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> ...what idiot decided that ampersands...

    example.com/?a=1&b=2
    vs.
    example.com/?a=1;b=2

The second example doesn't need to be encoded in HTML.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3481664/semicolon-as-url...

grokson LXC 1.0 Released

http://sandbox.libvirt.org/quickstart/

Or even just:

http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/28545.html

...an selinux sandbox without the containers stuff.

grokson Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

> To say some more good things about Stripe, they have launched in a few places internationally, and we are still US only. We can accept foreign credit cards, but merchants need to be in the US. Hoping to fix that, regulations are hard.

You should have a form on your website where I can add my email address and then you can tell me when Balanced is available in my country.

grokson Fedora 20 released

> As if millions of users are suddenly going to forget about cat, head, tail, more, less, grep...

    $ grep shiz /var/log/messages
    grep: /var/log/messages: No such file or directory

WTF?

    $ ls /var/log
    README    dnf.log wtmp Xorg.log.0    ...
    $ head /var/log/README
    You are looking for the traditional text log files in /var/log, and
    they are gone?
    
    Here's an explanation on what's going on:

Crisis averted!

grokson Okay, Google, you officially beat Siri

You can have your event, flight, hotel and restaurant reservations, orders and parcel deliveries, and prompt for reviews or custom actions in Google Now by adding meta-data to your notification emails:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/google-now

From the other direction, you can have Google Now call back into your Android app, triggered by hot words, as demonstrated in the new version of Todoist:

https://todoist.com/blog/2013/11/todoist-for-android-adds-su...

I can't find any published API for the latter.

grokson CAR and CDR

Why did you type it's instead of it is? Is it really so much work to type one more character to justify this? :-)

The shell is a working language as much as English is. You'll spend more time using it than learning it, so get crackin'.

grokson Web.go – Web applications with Go

You could create a dummy interface which all your DoParams-like types could implement:

    type Params interface { IsParams() }

Also, you can get away with passing a nil pointer for reflection rather than allocating a nil struct:

    fmt.Printf("nil pointer to DoParams: %T", (*DoParams)(nil))
    fmt.Printf("pointer to nil DoParams: %T", &DoParams{})

(Which isn't going to be a source of gc pressure in this instance, but still...)

grokson Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won

In addition to reporting problems, you can edit it yourself: https://maps.google.com/mapmaker -- faster turnaround.

grokson Finding the right CDN for our startup

They don't set the mime-type on upload, or you set the mime-type on upload and they fail to set it when you download it via the Akami CDN?

I was planning to use Cloud Files and it's CDN. Thanks for sharing.

grokson Finding the right CDN for our startup

You're having problems with uploads only? What about downloads?

grokson Rackspace Launches Developer Discount

Not really good enough. It's unacceptable to ask your customers to expose themselves to unlimited billing liability. This is one thing that Google gets right and yourselves and Amazon don't: the ability to set a budget.

I bet if I didn't pay my bill on time you'd cut me off pretty quick. Why not let me tell you how much I've got to spend ahead of time so there's no nasty surprises when I get back from vacation while some bot has been rampaging through my site?

Of think of it this way: today's offer is designed to get people using Rackspace by lowering barriers. You're hoping people will like it and stay, or be too lazy to move. Don't you think the potential of an unlimited bill is another significant barrier in people's minds? I bet you're losing sign-ups.

grokson Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom

> It's simply too profitable...

For something so profitable there's a lot of people losing a lot of money.

eg. http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/analysis-how-fracking...

grokson Switched away from App Engine, couldn't be happier

Can you give your colleagues on the App Engine team the number of the Dell sales rep you buy your servers from, because a quick comparison of App Engine vs. Compute Engine prices shows that App Engine is at best 10x more expensive per unit of RAM:

  | Instance Type              | MB-mem | $/hour | $/month | $/hour/GB |
  |----------------------------+--------+--------+---------+-----------|
  | GAE F1/B1                  |    128 |  0.080 |   57.60 |      0.64 |
  | GAE F1/B1       (reserved) |    128 |  0.050 |   36.00 |      0.40 |
  | GAE F2/B2                  |    256 |  0.160 |  115.20 |      0.64 |
  | GAE F2/B2       (reserved) |    256 |  0.100 |   72.00 |      0.40 |
  | GAE F4/B4                  |    512 |  0.320 |  230.40 |      0.64 |
  | GAE F4/B4       (reserved) |    512 |  0.200 |  144.00 |      0.40 |
  | GAE F4_1G/B4_1G            |   1024 |  0.480 |  345.60 |      0.48 |
  | GAE F4_1G/B4_1G (reserved) |   1024 |  0.300 |  216.00 |      0.30 |
  | GAE B8                     |   1024 |  0.640 |  460.80 |      0.64 |
  | GAE B8          (reserved) |   1024 |  0.400 |  288.00 |      0.40 |
  |----------------------------+--------+--------+---------+-----------|
  | GCE f1-micro               |    629 |  0.019 |   13.68 |      0.03 |
  | GCE g1-small               |   1783 |  0.054 |   38.88 |      0.03 |
  | GCE n1-standard-1          |   3932 |  0.115 |   82.80 |      0.03 |
  | GCE n1-standard-2          |   7864 |  0.253 |  182.16 |      0.03 |
  #+TBLFM: @I$5..@>$5=($3/$2)*1024; %.2f::@I$4..@>$4=$3*24*30; %.2f

No matter how good or bad the OP's GAE code was, that's a heck of a handicap to overcome.

grokson New Persona Beta: Millions of Users Ready to Log In using Any Browser

I think this is a bad idea:

You are using marketing terms like "Persona is distributed. Today" (last weeks blog title) but it isn't, because every auth request flows through mozilla servers. You are also advertising that it is so simple, the entire website example is 70 lines of python (recent talk), but it isn't, because you aren't implementing browserid, you're delegating to the centralised mozilla server.

