justinweiss

I've still got one of these in a closet somewhere. I suppose it could be called a laptop, depending on the size of your lap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable

(edit: on second thought, it most likely requires at least two laps.)

I just started playing casually earlier this year and I'm about 13-15k on DGS. I really liked the players on KGS, but it's hard for me to find an hour or two of totally uninterrupted time. DGS is so perfect for the slow pace I like to play that I wrote an iPhone client for it: http://dgs.uberweiss.net

When I started playing, it was frustrating and confusing. Now, it's still frustrating and confusing, but it's also so much fun.

Ok. But if that's what's actually happening, we need to have that conversation. Keeping these things secret will lead to nothing but waste, corruption, and misunderstanding.

I have no idea how this could possibly work, but it sounds incredible. Ad-hoc distribution for beta testing is still really painful.

"After spending a lot of time falling asleep at the library while facing the philosophy books, I determined that the concept of destiny is a construct that allows man a gentle release from facing the terror of his existence, and that a Hyundai full of twenties would pretty much offer the same benefits. And so, I ultimately said YES!"

According to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_volume_is_1_million_dolla..., 110 million in twenties is about 220 cubic feet.

According to http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/reviews/healey/2010-03-1..., a 2011 Hyundai Sonata has about 120 cubic feet of passenger and cargo space.

So, assuming TechCrunch is right, the Woot CEO is wrong. It's actually close to TWO Hyundais (Hyundai?) full of twenties.

(OK, maybe one after-tax Hyundai)

Sports Night did a great job with this issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP9U_mslaWU

(there's something strangely meta in linking to an infringing video about copyright infringement)

memset sets a block of memory to a given value. It is often used to initialize an uninitialized block of memory to 0. So often, in fact, that this bug where it always initialized the memory to 0 survived so long.

IDO is 100% necessary for decent code navigation in emacs, but it's also worth trying textmate.el (http://github.com/defunkt/textmate.el), PeepOpen (http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen), or my fuzzy-find-in-project (http://github.com/justinweiss/fuzzy-find-in-project) for something like, but more flexible than, TextMate's command-T functionality.

If you really want to see it, resetting your network settings will show it. It's not really worth it though, considering you can't do anything with the setting right now, and you'll have to re-enter your WiFi/VPN/etc. settings after the reset.

Nope, these are actual guidelines Microsoft uses to make hiring, promotion, and compensation decisions. city41's comment is 100% accurate about how these things are used.

The entire list of 'competencies' is here: http://www.microsoft.com/education/competencies/allcompetenc...

It probably started as your typical big-company CYA in case someone tries to sue them for HR-related stuff and grew into this monster as some middle manager began empire-building.

There's even a wheel, in case you felt like making a poster: (pdf) http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/4/7/3477e49d-315d-4...

I also wrote a plugin to bring Jamis' fuzzyfinder to emacs: http://ruby-on-the-interrails.blogspot.com/2008/10/introduci...

That's a common sentiment among the Microsoft alumni I've talked to:

"Ambivalent about the company, loved my team, left at the right time."

I wonder if that's something specific to Microsoft-ish big companies, or common among people that decide to leave any job?

We're using Twilio at the moment to provide our paying customers a way of tracking incoming calls from their customers as part of our analytics package, and it's working really well for that. It's a neat system, and it's easy to work with.

Most of their language books are pretty good -- Programming Erlang and Programming Clojure are both worth reading, if you're interested in either language.

It's disappointing that they don't discount The Pragmatic Programmer, as that's a book I wholeheartedly recommend to every working developer. I think that's still owned by Addison Wesley.

Oh hey! Another dvorak user!

Off topic, but this is the first time I've seen typekit in action -- it's really cool!

Until I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I was using fink with the unstable binary packages: http://finkers.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/fink-and-binary-dist...

I could use apt and dpkg, it did't build the world whenever I wanted a package (cough Macports), and since it just used binaries, installs were super-fast.

Last I checked, fink wasn't all that usable with Snow Leopard, but it's by far the easiest package management method for Leopard.

