• On Life and Love

    Fun Linkage

    Errata Security: Confirmed: LinkedIn 6mil password dump is real – The updates on this are particularly interesting, as he writes about the speed of cracking passwords. Also, I want one of those video cards. An Architect’s Guide to Color – Color is beckoning this season, and one architect is heeding the call with a plethora of new hues to tempt your house's palette. Review: Sufan Stevens, Son Lux And Serengeti, ‘Beak And Claw’ : NPR – I picked up this album on iTunes and have to say that it's as quirky and cool as this review makes it out to be. Linux computer the size of a thumb drive now…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place

    There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here. The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)? "So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations…

  • Uncategorized

    Tumblr Integration in PHP4

    Turns out: totally not worth the effort in this case. I’m working on an NPO site right now whose code concerns me more and more as I get into it. I’m new to the group and don’t have a whole lot of time to devote to the site, but one of my first tasks was to get the owner’s recent Tumblr posts to show on the homepage.

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: How to keep someone with you forever – "You create a sick system." I wanted to cry when I read this. Looking Back — Discord&Rhyme – "To be successful at bootstrapping, you have to cut every feature except those you think are absolutely necessary. Then you cut some that you thought that you absolutely had to have. You compromise your design because you need to get the product to market. You ignore automated testing and documentation because your code is too unstable to be held back by rigorous processes." Launching beta, or “How to decide when and where to cut corners” – 200+ Seamless Patterns Perfect…

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    Search-building: custom or Google

    Until earlier this week, I had a lousy site search in place. It was one of Google’s Custom Search Engines, barely configured and only on its own page, due to it’s hefty (and blocking!) JavaScript. I’d long since disabled WordPress’s search since my stories aren’t being run in WordPress, and I didn’t feel like trying to chew on the internal search mechanisms to include the stories. Last week, I started playing around with a project to create my own (Python) site search, including a crawler and Whoosh-based search. I’d seen the implementation of a Lucene search in Zend go fairly easy-peasy, and liked the idea of a self-hosted search. Problem…