Advertising that it is distributed and simple does not accurately communicate the current state of the implementation. Look at the spec:

https://github.com/mozilla/id-specs/blob/prod/browserid/inde...

> This assertion is a Backed Identity Assertion, as defined above. We call it assertion here for simplicity, since the Relying Party typically need only pass this assertion to a verifier service without worrying about the specific semantics of the assertion string.

It does not say that the centralised mozilla verifier is temporary, but expected.

This all leads to people getting the wrong impression. As you say, it is hard to get people to update software on their servers, but they don't even know that they have to - because it's distributed, today, and simple - so they aren't going to be looking. Another group of people are going to look at the spec and implementations and think: what is the point of yet another login scheme which just pipes everything through mozilla?

This is not going to help the adoption of browserid.

grokson New Persona Beta: Millions of Users Ready to Log In using Any Browser

This is the best example I've found:

https://github.com/mozilla/PyBrowserID/blob/master/browserid...

grokson New Persona Beta: Millions of Users Ready to Log In using Any Browser

That's right, you're not a 'provider', you're a 'relying party' - but you are unconditionally relying on the bootstrap mozilla service. You're not supposed to swap that out and rely on some other service, you're supposed to look at the assertion provided by the browser (or the javascript shim right now, while we bootstrap). Who you verify the assertion with depends on the user's email address.

So, if tomorrow Google added support for browserid to Gmail, and jo@gmail.com tries to log in to your website, he would claim to be jo@gmail.com and pass you an assertion to that effect. You need to check that with Gmail. Of course, Gmail being popular you've probably already checked the assertion of many people claiming to have Gmail logins, so you already have the Gmail key cached, and can verify the assertion without any http requests to anywhere.

Right now, Gmail does NOT implement browserid, so the assertion which you receive will be that jo@gmail.com is vouched for by the mozilla browserid service, so you will end up checking the URL you've hard coded.

But if it's hard coded we can't proceed to the next stage, which is the distributed promise of browserid. AND, it puts lets less pressure on the likes of Gmail to implement browserid because no one will be checking gmail.com/.well-known/browserid.

grokson New Persona Beta: Millions of Users Ready to Log In using Any Browser

I don't think you've actually implemented the protocol. Like most of the other examples I've looked at, you explicitly check every login attempt with the hard-coded mozilla verifier. This breaks two of the selling features of browserid:

1) Your identity provider doesn't know where/when you login because the relying party (the website) is supposed to cache the identity providers public key.

2) When identity providers start implementing browserid, it's not going to make any difference because you're not checking back with the identity providers website, as encoded in the assertion.

What you've implemented here is more like Microsoft Passport - a single point of failure through which all logins flow.

So, as a bootstrap mechanism the Persona service fails, because assuming people jump on the browserid bandwagon, we'll still be stuck using Persona because all the websites have implemented the protocol wrong (as in this case).

grokson Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

Unless the robots have guns...

grokson Stephen Wolfram does an AMA

  grep me$ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
  1699

(WolframAlpha: 210)

grokson Why I Still Use Emacs

Here is an article about drills and how they are used for drilling holes:

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/12/hand-powered-drilling...

grokson Twitter Says People and Publishers Will Suffer From Google's Social Search

Google knows who you are on Twitter if you tell it:

https://plus.google.com/connectedaccounts

And because Twitter is largely public, Google knows who you follow and will show tweets and links in serps. Has done for some time now.

You can tell Google who you are on github, but I haven't noticed any interesting search results.

You right about password protected content though. You can tell Google who you are on Facebook but it can't crawl most of the data.

grokson They Did It: Google Personalizes Search & It Is Not Evil

Enable 'Apps Search' from here:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#settings/labs

grokson Occupy Portland's Dec 3rd Tactic to Neutralize Police

Maybe "hackers" are less interested in "getting a job" than they are in "subverting authority". It's good you are here to keep them in line.

grokson Space Plan From China Broadens Challenge to U.S.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/30/chinese_space_white_...

grokson Which tech companies back SOPA? Microsoft, Apple, and 27 others

Maybe if more people used AMD, Linux and GIMP we wouldn't be stuck with SOPA.

grokson Vi and Vim vs. Emacs Shootout and Deal

They've paid a lot of attention to defaults, pretty much for the exclusive benefit of newbies.

grokson Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

/.well-known/ http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hammer-hostmeta-17

grokson Considerations When Planning Endpoints for your RESTful API

X-HTTP-Method-Override: http://cambiatablog.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/287/