I work mostly inside git repositories, so this has been really valuable for scoping commands to the current repository:

  (defun my-git-root () 
    (if buffer-file-name
        (let* ((current-directory (file-name-directory buffer-file-name))
               (git-directory (concat current-directory ".git")))
          (while (and 
                  current-directory 
                  (not (file-exists-p git-directory)))
            (setq current-directory (file-name-directory (substring current-directory 0 -1)))
            (setq git-directory (concat current-directory ".git")))
          current-directory)))

I also hated editing system files until I added this function, which I almost definitely cribbed from somewhere:

  (defun sudo-find-file (file-name)
    (interactive "FFind file (sudo): ")
    (find-file (concat "/sudo::" file-name)))

I got sick of having to context-switch to the browser when I needed to do a quick search, which is where these come in:

  (defun go-to-doc (base-url)
    (let ((default (symbol-name (symbol-at-point))))
      (browse-url (concat base-url (read-string "Search term: " nil nil default)))))
  
  (defun rails-doc ()
    (interactive)
    (go-to-doc "http://apidock.com/rails/search?query="))
  
  (defun ruby-doc ()
    (interactive)
    (go-to-doc "http://apidock.com/ruby/search?query="))

I really, really hope package.el is built-in soon:

  (when
      (load
       (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/elpa/package.el"))
    (package-initialize))

and by far the most important line in the whole file:

  (server-start)

For what it's worth:

ev: "@TechCrunch @arrington "we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information" What?! By whom? That's not our understanding"

(http://twitter.com/ev/status/2676203744)

I've rarely heard someone argue so strongly for inserting middlemen back into the supply chain. It's interesting, in a twisted sort of way.

I gave up on MacPorts a while back when it kept trying to compile the world, and never used fink because its packages were ancient. These guys build binary packages of all the fink unstable packages, presumably as part of some CI system, and host them as an apt repository. So instead of getting Ruby 1.8.1, I get 1.8.6.

This is exactly what I was looking for in Mac OS package management, and given the complaints I always hear about both MacPorts and fink, I'm sure other people have been looking for this too.

We use puppet for managing packages and configuration on our systems. At some point I'd like to take a look at Chef, too -- having Ruby as the configuration language seems like it'd be nicer than puppet's config file format. It took some work to get set up, but it's so nice being able to keep track of what's on each machine in version controlled source files.

For actually deploying our code, we use Capistrano, which we also use to run one-off tasks across machines. This pulls from our code repsitory, and each of our dev/staging/production environments know which version control branch to pull and deploy in that environment.

ELPA's pretty nice, I've only got two minor issues with it:

* It doesn't have everything in it yet, so about half the packages I use I still have to manage manually. (Someday I'll have to figure out how to submit stuff to ELPA...)

* If you take your .emacs with you across multiple machines, you still need a way of keeping your packages in sync. I like the way the emacs-starter-kit deals with this problem: http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/blob/b5d0aa7...

It's especially good for trying out packages that you're not sure you'll use on a regular basis.

I'm not exactly sure how it works, but I think most of the newer install methods will put the extra (non-Apple) drivers on an EFI support partition that isn't touched during system upgrades, to keep the install as pristine as possible. This also allows you to install from a real OS X disc.

In my personal experience, the Mini 9 didn't have any trouble with the 10.5.7 upgrade. I had to boot into safe mode and run the driver installer again, because the new update apparently affected the video card driver, but that was it.

I've started to use the bookmarklet at http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ for most long articles -- it boosts the font size, increases the margins, and cuts out the background and sidebars. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work for this particular article.

I'm the exact opposite -- I bought my linode slice when Slicehost had a waiting list, and haven't had a reason to look at anything else in the two years (or so) since.

I'm the wrong person to ask about it -- I didn't work on either the business or technical side of bar data collection, so I don't know exactly how often or when or how it was done.

I do know that if the DC bar provided this public data to people and companies directly, like most of the other other state bars have, this wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, the only provider of the data is the bar's own website, so retrieving the data directly from the site is the only real option. Terms of use may or may not change whether that's ok, but we'll have to wait and see what happens.

(Full disclosure -- I work at Avvo. Not a lawyer, but I do work with a lot of them.)

In this case, it's the other way around -- the DC lawyers must register with (and pay) the bar association in order to be allowed to practice in the district. The registration and disciplinary information is public data, but the bar association is usually the only organization that actually holds the data (since they were the ones who collected it in the first place). So, in many cases, including this one, the only way to get this public information is by going through the bar.

We went through something similar about a year ago in New Jersey. The AP article has fallen into the archives, but the Seattle PI wrote a blog post about it: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/135524.a...

For what it's worth, "Every employee has his own office" doesn't always apply anymore, since hiring has outpaced capacity over the past few years.

I did this, and it made it pretty simple to later go through the Apple Developer documentation included with Xcode. It's worth setting aside a pretty good amount of time to thoroughly learn how everything works, because it's pretty easy to do braindead things otherwise (my first tableview with custom cells was doing TERRIBLE things).