I recently had the pleasure of needing to load 30’000 records from MongoDB and then performing slow and memory intensive processing on them. Basically you can imagine it as a database of videos and MongoDB was holding the metadata and other bits but the actual video files were on disk somewhere. My parsing involved loading…
Quick Tip: iOS and web graphics in Illustrator
Nov 3, ’11 10:01 AM
I wanted to make a note of one of these things I keep forgetting in Adobe Illustrator. It is very simple, obvious and keeps me sane while drawing UI elements. Make sure “Align to Pixel Grid” is actually selected! That gets you out of so much trouble. Problem is, you need to keep an eye…
Patents Gone Crazy
Jul 26, ’11 2:06 PM
I am in the middle of some patent applications in the US at the same time as all the recent press about patent “trolls” going after small (and large) iOS developers. These things have made me think more than usual about the patent system. I think the root problems are the following: Legal costs or…
Transitioning to more secure passwords
Jun 24, ’11 2:29 PM
With all the news of hacked databases (mostly at Sony) and the clear-text or poorly hashed passwords in their datasets, I thought I might offer my standard trick for transitioning to a more secure form of hashing. I think some sites don’t change passwords security for fear of annoying users or the workload involved in…
Am I Fierce?
May 18, ’11 8:45 PM
I love Dropbox and use it every day. I love Flipboard and use it every day. So imagine my reaction to seeing my (and my co-founders’) little company named as one of the 15 coolest young companies in the world next to all these great companies. That was really special. Fierce Wireless about Great Connection…
Minimalist WordPress Deployment
May 17, ’11 1:23 PM
So, my “sugar daddy” datacenter is kicking me out. This is where I have been hosting absolutely free for a decade so I have nothing bad to say about them… at all. My 4U quad-core2duo, 4GB RAM, 8TB SATA beast will soon become homeless…. Did I mention they let me host that monster for free?…
Graylog2 on Mac OS X
Jan 19, ’11 10:32 AM
I have been playing with Graylog2 on my Mac today. Since the setup guides are all for Debian and not fully compatible with Mac OS X I thought I’d mention the changes I needed to make to get thing rolling smoothly. The guides are good, so go read them in the wikis on Github. I…
Rails migration of indexes
Nov 24, ’10 10:26 AM
A small gotcha when changing indexes in a migration. To change an index one has to first remove it and then add it again. Removing an index is the tricky part. The documentation states: remove_index(table_name, index_name): Removes the index specified by index_name. This is not strictly true as it turns out. The docs should probably…
Offensively lazy web developers
Oct 30, ’10 8:55 PM
There exist many websites and web applications with elements of poor usability, engineering, design and so on. Some exhibit features so poor I can only attribute them to laziness. Some actually make me feel offended that I have to jump through hoops to accommodate their laziness. Top of my list are form fields for postcodes,…
SOAP with Attachments in Ruby
Sep 30, ’10 10:25 AM
I found myself once again facing SOAP. This abomination of a protocol they even have the nerve to call “web services” is not my favorite type of API to interface with (how did you guess?). I think probably the only language with any decent support is Java and possibly .net. Neither rank among my favorite…