August 2009
1 post
Installing APF and BFD on a Rackspace Cloud Server
Don’t look now, but people have been trying to break into your server. Don’t believe me? Okay, look now. Type this command (as root) in your shell: grep "Invalid user" /var/log/secure | wc -l The number you see is the number of times someone has tried to log into your server via ssh with an invalid username. Some of them might be you, but most of them are not. Most of them are people...
June 2009
1 post
Stupid caching tricks #804
Suppose you have a number of endpoints in your app, such as /user/private_data and /user/secret_stuff, where logged-in users see information that’s only meant for them. Suppose further that you have a number of other endpoints like /user/1/quotes and /user/1/book_collection that are accessible by all users of the app, logged-in or otherwise. You want to cache the responses to all of these...
May 2009
1 post
Testing Twitter OAuth with Cucumber, Webrat, and...
I’ve recently seen folks asking questions about how to do acceptance testing with Cucumber on an application that authenticates using Twitter’s OAuth service. Since I’ve recently done exactly that, I thought I’d share my technique with the world. I’ll walk you through it step-by-step here, from creating a new Rails app all the way to the bitter end, but if...
November 2008
1 post
Top 5 Covers
The other day I complained on Twitter about the cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that Lincoln is using in their commercials for the MKS. This elicited a response from a friend of mine whom I’m guessing is a fan of Chan Marshall - who for some reason calls herself “Cat Power” on stage, and is responsible for the aforementioned abominable cover - coming to...
September 2008
1 post
Finally Leaving AOL
Some of you might be confused by the title of this post, since I haven’t worked at AOL since October of 2007. But even though I don’t work there anymore, I haven’t really left. I went from AOL to Mixx, largely because it was an opportunity to continue working with some of my favorite AOLers (Joe Dzikiewicz, Kerry Parkins, Jason Garber, Nathaniel Collinsworth, Mike Golay and Kori...
August 2008
1 post
Hi, no. (adventures in recruiting me)
I’ve been using the word “no” an awful lot lately. For some reason over the past few months there’s been a lot of interest shown in my resume (which apparently is out there somewhere, though I don’t remember where) and my LinkedIn profile. I get all sorts of random emails, LinkedIn messages, and even phone calls from recruiters. My favorites are the ones who call me...
June 2008
1 post
Monsters are real
On July 23, 2007, two career criminals broke into the home of a prominent Connecticut doctor, intent on robbing it. When they entered, they discovered the family was at home - the doctor, his wife, and their two daughters, 11 and 17. They beat the doctor. They tied the 11-year-old girl to her bed, and raped her. They raped and strangled the wife. Then they poured gasoline on their victims, and set...
April 2008
1 post
"abcdab" or, why I don't work for Yahoo
As many of you know (because I have no internal filter), I was recently in talks with Yahoo, who were talking about relocating me to California to go to work for them. The title of this post refers to an interview question they asked me, which was, “Can you think of an efficient algorithm to detect the first repeated character in this string?” My answer was, essentially, not really....
December 2007
1 post
Face it, Northern VA - there's nothing northern...
I recently learned that people in Virginia - that’s people in general, certainly not every one of them - have a keen distaste for the state of Maryland and its contents. I don’t know why this is, much as I cannot explain to you why people from Michigan look south to Ohio with disdain, even though I myself hail from Michigan. In Ann Arbor, directions to Toledo are typically given as...
September 2007
2 posts
Bluetooth Imports says "We're among the most...
Sometimes you run across someone so profoundly dumb you do a mental double-take before realizing that, yes, they really did just do something that stupid.
Case in point: Today I was browsing around doing a little research on a Bluetooth headset I’ve had my eye on when I stumbled across a site belonging to a company called Bluetooth Imports. Like so many online retailers, Bluetooth Imports...
8 Things
I’ve been tagged. I’m supposed to tell you (in case there is a you) eight things you (probably) don’t know about me.
I first attended college at the ripe old age of 12. I thought I was 14, but last Christmas the topic came up and my parents convinced me I was 12 (and of course they’re right; it was 1987).
I can sing.
I used to be a locksmith.
I grew up in a house on...
August 2007
1 post
BarCamp!
This is me trying to look like I know what I’m talking about at Barcamp in Washington, DC this past Saturday, August 11. This day was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, and I managed to learn a few things, too. I immediately went home and fixed some of my code based on things I learned there.
The event was very well run, which is due in no small part the outstanding efforts of...
July 2007
1 post
habtm and the :id field
I spent all day today discovering something that’s both useful, and frustrating. To put it shortly, having a primary key on the join table for your habtm relationship will cause you problems. But having an :id field that isn’t a primary key does something useful. Want details?
I was trying to figure out how, even though my join table only defined a relationship between two records,...
May 2007
1 post
Phone companies are their own worst enemies
Is it just me, or is every single phone company in the world a huge pain to deal with?
A few months ago I had a Frontier phone number ported over to Packet8’s VoIP service. Everything went perfectly. Almost. Since then, anyone in the world who is using any carrier other than Frontier gets routed to my VoIP phone when they dial the ported number. But if you’re using a Frontier...