Wikimedia Commons holds a few remarkable maps of San Francisco from the 1850s. These maps, done as part of the US Coast Survey (now the National Geodetic Survey) were made a half century before the 1906 earthquakes and show a San Francisco that was largely limited to the Northeast part of the current city. I […]

Heroku is trialling new pricing levels for their dynos. Here’s the verbatim text they gave: Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom domains. 512 MB RAM. Hobby – […]

We had a hardware unit that was Ethernet enabled. To configure and manage it, the vendor provided us with a Windows program that, given the unit’s IP, could establish a TCP connection to the unit’s port 3300 and do all of its fancy management things. The only problem was, the hardware unit was a hundred […]

Alternate title: “Why do people forget about psychology when talking about STEM?” STEM majors! Everyone needs to be a STEM major! We have a huge shortage of STEM majors! Quick, get your sons and daughters (especially daughters) to major in a STEM field! STEM stands for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics” and we often use […]

Found the below article through so-called “social media”. Don’t have any affiliation with the author nor the WeChat group, but thought it was worth being translated. Original post at: http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4ODQwMTkyOQ%3D%3D&mid=200035572&idx=1&sn=6fc8fba95e4c22b96616f5cd79b99437 [n.b. photos from original post omitted] ?????????????????????????????? Everyone looking at the photos from students studying abroad keeps saying, “Wow, what a wonderful life. I’m jealous.” […]

The new version of HipChat added support for video and screen-sharing. It also introduced the new requirement of OpenGL 2.0. On my computer, HipChat would crash on startup with repeated messages of [code] can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection can’t find build id HashElfTextSection [/code] I […]

People wrote a lot of good comments on my last post about Node.js. (They also wrote some bad comments, but the worst have been modded out.) One of the key points I was trying to make was that the way concurrency is written in Node.js sucks, so it blew my mind that people kept referring […]

There are plenty of people lambasting Node.js (see the infamous “Node.js is cancer”) but proponents tend to misunderstand the message and come up with irrelevant counterpoints. It’s made worse because there are two very different classes of people that use Node.js. The first kind of people are those who need highly concurrent servers that can […]

(Original email at bottom.) CloudMade, a company selling mapping services (many based on OpenStreetMap data) that competed head-to-head with Google, let its users know that as of May 1st, they’ll stop serving anyone who’s not on an enterprise plan. This is rather sad, because they were one of the main alternatives for custom OpenStreetMap tiles. […]

Of course, you know that “good things” and “MySQL” don’t go together. File this one under the category of “small ways in which MySQL is broken”. Let’s fire up MySQL 5.1.72-2-log or 5.5.34-log. [code]mysql> create temporary table blah -> (alpha datetime, beta datetime); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec) mysql> describe blah; +——-+———-+——+—–+———+——-+ | […]