nuclearsandwich

tl;dr: Don't take security advice from organizations whose job is spying on you.

I don't know about anyone else. But the NSA is one of the last organizations I'd let give me security advice. I wouldn't put it past them to purposefully omit a pointer or two in the hope that those who follow the guide to the letter not knowing any better will leave a way in. Based on the other comments the advice is banal rubbish. Perhaps this is purposeful.

* As much of an asshole as Orson Scott Card turned out to be, both Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow are great works of fiction which have the added bonus of showing you what creative thinking is like and why children are so good at it.

* Anything by Larry Niven and/or Jerry Pournelle.

* K.J. Parker is an excellent author of short, powerful, fantasy whose previous work is in law, journalism, and numismatics.

* Breakpoint and Beyond[B] is a great non-fiction about divergent thinking.

* If you want a lighthearted laugh or have children look for James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks or anything by Daniel Pinkwater.

[B]:[http://www.amazon.com/Breakpoint-Beyond-Mastering-Future-Tod...]

The first step is to identify a problem. Find some pain point in your life and try to address it using Ruby. Some of these may crash and burn but you'll learn a lot from each one.

I ordered one! For a robot that can run around and talk $100 isn't bad at all. Only thing that weirds me out is the constant tethered power source. But I'm sure that can be hacked around if it hasn't been already.

In which language should I build my webapp?

Feel free to mod me down, but lately ending sentences with prepositions has become nails on a chalkboard in my mind. Yes, I know that avoiding this makes everyone sound like Victorian gentlemen, I'm sorry.

I find the beta group to be really good for WakeMate. There is always the risk of new bugs as well as new features. If you're super super fussed about your data, I'd say stay away but it's rare to see a regression. Big issue for me was it wouldn't store my login so I had to re-authenticate every time I opened the app to go to bed, which at 5AM when you're getting up in 90 minutes is no fun at all. I think that went away in a recent nightly.

In earlier days, it was really easy to kill the Wakemate app by opening a bunch of other apps and then Android would kindly unload it from memory. The dev (There's only one between Android and BlackBerry) has fixed this in recent betas and, I believe, the current market version.

I do find early AM fat finger syndrome to be the more frequent cause of data loss compared to Wakemate bugs, but they do crop up.

I experienced all those same issues. I don't really care about my sleep score as I'm just in it to abuse my body into giving me more coding hours. Autosuggesting tags is but a feature request and some developer attention away. As far as tagging data, I thought the whole point was so that you could keep your own metrics not that you had to. The only thing they can monitor is how well you slept. It's up to the users to correlate that with pre- and post- sleep variables. They have general comments about how to improve sleep scores, but it'd be nice if they offered suggestions based on apparent symptoms in your data.

The charger thing is super annoying, especially that they offered no avenue to recycle them instead of just chucking them in the garbage.

It seems really difficult to offer a compelling software engineering program. Computer Science has a lot of history and theory that is well suited to classrooms and professors. A software engineering program would have to be constantly (at least each semester) evolving to explore all paths for designing good software. In fact, we offer a Software Engineering degree at San Jose State University, in Silicon Valley, we should have an unfair advantage in that field. As a CS/Math major I am required to take a few SE courses. All of them have been 10-15 years dated in both execution and their definition of good software and what constitutes solid design. I'm so sick of these SE classes that I'm tempted to drop out or transfer. Engineering (not just software) is mastery of a craft, it isn't something you can learn by passing classes and getting a degree. You need to get your hands dirty, something other engineering disciplines focus on highly. For an SE program to be effective there should be one class: Software Engineering 1, the curriculum should consist of working with your peers to build awesome software. You should have to take it at least six times. The instructor can mentor the veterans and the veterans can mentor the freshmen The masterclass is to start a project that you spin up into a publicly available piece of software, then watch how you're design scales and what needs to change. Anything else is history and lies.

Check out status.net and the most popular instance of it: identi.ca, the web ui isn't pretty but a refresh is coming with the 1.0 release and I use a CLI client to connect to it anyway.

the worst thing about it is that it maintains API compatibility with Twitter.

I voted lighthouse because that's what we use at Nowmov but for personal projects I use [Bugs Everywhere](http://bugseverywhere.org) It's a simple command line tool that syncs to a file in your software's repo. Simple + Portable = LOVE.

w3schools is not affiliated with the w3c and often has subtly incorrect information [See here](http://w3fools.com).

My preferred resource on the subject is the [Mozilla Developer Network](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs)

I love to do the dishes. Does this make me a natural born leader?

In seriousness though I feel like the best way to manage in situations of ambiguously shared responsibility is not to be afraid of getting stuck with it because the slackers start to feel embarrassed around you and either pitch in or leave.

There's little more cathartic in life than actual physical toil and while doing the dishes isn't all that rough, it presents an opportunity to occupy the hands and let the mind wander.