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The Development Abstraction Layer
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women. He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he sp…
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Erlang: An Introduction to Records
Internally Erlang has only two internal compound data types: lists and tuples. Neither of these data types support named access, so creating associative arrays a la PHP, Ruby, or Python is an impossibility without additional libraries.
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A Django website that took (a lot) more than 20 minutes.
An attempt to debunk some of the '20 minute web app' hype that is so prevalent at the moment, and present a more realistic and balanced account of the Django site I have just finished.
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Programmer search engine
For as long as I’ve been in the industry, which is, I think, about 74 years now, the problem I’ve had with hiring programmers was not interviewing them or deciding if they’re smart—it’s been findin…
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John Resig dissects the neural network javascript OCR captcha code
A pretty amazing piece of JavaScript dropped yesterday and it’s going to take a little bit to digest it all. It’s a GreaseMonkey script, written by ‘ Shaun Friedle ‘, that automatically solves captchas provided by the site Megaupload . There’s a demo online if you wish to give it a spin.
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The Universal Law of Leverage
An article that explains how misunderstanding leverage kills businesses.
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How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)
Well, it was really more like 17 weeks, but who's counting. ;) First, I'll give the punchline.
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Intercepting Predator Video
Sometimes mediocre encryption is better than strong encryption, and sometimes no encryption is better still. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iraqi, and possibly also Afghan, militants are using commercial software to eavesdrop on U.S. Predators, other unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, and even piloted…
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A Tour Of A “Pay to Download Firefox” Site
At Mozilla , we regularly get anguished emails from people who have paid to download Firefox, and have then discovered a) that it's actually free, and b) that it's very hard to get the company they paid to stop charging their credit card. For those who have never had the misfortune to visit one of these trap sites, I…
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Parenting in the age of Paranoia: A Small Manifesto
We live in a contracting world, with diminishing options to travel far from your home and meet people of unfamiliar backgrounds- if you’re a child.
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Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484
Warning: the following is excessively technical, and is intended more for the sake of the next poor sod who types "vista dns round robin resolution" into Google than it is for my actual friends list. (Except for a few of you. And you know who you are.) Also, since I want this to be searchable on…
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Schneier on Security: Software Problems with a Breath Alcohol Detector
This is an excellent lesson in the security problems inherent in trusting proprietary software: After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc…
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Advanced SSH Techniques
At one site where I provide technical assistance, access to the network is all done via ssh over the Internet. However, one can't get access to the machines directly; one must first make an ssh connection to a gateway box I'll call martha. martha doesn't allow one to use regular passwords or keys, though. We're all…