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This Page Has Moved

2012-01-29

Not too long ago, I decided that I wanted to shift my content from Heroku’s servers to my personal server. For a number of reasons, this meant that it was much easier for me to host my content using jekyll. I still believe that toto is a great platform and I will continue to host the dodo template on GitHub, but this site is effectively dead. All future content (as well as copies of old content) can be found here: http://prestia.org

This page will remain online as an example of the dodo template, but no new content will be produced.

1955 - 2011

2011-10-05

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs, 2005

Back to Basics

2011-09-29

Like a good number of nerds my age, my first experience writing code was copying BASIC programs from the back of old computer magaziness. Over time, I began experimenting with HTML and took a few C++ courses in high school. After a few Java classes in college, I gave up formal computer science training and just hacked around in my free time. I had a lot of free time.¹

I learned quite a bit about writing software and maintaining a server over the years, but I could never shake the feeling that I missed something by not majoring in computer science. I was never really sure what that something was, but I felt that my purely pragmatic education left a sort of hole in my experience that CS students didn’t have. As a result, I always felt like an outsider (if not an outright fraud) talking with CS-diploma-wielding engineers at local tech and startup events. Still, I quickly learned that this feeling beat the alternative: Admitting that I’m an attorney.²

Anyway, I decided a few weeks ago that it is finally time to fill this hole. I did some asking around and bought a couple of books that appear to be widely regarded as the best for learning CS fundamentals: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [free html version] and Introduction to Algorithms. I keep pretty busy with work and a few outside projects, but I’m setting aside at least an hour each day to work through these books. I already started working through SICP and, despite Scheme’s strange syntax³, I’m rather enjoying the book. The expository bits are good (if a bit dry) and the problem sets are challenging without being overly frustrating. I don’t think this is a particularly great introduction to programming for someone who is casually interested in the subject⁴, but it is perfect for my purposes.

I hope to eventually post my answers to the problem sets on this website (they are currently occupying a spiral-bound notebook), but I haven’t decided if I will post them to the main page or hack together multipage support in my blogging software. Look for them in the future.

¹ How much free time? Enough to learn some Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and a host of web-centric technologies.

² Seriously, if you ever want a group of self-respecting hackers to ignore every word you say, just walk up to them and say you’re an attorney. I’m pretty sure that, as a class, we are disliked even more than Pointy-haired Bosses and Douchebag Business Guys.

³ Or should I say Lisp’s strange syntax?

⁴ For softer introductions to programming, check out Try Ruby, Learn Python the Hard Way, or Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Code School also has some great learn-by-doing tutorials.

Gap.com is a Nightmare Waiting to Happen

2011-08-14

I discovered today that the entire family of Gap websites (gap.com, bananarepublic.com, oldnavy.com, piperlime.com, and athleta.com) store customer passwords in plain text. This is particularly worrisome because these websites also store the customer’s name, address, email, phone number, and credit card number. It is possible that the credit card numbers are properly hashed (I have no way to verify), but this still wouldn’t prevent massive fraud if someone were to steal the customer database and post it online.

If you shop at any of these websites and have your personal data stored, now would be a great time to delete it.

dodo: A Template for toto

2011-08-10

What is dodo?

Dodo is a personal blogging template for the compact, hacker-friendly blog engine toto. Dodo looks beautiful and degrades gracefully thanks to HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery, modernizr, hyphenator.js, and highlighter.js. All posts are written in John Gruber’s excellent markdown syntax and published to Heroku using git.

Dodo was written by Anthony Prestia and you can see it in action on his personal blog.

Want to try dodo?

