Archive a PDF of your Posterous blog
My wife and I had a private travel blog on Posterous. Unfortunately, Posterous got aquihired by Twitter and is shutting down, so I spent a few minutes figuring out how...
Command Line Accounting with Ledger and Reckon, an update
I’ve been using ledger, combined with a custom Ruby gem called reckon, to balance my small business’s accounts for the last few years. The command line, Bayesian statistics, and Double...
Running Ruby inside of Ruby (in the best way ever)
There are no good Ruby sandboxing options right now. You can sort of use $SAFE levels and taint checking, you can sort of use Shikashi, you can use the secure...
Compressing Code
What can we learn about a code base or a language based on its compressibility? My pet theory is that less compressible code will be, on average, better code, because...
My experiences with personal outsourcing
Over the last few years I’ve been experimenting with outsourcing. I’ve done this both for personal and business projects. In the personal domain, some people call this “lifesourcing”: the practice...
Machine Learning Project Ideas
Ryan Stout and I are giving a talk at RailsConf about Machine Learning tomorrow. To go along with the talk, here is a list of project ideas to get your...
Fixing the Chrome background refresh bug
There is a bug in the current version of Chromium (hence Google Chrome) that sometimes fails to redraw CSS background images when they’re hidden and then re-shown. This issue appeared...
Hacking Google for fun and profit
At the end of last year, Google announced their Vulnerability Reward Program which rewards security researchers for reported security and privacy holes in Google properties. This sounded like an interesting...
How to make your Rails app tweet the Twitter
Suppose you want to build a Rails application for tracking popular links, and you want it to post the most popular links to Twitter automatically. This quick tutorial will show...
Why plug computers are a security nightmare
The increasing availability of low profile “wall-wart” plug computers like the SheevaPlug can be viewed as an emerging threat to physical network security. For $99, a budding industrial espionagist could...
How I do command-line accounting: Ledger and Reckon
Ledger is a powerful yet simple double-entry accounting system with a command line interface, making it perfect for those of us who prefer our text editor and flat files over...
Rails RSpec tests are CPU bound
Today I experimented with running a large Rails RSpec test suite on a RAM disk. My hope was that by hosting either the MySQL server or the Rails project directory...
Revolutionary
Sometime in the late ’80s I convinced my parents to get an external hard drive for our Mac Plus to augment our extravagant two floppy disk drives. We got a...
Multiple profiles in Chrome on Ubuntu
If you’re running Chrome on Ubuntu (likely elsewhere too), you can run multiple copies of Chrome with fully different profiles by launching it with the --user-data-dir option. For example, I...
Easy web scraping: Get the title of any URL with YQL
This snippet demonstrates how to get the title from any webpage using a simple YQL query and jQuery. The title is fetched from url and is placed in #page_title. 400:...