Archives for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

See Procreate thumbnails on Linux

This is old thing I made that I never wrote about here: a thumbnailer for Procreate files. Procreate is a popular iPad drawing and painting app that has its own native *.procreate file format. Most people probably never have to think about this since you can’t access files directly on an iPad and PSD is […]

MacSD SCSI adapter

My Macintosh SE had the original 20MB hard drive still full of software, and although it was painfully slow (too much bloat, maybe?) I didn’t want to lose anything on it. That meant I needed to get a new hard drive that I could play around with. Since the Macintosh SE uses SCSI, I wanted […]

Why Engineers Hate Scrum

There are a lot of people out there burned by bad experiences with Agile and Scrum. And talking to them about it, what their team called “Agile” consisted of doing things that Scrum says to do without understanding why they’re done and consequently not getting benefits out of it. (This reminds me of the legendary […]

[transl.] You went overseas—are you happy? (“???? ???”)

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.” […]

What concurrency in Node.js could have been

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 […]

Raise your hand and ask

College lecturers (and teachers in general, I suppose) assume they need to ask if the class has any questions. The benchmark is that if the class doesn’t have any questions, then they understood the material, and if there were questions, then the lecturer should slow down a bit and maybe review it in a bit […]

Using bcrypt in CakePHP 2.3

CakePHP 2.3 adds native support for the bcrypt hashing algorithm, which is often recommended because of the amount of analysis that’s gone into it and its configurable cost function. Using it isn’t obvious, however. The 2.3 migration notes merely say, You can now use Blowfish in your $authenticate array to allow bcrypt passwords to be […]

We don’t remember your startup

Yeah, your startup. You know, the one that had the nifty HTML5 responsive launch page? The one that promised big things and nifty features? The one where we typed in our email address so we could be notified when it launched? You spent the last five months working your butt off to productionize and bugfix […]

Steve Jobs: 1955–2011

It’s hard to put Steve Jobs into words, but I will forever remember him as a leader who didn’t let critics stop him from accomplishing so many things. We as a society tend to complain about Apple products being overhyped and to mock Apple’s “magical” and “revolutionary” labels, but the critics are uncomfortable because there’s […]

"EISA Configuration" partition won’t go away

The symptom is typical: you check out the partitions on your hard drive in Windows Disk Manager only to find out that there’s a weird, inaccessible partition that’s of the type “EISA Configuration.” What is it? Can I get rid of it? What is it? It has become standard practice for manufacturers to include recovery […]