Category: Uncategorized

What’s a fake user? What’s fake?

On Instagram, the photo-sharing social network for the iPhone, I caught eye of a drama that’s unfolding right now over who is a fake user and a real user – not to mention the distinction between fake photo and real photo.

Here’s the blow by blow.

• User @sunshinepeyton starts posting pics that are not her.
• User @chicago has a contest which the fake account won.
• Other folks start getting accused of being fake, e.g. @jakec223 , and starts the #iamnotfake tag.
• @chicago calls out the faker. See below.
• Users start posting photos of themselves with text to try and show they’re not fake, e.g. “My name is Jake @jakec223. I am not fake.”

I’ve been using Monaco as my default font for coding for about 10 years now. I used to be a hardcore Courier fan back in college only because our printers only printed out in Courier. I wanted my emails and printouts to match.

I ran into an article on the 9×15 font being more readable and clean, and decided to use it. Here’s the comparison below with Monaco first,

and then 9×15:

If you tried logging into YouTube today, you’ll notice that you got an “Error 502”.

Here’s a quick summary of what that means.

According to RFC 2616, the document which among other things lists the error codes, Error 502 means “Bad Gateway.” That basically means that you can get to the Proxy server or the server that talks to your browser, but not to the servers behind that.

Wikipedia lists all the error codes, too.

I just want to chime in and say that my iPhone 3G is God awful slow now after updating to iOS4. I did the hard reset twice on it.

There was a moderate improvement, but I still run into spots where it’ll hang for a minute or two.

I really do hope they come out with an improvement to performance, which is rumored to come out soon.

There’s a feature that I need to get done in the next hour or so before leaving SF. It’s a business log-in for MyChamberApp so that businesses can update and edit their business listing that shows up on our mobile apps.

When I was thinking about places to code, the one place that looked good on all levels was Apollo Coffee.

The have

• free wifi,
• comfortable couches,
• lots of outlets to plug-in your laptop,
• friendly clientele who are most likely coders or designers, too, and
• great latte art.

If you can, please give them a great review on Yelp.

This video from Dave Berzack pretty much sums up what an application developer does.

Killa Appz by Dave Berzack:

Not to belabor the awesome nerdcore in this video but ya, a good application developer makes legacy apps faster. Also some folks do try to de-compile a closed source app, and it’s a waste of time.

I just got my ticket for WordCamp LA.

Here are 5 reasons you should go:

1. You run a WordPress blog. WordCamp LA brings together folks who have the same challenges you have in SEO, web design, and extending WordPress functionality through themes and plug-ins.
2. You are in LA. ’nuff said.
3. The view of LA from the LMU Campus is fantastic.
4. Thom Meredith will be talking about his WordPress related experiences while working for the LA Times.
5. Allison Day will give a talk just for beginners on how to decode the code in WordPress Themes

I contacted the organizers about giving a talk on how I used HyperDB to scale the Nikon Festival site. We’ll see if I hear back from them.

I forked the code that Ryan King wrote for Twitter called snowflake.

Snowflake works by guaranteeing a unique user id based on a few simple guarantees: time, machine id and sequence number.

My fork has a fix for the ruby client allowing you to query multiple servers.

Here are the prerequisites:

• Java 6 (1.6)
• sbt (simple-build-tool) – http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/
• thrift – http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/

The install process is fairly straightforward:

When you run the client like so:

You should get something like this:

The problem with professionalism is that there’s only one way to get a job done right. For example, if you’re a DBA working from a relational background there’s no way that you could ever professionally suggest a NoSQL solution to a problem.

The great thing about professionalism is that you can get paid for your detachment to reality and by following “The Process.” The process is something that’s hard to argue with, has authority, and won’t ruin your career. But the process can ruin a business.

A good example of the process ruining a business is the current shakedown in advertising.

There used to be a process where creative output was cheap and what was treasured was the global reach of a global agency.

By following this process of client close, account executive direction and creative output through various channels, advertising turned a blind eye to the rise of the Internet.

Global companies no longer need the global reach of an agency. Global companies need social media experts who can leverage nodes of attention in form of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Professionally, a creative steeped in radio or print cannot suggest that the solution is something Internet-based. By the same logic a social media expert, enjoying the zenith of the social media frenzy, cannot suggest professionally a non-social solution.

How do we escape such professional straight jackets?

The solution seems to be that being less focused leads to more insights:

“People who seem to have frequent insights do not do so by focusing harder on the problem, instead they have learned to switch off their thinking – to access a quieter mind on demand. Having insights involves hearing subtle signals and allowing loose connections to be made by quieting the mind – letting the brain idle with minimal electrical activity.” — David Rock