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Remembering Daadi
I prefer to keep journal entries private but it feels right to share how much I’ll miss Daadi Whenever Anne and I travel to remote areas where we have no cellphone reception, I’m always wary that something horrible is going to happen while I’m unreachable. When we came back to the borders of civilization yesterday,…
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Getting around Amazon Kindle’s location restriction
If you’re an avid reader, you’re probably well aware of how the US Kindle store on Amazon has a lot of books available whereas the rest of the stores leave much to desire. It wasn’t an issue though as you could just switch your location to the US and purchase books from the US store.…
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Science: Breaking Bad > Big Bang Theory
How Breaking Bad helps foster interest in STEM more than The Big Bang Theory As you’re probably already aware, The Big Bang Theory’s humor primarily feeds off of the social ineptitude or pop culture naiveté of four young scientists. The show is littered with the same false dichotomy Hollywood incorporated into The Social Network: If you’re…
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Localized Challenges
Solving your own little world’s problems Since the hi-tech industry is a far cry from zero-sum, each success story heats up the competition for talent. Salaries and perks have all been leveled to the point where the previously novel have become the standard. Struggling to stand out from the growing crowd, companies have come to stress…
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PRISM is not the problem
Most of the recent stories and outrage over PRISM seem to have missed the mark on addressing the core issue of privacy. PRISM makes the system more effective and efficient – it doesn’t change the underlying issue of the government accessing your data. Data requests are made in accordance with FISA, a surveillance law that…
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Content Standards
Current State of CMSs Most of the stuff on the internet that doesn’t involve transactions fits into a nice generic bucket: Content. Content that is provided by individuals (primarily on social networks and blogs) and then of course, media outlets and companies (primarily websites with supporting social media presence). The market for providing Content Management…
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Seeing with Ctags
Within all hackery, the road to mastery usually leads you to the nitty gritty low-level implementation details of what you are trying to grasp. Even though there are many books on advanced material, they only get you so far before you find that they are either no longer up-to-date or they don’t cover a particular…
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Rebuilding Rails
It has been a couple of years since I first dove into Ruby on Rails to build some side projects. However, there’s still an awful lot of magic going on with the framework. With the release of Rails 4, there seems to be even more magic to make everything easier. Unfortunately, I’ve found myself in…
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Static Blogs
Static What? Static blogs are blogs that are composed of just a bunch of HTML files. There’s no magic to it – No databases, WYSIWYG editors, etc. Just a bunch of files sitting on a webserver, waiting for a click or two. That sounds pretty lame You’re absolutely correct. Without any engine for the blog,…
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Sweat Equity
The phrase ‘Sweat Equity’ gets thrown around a lot, especially within the tech startup community. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the origin of the phrase goes all the way back to the (then) new found American dream of homeownership. As more homeowners went the DIY route to enhance and in turn, add more value…