Toluu : Push cx

Push cx

A tea-drinking web geek's coffee-flavored blog

ICANN is moving steadily to enact a fast-track process for gTLD creation (where “fast” here means “months instead of years”), so there could be a few more competitors for .com, .net, .pro, and the rest of the gang in a year or two. Some of the early candidates are .bank, .nyc, and .paris.

What this means, of course, is that www will never die. When a website could be advertised at “strand.nyc” or even just “google”, there needs to be something to indicate to the viewer they should go type this into their computer. It’s not going to be “Hey, now that you finally get that .com isn’t some kind of stutter, type this into your computer:” and it’s sure not going to be “http://”. It’s going to be www, and it’s going to just barely be the lesser of several evils for a long while.

Not A Good Day for RubyJune 22

*** glibc detected *** /usr/bin/ruby: double free or corruption (out): 0×299b2b08 *** ======= Backtrace: ========= /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6[0xb7d40d65] /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(cfree+0×90)[0xb7d44800] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ed5d79] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8(ruby_xmalloc+0×85)[0xb7ed60c5] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8(rb_str_buf_new+0×50)[0xb7f25b80] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ef157e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7eb733a] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebee8e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebfbc8] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec797e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec78fc] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebf766] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebfbc8] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec797e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebf766] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebfbc8] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec797e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebf766] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebfbc8] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec797e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7eca68a] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8(rb_yield+0×21)[0xb7ecbad1] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8(rb_ary_each+0×31)[0xb7ea41a1] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7eb7345] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebee8e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebfbc8] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec797e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec953d] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec6d64] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebf766] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ebfbc8] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8[0xb7ec797e] /usr/lib/libruby1.8.so.1.8

Important News Regarding Netflix PaymentJune 19

I got an odd email this morning from Netflix about how they’ve decided to reduce their service. I called their support line and they refused to elaborate on their vague promises of improvement. They think it’s a great idea to just stop living up to an agreement they’ve made with customers. So here’s the note I’ve sent them:

Dear Netflix,

We wanted to let you know we will be paying you less for our account, the one that we’ve had for about seven years, effective September 1, 2008.

This additional money will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. You will, of course, continue to provide us the same number of DVDs at the same pace. Before then, we recommend you rethink degrading your service, or find a way to make my girlfriend like kung fu movies and me like costume dramas.

While it may be disappointing to see part of our payment go away, this change will help us continue to improve the renting experience for all of your customers.

If you have any questions, please check your conscience or ask your support workers at 1 (888) 638-3549 what other customers think of it. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Harkins’s Law of Enterprise SoftwareJune 8

Bram’s Law cleverly explains why a lot of common software sucks. I was just chatting in #startups and coined my own law to lay alongside it. I think I finally understand why all the gigantic content management systems and “Enterprise solutions” I’ve seen are so terribly bad.

We were having a conversation about designing a particular feature to scale up nicely…

<goldbond> if you are going to charge for your application, scaling really isn’t a problem right? because you can just throw a ton of hardware at it without eating up all of your revenue
<axod> goldbond: depends how badly you scale
<axod> as long as you charge more than it costs ;)
<Harkins> So clearly, the more you charge, the less competent you need to be.
<Harkins> I’d better go raise my prices.

Getting GitJune 3

I’ve been curious about git for a few weeks. I’ve heard friends recommend it, a lot of big projects (Linux kernel, Xorg, Rails) have switched to it, and I hadn’t yet learned a distributed version control system. I’ve bounced off the blog posts I’ve come across, they weren’t well-organized or assumed some basic familiarity I didn’t have. The man pages were also kind of intimidating.

I found an article promising to explain git from the bottom up. It starts out well, with an explanation of the basic objects involved. I puzzled a bit when it started comparing merges, but the graphs made it pretty clear what the difference between a merge and rebase are, though I was fuzzy on why you’d want them or if they were really usable. Then it sort of wandered into resets and reflogs and it wasn’t so much a tutorial anymore as a gripe/exploration of advanced features that went a bit over my head.

I switched to reading Git Internals on a friend’s recommendation. Some minor formatting oddities aside (widows, orphans, and why not put the graphs in the gigantic right margin?), it’s a great introduction to git. Like the previous, it builds from the basic git objects and starts by explaining how files, then directories, then versions are stored. On