So your Mac is crashing a lot, and after a trip to the “Genius Bar”, you’re starting to think maybe that “genius” you talked to is anything but. Is this where you are? If so, join the club, because that’s exactly what I’ve been going through recently. My MacBook Pro would regularly go black without [...]
...full articleDear Google,
Please democratize SSL certificates. The ability to serve HTTPS:// pages without scaring users is currently controlled by a handful of “trusted authorities” whose business is to make it difficult to secure web communications. Google, you have the ability to disrupt this oligarchy and empower individuals to make the web safer.
The web is a safer [...]
In studying the history of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the ongoing events at Fukushima, a subtle but important connection appears. The problems at Fukushima today share a fundamental similarity with the cause of Chernobyl’s disaster. Moreover, within that similarity lies a path to making nuclear power safer.
Obviously there are huge differences. Chernobyl was a massive disaster [...]
Tonight I’m giving a guest lecture for a class on web development in Python. I’m talking about building real-time web sites using Hookbox. It draws on my experience building the software version of the Groovik’s cube. Here are the slides from the lecture:
Here are the slides from the talk.
I start out talking about the [...]
Recently, 20th century software pioneer Jim Gettys has been doing a bang-up job raising awareness about performance problems with the internet known as “buffer-bloat.” The details are technical and complex but the gist of it is that networking equipment is often buffering way too much data, resulting in unnecessarily long latencies. High latencies (literally [...]
...full articleHere’s the presentation I gave to the Django-Seattle group earlier this week. (Full link here.)
It gives an introduction to South, which is the most popular database migration tool for Django. If you’re using Django on any kind of mature project and you’re not using South, you should really take a look at this. [...]
Tomorrow night I’m giving a presentation to the django-seattle group. If you’re interested in Django come join and meet like-minded folks.
When: Tue, Dec 14th 6:00pm – 7:30pm (Meetings are on 2nd Tuesday of each month)
Where: Web Collective, 1402 3rd Avenue – Suite 925 – Seattle
(3rd and Union, 9th Floor, Vance Building, kitty corner to Benaroya [...]
Recently one of my friends asked whether or not there was a general trend towards improved safety in oil exploration. Coming from a mechanical engineering background, he noted that things like bridges and buildings have gotten safer over time through failures. Every new structure is built with the collective wisdom of the many failures before [...]
...full articleOne of my responsibilities in my new job is to lay the groundwork for development of the company’s technology. One decision that was pretty easy to make is that we’ll be building tools that you can use from a web browser, that is to say, a web application. Next comes the choice of what language [...]
...full articleA number of years ago, a bunch of my friends were reading Naomi Klein’s book No Logo and getting really riled up by it. The book is certainly written to make you angry, describing how brands and logos have become more and more prominent in our society as the marketing industry has become more sophisticated at [...]
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Leo is a professional geek who looks forward to the robots taking over. For more current, less coherent thoughts, follow him on twitter