Benjamin Ste.in Pro

Everything announced at the Google I/O 2013 keynote in one handy list

(Source: 9-bits)

This is like asserting that my former hometown of Washington, D.C., has several football teams: the Redskins, the Georgetown University team, and the Gonzaga High School team.

Susan Crawford, on contentions by AT&T and T-Mobile that local wireless markets are competitive

You should have distinct memories of you or someone under your employ having at least two separate incidents in the last four weeks in which they dropped everything they were doing and immediately took action to resolve these problems.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/01/31/what-the-rails-security-issue-means-for-your-startup/

I Thought It Was a Series of Tubes…

Last night during the hurricane, we could not telnet to one of our partner’s data centers from our primary data center. We could get there from our workstations and from our backup sites.

A traceroute revealed a router somewhere in Washington DC that was hanging things up between the two data centers.

So my question is, how could this happen? I would have expected all the TCP/IP packets to be rerouted automatically around the malfunctioning router? Isn’t that the way the Internet was designed to work?

Tuesday, October 30, 2012 — 1 note

Hurricane Preparedness for Nerds

Everyone on our production support team installed the following cron on their local workstation so we would know if anyone loses power and can’t get in touch with the rest of the team:

*/1 * * * * ssh server "echo '`date` `whoami` reporting for duty' >> sandy.log"

Monday, October 29, 2012

Love the new Slashdot logo.

I also love the neckbeard comments about how that wouldn’t actually be an accurate little endian representation “even on 24 bit machines”

This is such a useful little feature for the new version of Skitch.

Update: The app store reviews of Skitch 2.0 are scathing. I’m not upgrading yet.

Stripe Blog: Capture the Flag 2.0

From the Stripe blog:

Today we’re launching Capture the Flag: Web Edition, a security contest where you can try your hand at discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in mock web applications. If you’ve ever wondered how a CSRF attack works in practice, this is your chance to find out. We’ve found that hands-on experience with exploiting security flaws helps us write more secure code, and we hope that working on the CTF will be both enlightening and fun.

I’m giving my development team the afternoon off to compete in this!

Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing.

Jeff Atwood, “Please Don’t Learn To Code”

Ben Says:

This is one of the dumbest things I have ever read.

The article is conflating “coding” with “professional software development”. Learning to code teaches you, among lots of other things:

Divide and conquer
Boolean logic
Debugging
Analytical thinking
Logic flow
Details!

When a programmer gets requirements from a product manager or business analyst, they are ALWAYS incomplete. The edge cases are NEVER identified and none of the “what if” scenarios are played out. 9 times out of 10 it is up to the programmer to understand the nuances, to take things to their logical conclusions, to consider what happens in the case of N=0 or as N approaches infinity.

These are all skills I use EVERY SINGLE DAY, not just when I code, but in solving problems in life. Broken toilet? How do I figure out where the problem is? You bet I’m going to divide and conquer that shit (pun intended)!

This kind of thinking helps me in everything that I do in life and it wasn’t until I learned to code (in college, mind you) that I started thinking this way.

Do I want my son to become a computer programmer? I don’t care. Up to him. Do I want him to understand how to think critically and logically and in a structured & methodical way when approaching problems? Absolutely. And computer programming teaches these skills better than anything else I’ve ever done.

(Source: evan)

Introducing BK Tech Talks

Half of New York City’s best and brightest technologists live or work in Brooklyn, yet we travel to Manhattan every week for the best tech talks.

Not anymore! BK Tech Talks are presentations about the most interesting problems and solutions that New Yorkers are working on.

Presentations should be 30-45 minutes long and are for a technical audience. Don’t be afraid to show source code. And if you’re afraid to read code, this Meetup isn’t for you. If you would like to present or there’s something you’d like to hear about, please let us know.

The first few presentations: “MTA BusTime: Real Time GPS Tracking of New York City Buses” and “Bitcoin is Not a Currency” look awesome.

So? What are you waiting for? Come join the Meetup and we’ll see you in Brooklyn!

Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made.

Scripting News: Hackathons are nonsense

I missed it all, I was too busy building a product.

Ted Dziuba, on the recent tech journalist kerfuffle between Arrington, Siegler & Lyons.