Prune Fingers
This was a nice article about why we get prune fingers
Cloud Backups Using Arq
I have long considered the cloud better suited to data than apps. I can’t explain my aversion to web apps, the cloud just seems better suited to serving data than CPU time.
Coding with Style
I described the genesis of my source code library in a recent post. While poring over old code, I noticed that my formatting had been inconsistent across projects, and so I decided to adopt a unified coding style for future projects. I found a palatable style guide from the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL), which I intend to adopt with two small changes:
The Case for Creativity in a Vacuum
Mankind’s greatest challenges demand the combined effort of many, but collaboration thrives on trust. As such, teams often falsely bolster positivity through the acceptance of unfit ideas, dismissing critical people as pessimistic or pedantic. Valuable insights are therefore tempered, with group harmony taking precedence over excellence.
Becoming a Mac User
In early 2009, the hard drive of my laptop failed. Replacing a hard drive is trivial, but I had been saving for a while and decided it was time to buy a new machine. In the beginning, I had no intention of switching to a Mac — I hated Apple, and I had always hated Apple.
Using Apple Routers with ADSL
I’ve been using a faithful DG834GT router for as long as I’ve had an ADSL connection, but it is now showing its age. I recently bought a Time Capsule with an inbuilt 802.11n router. Unfortunately, it caused my internet to drop out sporadically, especially under heavy loads. I suspected a protocol mismatch between the ADSL modem and the Time Capsule. After hours on Google, I discovered the problem was inherent to all Apple routers.
Push Mail
Most OS X hints are cumbersome and inelegant, but this one rocked my world: Push email in Mail.app
Streamlining Static Websites
I witnessed a dramatic boost in the performance of my website after switching to a Sydney-based server. In hindsight this is hardly surprising, but it illustrates how the performance of a website is dictated by more than pure bandwidth. My website is made with static HTML, which mitigates server-side lag under load. The main bottlenecks should therefore be the size of the content, and the number and latency of any requests for that content. In this post I describe how I addressed these performance bottlenecks.
Amazon S3 TurboBoost
Amazon doesn’t have much of a presence here in Australia, but the limited set of services they do offer are excellent and affordable. I use Amazon Web Services to host this site, which is both extremely cheap (~1c per month) and extremely reliable. Unfortunately, until recently their closest server was in Singapore, so the latency was really bad. Sometime in November however, they quietly launched a Sydney based data centre.
Professor of War
Mark Bowden’s article The Professor of War describes the life of David Patraeus, the General recently shamed for having an affair with his biographer. It was written back in 2010 before this scandal got the better of him.