now been renamed to http://rove.io (301s to it).
damncabbage··on Keeping People
Well, in the places where I've seen it done right, the code reviews happen before the code is committed.

Do you mean before the code is merged? Either programmers at these places worked directly together (eg. pairing), or they weren't using a DVCS like Git or HG.

We use GitHub at work, with code-reviewed Pull Requests. You do you work (pairing as you want), then ask for it to be merged. It gets reviewed by at least one peer, and you get feedback, discuss and make changes, and then merge those into trunk.

You get the benefit of code review, while also being allowed to carry on with something else in the same codebase without sitting on your butt waiting for a code review.

(Has anyone else tried this and had good or bad results?)

damncabbage··on Twitter Music will integrate Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Soundcloud, Vevo and Youtube
They also act like dicks and don't pay artists. :(

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57332246-261/grooveshark-e...

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/101311cc

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120405grooves...

damncabbage··on Keeping People
In that situation I either try to switch teams (if possible), or move on and just provide feedback during the exit interview.

If the manager's even a little bit politically-minded, you're gonna have a bad time if you try to fix the situation while he's still your boss.

(Sorry, the cynical codger in me is talking.)

damncabbage··on Git koans
-h is not a valid option. You could put --floogahbar in there and it'll give you the help by way of response.
damncabbage··on Die Git Die
you list, move, rename and delete branches with branch, but create branches using checkout? Seriously???

  git checkout -b new-branch
... is a shortcut for:

  git branch new-branch
  git checkout new-branch
You can create the branch or otherwise manipulate it without actually checking it out, so it's useful to have it separate and have a shortcut.

(I agree that git's interface is terrible, but I disagree that this is one of those cases. :) )

damncabbage··on Updated Packages – Python 3.3
One big reason for moving to 1.9 is that 1.8 is hitting EOL in June[1]; this means no further security patches either.

(The plan for this was originally announced[2] in 2011.)

1. http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-dev/4...

2. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2011/10/06/plans-for-1-8-7/

damncabbage··on Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
I pulled my old joystick out I'd kept for the last ten years, only to realise my PC doesn't have a serial port. Warning!

(I've no idea how long I haven't had a serial port. Which makes it worse.)

damncabbage··on Explicit vs. Clever
Party time with Ruby:

  orders.map(&:total)
... Where :total is a symbol, and & is asking :total for the Proc version of itself (a Proc being an anonymous function of sorts), and map is then calling that Proc with a single argument (an order from the list of orders).

More detail: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1217114/3528

damncabbage··on Making a Physical Product
HN auto-links URLs in your post (eg. http://supplybetter.com), but you need to include the http://.

(I find auto-linking lowers click friction for me, personally.)

damncabbage··on A Tale of Two Interviews, Part 1
Seriously? Australian here; longest interview I've had is two, but they're usually an hour long at most. There may be two rounds of single hour interviews sometimes.

(How are you supposed to take five hours out? Ask for leave in advance and hope the company doesn't mind waiting a fortnight for you to be able to show up? I usually interview before or after work.)

damncabbage··on Schema Migrations for Django
Is it anything like DataMapper's[1] auto_upgrade!() and model definition approach?

1. http://datamapper.org/why.html

damncabbage··on Test-Driven Development Bypasses Your Brain
Could we please stop arguing? This back-and-forth with absolutes is akin to useless political campaigning. http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/03/06/ThePragmaticsO...

(More specifically, read everything from the "The Pragmatics: So when do I not practice TDD?")

damncabbage··on Uber Drivers Protest Outside the Company’s San Francisco Headquarters
Telstra (Australian Telco) internally uses a number rating for B2B sales and sales-support teams, and point inflation has made it useless. The Sales guys end up needing to explain to the customers what the numbers really mean; 8/10 was being left for "great service", but that qualified as a failure by the internal metrics.

(To make it even worse, the management accidentally let the sales meet their target once; some people actually got their bonuses, so upstairs bumped the minimum target score again.)

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