July 2011
1 post
Lazy devops config recoverability with mercurial
makingwoome:
At Woome we often suddenly create a new set of key information, such as a regularly changing nginx config. We use mercurial extensively, so the typical next step at this point initialise a repo for the data set and check everything in. As a team we’ve trained ourselves to check in changes to most admin data sets automatically, with a ticket number in the comment, so this is very...
March 2009
2 posts
Ban Software Patents →
cowsandmilk:
rcrowley:
cowsandmilk:
blah blah, whatever I wrote earlier. scroll down.
You make an important distinction but I still believe software patents are not useful. Differentiation in implementation purely to skirt a patent’s claims is useless.
I spent some time tracking down the account of expert witness Philip Greenspun when Amazon sued Barnes & Noble to enforce the...
Ban Software Patents →
cowsandmilk:
I don’t know how this blog post showed up in one of my browsers, but it’s proof to me of how little most people understand software patents. And it was probably linked to by someone high profile who also doesn’t understand software patents. In this person’s view, there are these 2 patents that both patent the idea of ORM. Neither patent is for ORM. They are each for a way of...
August 2008
2 posts
A note on OpenClip
cowsandmilk:
marco:
Using this, an app can read any saved authentication information in any other apps — for example, an app could steal your Flickr API key from any other apps that you’ve trusted with access to your Flickr account. Or an arbitrary app could read saved passwords from a password-manager app.
I don’t think it would be possible for another app to steal your app’s access to...
cowsandmilk:
marco:
Nice people at Slicehost.
AMEN!
Alas, they’re not Wash U kids. Still rockin’ service, though.
July 2008
2 posts
The UUID vs. the Integer
cowsandmilk:
In the world of distributed systems, integer indexes are left behind in favor of UUIDs. Since there’s no shared counters between two unconnected systems, this is a great solution.
I think that the UUID in general is better than integers though for indexing a relational database for a couple reasons:
There are millions of pages on the internet about autoincrementing of database...
June 2008
3 posts
“The culture of free, seductive as it is, is destructive to everyone involved....”
– Matt Maroon: Bubble 2.0 (via marco)
My fear is the destruction of software innovation as I’ve written about before. (via kyleshank)
The important place for innovation in an increasingly ad-driven web is in increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. I think services that bring in direct revenues are...
April 2007
1 post
First post!
This is new and interesting. Perhaps Tumblr will not seem as silly to me as Twitter.