My dreams are haunted by standards organizations (and spear-wielding iguanas in tutus but that's a different post). Trying to figure out which standard meets which business case or what set of standards together can you claim in a new product - it...
Father of the Year
I think there should be a father of the year award. Not like a trophy, certificate, or coffee mug, but something that actually incentivizes deadbeat Dads to actually give a shit. 4 editorial notes on this: 1. I'm not throwing my hat in the ring. I...
What happened to my live feed?
Yes - yet another blogger posting about facebook. The infatuation with facebook, both in media and in the public, is another post however. This is a sympathy for facebook post. Why? 1. It's hard to please everyone Have you had a huge Thanksgiving ...
The Distinction Between Vision and Direction
I went to the doc today to discuss blood-test results that were a little abnormal in some respects. She confidently talked about changing my diet - and used a pie-chart to represent risk factors of heart disease. It is wrong to use a pie chart for...
Taking chances with open source
Advocates of Linux, Postgres, Ruby, OpenLDAP and OpenStack all tout the benefits of having an open-source architecture. Granted, it's a hard pill to swallow especially in compliance-ridden industries (finance, health). The benefits are vast though...
Onward and Upward
There are 2 trends I've noticed with my career and it's likely that they are related: 1. I've been going from smaller to smaller companies. 2. I've been wearing more and more hats. Along the way, my work-life balance became unbalanced. I've learne...
Link broken in Firefox but not Chrome
Coding for a multitude of browsers is always fun. The latest issue I ran into is that firefox doesn't like elements with an id that starts with a number. So is kosher with javascript handling in chrome but not legit with firefox.
Solr Sunspot
There are a lot of search options for rails applications out there. We batted around with meta_search, and while implementing it, we ended up doing more and more straight sql searches. While this allowed greater customization and control over what...
git permission denied when doing a push
I've been operating primarily in one repository, but had to create and work in another. When I tried to push my code to my new repo, I got the following error: $ git push -u origin master ERROR: Permission to xxxxxxx denied to yyyyyyyy. fatal: The...
LinkedIn javascript API
I promised a couple posts back that I would write about how I'm doing the linked-in authorization and posting. This isn't as easy as facebook, and there is really no good gem for it. The one that we did find (http://rubygems.org/gems/linkedin) doe...