February 2012
3 posts
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January 2012
9 posts
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The MegaUpload Shutdown Effect
The popular file sharing site MegaUpload was shut down by the US FBI and Department of Justice on Thursday, January 19, and executives from the company were taken into custody. This story is very well covered by the Wall Street Journal and includes a copy of the indictment for your reading.
As you would expect, this was a wildly popular site with users from all over the world. So much so that...
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How to Enable TRIM Support For All SSDs in OS X...
Ever since the release of OS X 10.6.8, Apple has been selectively enabling the TRIM command for SSD’s in OS X. This support continues on on Mac OS X Lion, but as many have noted, it only seems to work for Apple SSDs. Here’s how to enable TRIM across the board:
The TRIM command is an important disk command for SSDs that keeps your flash memory appropriately cycled so that you can achieve faster...
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The MIT Media Lab is against SOPA and PIPA →
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parislemon: Google Is "Surprised" That Twitter Is... →
parislemon:
Just to give everyone their fair airtime, here’s Google’s response to Twitter’s response to Google’s announcement about Search+. Naturally, this was posted to Google+:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their…
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Scrollorama
dhs:
There’s a nifty new trick appearing on various good-looking websites. The first example of it that I saw was Ben the Bodyguard (scroll down the page to see it). Now there’s an open source library to help you create these effects with jQuery. It’s called Scrollorama and if you’re into web design you should check it out.
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December 2011
7 posts
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Facebook Pulls Back Curtain on 'Timeline' →
Nice article by @wired that includes geeky MySQL details.
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Instagram Engineering: What Powers Instagram:... →
instagram-engineering:
One of the questions we always get asked at meet-ups and conversations with other engineers is, “what’s your stack?” We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in…
November 2011
12 posts
3 tags
Spotify Technology: How Spotify Works →
Spotify uses some particularly clever streaming technology to deliver all that instant music. It’s been described in an academic paper by Spotify techno-wizards Gunnar Kreitz and Fredrik Niemelä, who included some very interesting statistics and analysis of their measurements taken during one week in the early part of 2010. It’s a pretty dense technical read, but there are some fascinating stats...
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Recollect Engineering: Solving Instagram's... →
recollectcode:
By now you’ve probably seen the Instagram Engineering Challenge: The Unshredder and a few solutions including one written purely in Canvas and Javascript. I don’t know any company code blogs that solve other company code blogs’ engineering challenges but that sounds meta enough to be awesome, so…
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Valletta Ventures: The price of a messy codebase:... →
vallettaventures:
Any LaTeX user with an iPad has had the same thought: I want to use my favourite document creation system on my favourite device. Despite everything I am about to say about the LaTeX codebase, there is nothing like it for composing beautiful documents, and the iPad is the most beautiful platform…
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“The Internet is not a technology, it’s a fundamental belief system”
– Joi Ito (Director, MIT Media Lab)
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Harvard referencing style - how add it to...
For some unknown reason Microsoft have not included the Harvard referencing style into their Office packages. If you’re like me, and sometimes need to include references in your document for one reason or another such as university, then the below should help you.
Go here and download the file styles.zip
Once downloaded, unzip styles.zip.
To Install on Mac OS X, copy the files to this...
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Rails new vs build
@article = Article.new
Creates a new instance of a Model.
@comment = @article.comments.build
Just like the new method, but by assocation proxies (not for Models). It automatically sets the foreign_key.
The other thing is that when you are doing a “has_one” the build looks like this:
@comment = @article.build_comment
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk”
– Mark Zuckerberg
October 2011
7 posts
3 tags
Steve Jobs and the Seven Rules of Success
Steve Jobs’ impact on your life cannot be underestimated. His innovations have likely touched nearly every aspect — computers, movies, music and mobile. As a communications coach, I learned from Jobs that a presentation can, indeed, inspire. For entrepreneurs, Jobs’ greatest legacy is the set of principles that drove his success.
Over the years, I’ve become a student of...
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September 2011
7 posts
1 tag
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Precompiling files for Rails production
By default Rails assumes that you have your files precompiled in the production environment. To precompile the files and to get better performance in production set config.assets.compile to false in production.rb and then precompile your assets. You can precompile with this rake task:
bundle exec rake assets:precompile
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August 2011
13 posts
1 tag
Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for... →
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“True leadership is about making other people better as a result of your...”