April 2012
3 posts
5 Things You Should Know About Big Data →
A few byte-sized big data concepts (not just trivia) so that you can distinguish the substance from the hype.
March 2012
2 posts
Giving Away Your Passwords →
The House voted down a bill this week that would prevent employers for asking for your Facebook password.
Unfortunately, plenty of third-party websites ask for your Facebook, Twitter, and Google passwords, too. This is called the Password Anti-Pattern, and it’s extremely dangerous. Luckily, OAuth is becoming more common and is way more secure.
1 tag
7 Recommendations for Data Protection by... →
If content is king, context is God. DLP solutions can tell you where data is exposed, but unless you have context, how do you know where to begin? You have to be able to answer, among other things:
What do I do first? You have to know which sensitive data is over-exposed and most at risk.
Who can should make the access decisions about sensitive data? Not IT, that’s for sure.
How do...
February 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Learning coding from boredom →
Great post by Benjamin today.
Programmers like to program because they can do cool things.
The reason I learned to code at age 13 was so that I could automate slaying monsters in a text-based RPG that I loved. Today, I code for a number of other reasons: to earn a living, to make tasks in my life easier, to impress the ladies, etc.
Over the years I did eventually develop a deep passion...
parislemon: Path, Not Pathological →
parislemon:
As an iOS lover and Path champion, a number of folks have asked for my take on the Path address book situation of yesterday and today. I’ve avoided weighing in for two reasons: first, I wanted to talk to some other actual developers about the situation. Second, the fact that CrunchFund is…
MG Seigler is great at calling people out when they a.) do something shitty, or b.)...
Data Protection: It's Just the Right Thing To Do →
Too many business put data protection out of mind and, in the long-run, end up harming customers, partners, and shareholders. Sadly, since moral obligation clearly is not enough to make most companies flinch, state legislators have been trying to force compliance with PCI-DSS and other standards. Now the SEC is stepping in.
January 2012
3 posts
The enterprise cloud is, well, cloudy
Last night I watched a fantastic episode of This Week in Startups with guest Aaron Levie of Box.net. Aaron is a remarkable young CEO who really seems to understand and care about enterprise software, which is a rare combination.
One of the themes of the interview was that CIOs and IT departments at large organizations are starting to embrace the cloud. Jason and Aaron discussed “bottom...
Please don't learn to code
I remember stumbling upon tryruby.org a few years back. It was this neat little web-based shell that helped teach Ruby in a fun and interactive way.
The site lowered the barrier to entry for newcomers: you didn’t have to download anything; you didn’t need an editor or an interpreter; you didn’t even have to know what a shell was. You would simply read the instructions on the...
Why I Hate Android
Is Google sleeping with the enemy?
parislemon:
Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.
I should probably explain.
Believe it or...
March 2011
1 post
Using Mercurial Subrepositories
Code reuse is important. As developers, we don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. We should leverage code that we’ve already written, and use open source libraries and frameworks where appropriate.
Having the source code of a library that your project depends on is very beneficial. You can browse through it, debug into it, and make changes to it. But what is...
November 2010
1 post
Sticky notes with CSS3
I’ve been working on a pretty cool wall-mounted status board as one of my projects at Fog Creek. It’s a webapp that runs on a vertically mounted LCD screen in our office. It displays a bunch of interesting information like tech support calls, staff vacations, tweets about FogBugz, and more.
I’ve been incrementally adding features and improving the UI whenever I have spare cycles. The other night,...