Assuming you are already a GitHub and Heroku user, setup takes less than 10 seconds:

$ git clone git://github.com/prestia/dodo.git <blog_name>
$ cd <blog_name>
$ heroku create <blog_name>
$ git push heroku master

Configuration

Once installed, you can configure dodo by modifying the config.ru file. The default options are as follows:

set :blog_title,   ''  # main blog title
set :author,       ''  # blog author
set :root,         "index"  # page to load on /
set :markdown,     :smart  # use markdown + smart-mode
set :disqus,       ''  # disqus id, or false
set :fulltext,     ''  # for index, true or false
set :summary,      :max => 150, :delim => //
set :ext,          'txt'  # file extension for articles
set :cache,        28800  # cache duration, in seconds

set :git,          false  # github username
set :twitter,      false  # twitter username
set :description,  ''  # default blog description
set :main_url,     ''  # main, non-blog url
set :analytics,    ''  # your site's Google Analytics ID

set :date,         lambda {|now| now.strftime("%B #{now.day.ordinal} %Y") } # date format for articles

Problems?

Dodo is a work in progress. While it is perfectly stable, some code is still a bit messy and there may be some layout hiccups. If you have any problems using dodo, please submit them here.

A Horseman Arrives

2011-08-07

I planned to write a long piece about the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, but I waited a bit too long and Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic managed to nail pretty much everything I wanted to say. If you haven’t done so, read his article immediately. I’ll wait.

Outside of what Friedersdorf mentioned, I’ll add only two things:

First, I want to stress the seriousness of this bill. H.R. 1981 is the digital the equivalent of allowing a federal agent to follow you around taking excruciatingly detailed notes just in case someone one day thinks you may have done something illegal. This is absurd, creepy, and absolutely unacceptable.

Second, I want to emphasize the importance of carefully scrutinizing any bill that claims to exclusively target one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers). These four categories of criminals are so universally reviled that individuals are often quick to sacrifice individual liberties to combat them. These “temporary” sacrifices often end up lasting for decades and can be incredibly damaging.

This Just Might Be Crazy Enough to Work

2011-07-17

If you are reading this, it would appear that my blog is successfully running on Heroku.

iPhone Users Are About to Be Screwed Over

2011-02-08

The next iPhone (presumably called the iPhone 5) is rumored to include a near field communication ("NFC") chip that could be used for ExpressPay/PayPass-like credit card transactions. Last month, John C. Dvorak declared this technology "to be the most onerous ever." Dvorak apparently lives in some crazy world where other phones don't already contain NFC chips and only Apple has ambitions of turning cell phones into NFC-enabled credit cards.

Dvorak argues that NFC-enabled phones would be tremendously convenient, but that the costs of routing your payments through a mobile carrier are much too high. He states:

If you think your banker is a gouger with dubious fees and no-leeway, what do you think the phone company will be like? Yes, let AT&T handle all your money for you, and see how that works out in the end.

Now, I agree: Letting your phone company become entangled with your daily financial transactions is probably not a good idea. And, yes, I know that phone companies would love to do this. But how does Dvorak logically jump from "smartphones will enable mobile transactions via NFC" to "carriers will necessarily be involved with these transactions" to "iPhone users are screwed"?

NFC has a maximum range of 20 centimeters and does not require a cellular connection to operate. There is no requirement that a wireless carrier ever become involved with an NFC transaction. Presumably, the most logical use of NFC would be for PayPal, American Express, Visa, etc. to build mobile applications that link to pre-existing financial accounts and are processed identically to current credit or debit transactions. In this situation, the only way the wireless carrier would become involved is if they started charging a toll to connect to your financial institution's servers (net neutrality, anyone?). Even if this practice were adopted, installing Wi-Fi connections near store registers would quickly alleviate the problem.

In the carrier-controlled application ecosystems of the past, your cellular service provider could ensure that all NFC transactions passed through their applications and show up directly on your monthly statement. Today, however, carriers are unable to limit what shows up in the App Store and Android Marketplace. Consider the numerous credit card processing applications available on both Android and iOS. Your wireless carrier is not taking a percentage from those transactions. NFC transactions are no different.

It seems to me that Dvorak is crying wolf. Of course, this is the same guy who predicted in 2007 that the iPhone would fail and is most famous for stating in 1984 that "[t]he Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things."

He's been wrong before.