March 2012
1 post
February 2012
1 post
December 2011
3 posts
Interview on Lining Things Up →
Chad, who was a student in one of our courses, asked me to be on his show recently and talk about startups, GrowLab, and Vancouver. I thought I bombed it right away after, but it actually turned out pretty good. :)
November 2011
2 posts
Neat Scala null -> option idiom
Working with Java APIs in Scala? Things potentially being null when you wish they were None?
I had this problem working with servlets… request.getQueryString returns null if there is no query string in the url (as opposed to an empty string) and without explicating checking for nulls (a good 3-4 lines of clutter), the code throws an unhelpful null pointer exception. Turns out Option(value)...
Capitalizing on a General Education →
Great article on the divide between generalist / non-technical degrees being studied by most University students and the economic/job prospects of their graduates.
But no fear, you army of BAs who wax eloquent (I am one of you). Keep your eye on Matygo. We are here to help. Get the concrete skills you need to get on the track to positions where you can actually exercise the abstract and holistic...
October 2011
3 posts
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to...”
– RIP Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
September 2011
1 post
5 tags
June 2011
1 post
The Matygo Blog: Network Effects (or, how to make... →
Wrote this for the matygo blog, though it’s really a personal position.
matygo:
A network effect: when the value derived from a system increases with the number of people that use it.
I’ve been slightly obsessed with the idea of network effects lately, but for good reason: Every major internet success has been created by leveraging network effects: from email to Airbnb. A…
May 2011
4 posts
2 shell tricks
1) Empty file of any size (useful for testing things, e.g. uploads of various sizes):
Did some googling a came up with using ‘dd’… it’s long, hard to remember, and a bit hard to read. For example, if you want a junk ~50mb file:
$ dd if=/dev/random of=./fifty.junk bs=1024 count=50000
that says ‘in blocks of 1024 bytes (1kb, the Block Size) read 50,000 blocks from...
Year 292M is the next Y2K
In pursuit of what we can safely use as the infinite future on date comparisons:
scala> val t3 = new Timestamp(Long.MaxValue)
t3: java.sql.Timestamp = 292278994-08-16 23:12:55.807
Yup - that’s year two hundred ninety two million and a lot.
by comparison here’s today.
scala> val t1 = new Timestamp(System.currentTimeMillis)
t1:...
OO fail - isn't that what param types are for?
Potential runtime error of exactly the type the compiler is supposed to catch.
(I know *why* in Java it has to take a Date and can’t specify a Timestamp object, but that’s a language (and potentially library) design error. I wonder how/if I could solve this in Scala….)
from: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/sql/Timestamp.html
intcompareTo(Date o) ...
The Matygo Blog: Office v 2.0 (now with tracked... →
farhanpatel:
matygo:
Well it’s been exactly a year since we moved in to the dominion building. It was a wild ride, we built a lot of cool stuff in that office, played a bit of starcraft, all in all had a great time.
You know what they say, all good things…
To make room for our interns who will be joining us…
I’ll be working here for the next 4 months. It should be a very interesting 4...
January 2011
1 post
July 2010
1 post
history meme
Haha great idea alex. This is like a programmer’s version of those stupid ‘what are your favourite <blahs>” forwards. Here’s mine, post yours!
Pauls-IcinTosh:Darkhorse paulrl$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnk1,1 | head -n 20
143 hg
141 cd
79 ls
26 rake
14 ack
13 touch
11 pwd
10 java
7 ssh
5 sudo
5 sc-server
4 which
4 script/console
4...
June 2010
1 post
Rent a White Guy (in Beijing) →
If all else fails….
This really brings me back. Never did this myself but knew a couple people who did.
God I love China.
April 2010
4 posts
Just finished my last exam of my degree. (and I think I killed it). Just wanted to let it be known :-D
devio.us - Free OpenBSD Shell Account Provider →
(via mrtoto)
nice find. If their latest blog post is any indication, I think guys don’t realize the massive flood of geeks they’re about to suffer. GL guys, smart simple service.
A selection of art people have made on the iPad in...
mrgan:
(Click through to see the originals)
On three separate occasions this morning my iPhone/MacBook combo fell short and I wished I had an iPad. Come soon end of April! I want one so bad.
March 2010
5 posts
mr toto's «tecthusiasmic»: Move Your Office to the... →
University students conduct most of their work in libraries, drawn in by the lack of distractions the environment provides. There’s often a feeling of solidarity that develops between participants, making the system work with little outside guidance or control.
Offices should be more like…
Interesting argument. Though there are couple major assumptions that I think work against this...
The Matygo Blog: Announcing the Matygo Alpha →
It has been a long time coming, but Matygo is finally ready to release some software. It’s small, young, and only does a few basic things but we’re proud of it. Try it out and let us know what you think.
Over the last half year we’ve done a lot more than just work on code. We’ve also made…
Hurray! I wrote this post for the Matygo blog marking the happy announcement of my startup’s...
January 2010
23 posts
Funny cause it's true (warning: must be a... →
The Onion truthiness. →
thebronzemedal:
mthig:
I don’t enjoy that stuff. I don’t enjoy anything. I don’t even want to be here. The sadness and regret I feel every waking hour of my life is absolutely unbearable. I am a miserable pig and I do not want to exist.
The irony is that, even if I did die, the hell I would surely be sent to could not possibly be any worse than the bottomless pool of excrement...
Fucking Awesome. →
There is no other way to describe this thing. All I know is that if you love computers and you love ROCKING this is a wet dream. I’ve always wanted to ssh into my *guitar*.
Some choice snippets from the FAQ:
7. How do I add [insert xyz here] functionality in to the control program? C++ source code is provided for you to make any changes you like.
Still don’t understand how...
RIP JD Salinger.
joegaudet:
I like many read and loved catcher in the rye, it’s a shame he never wrote much else.
That is all.
+1
Update on "Tumblr sends passwords in the clear."
This is a follow up to my previous post: Tumblr sends passwords in the clear.
First, the official response from Tumblr: A short, polite, but generally uninformative email from Marc at support@tumblr.com. The jist of it was “Yes, we are aware of how we are handling passwords.” and “I’ve passed your suggestion along to our development team.”
So at least they are...
CBC News - Calgary - Nellie's restaurants fined... →
charliegodsoe:
Now’s the best time best time to eat at Nellie’s folks… It’s never been nor will it ever be this clean again.
Who doesn't love ASCII? →
Tumblr sends passwords in the clear.
I just sent this email to support@tumblr.com. I’m hoping by bringing a bit of attention to this fact the issue might get fixed a bit quicker.
Hey there,
First I want to thank you guys for making such an awesome blogging site. First web app I’ve been genuinely excited about discovering in a long time.
Secondly, I wanted to ask you if you are aware that you are sending your...
PEP 8 as a PDF - Python Style Guide with syntax... →
I couldn’t find a nicely formatted version of PEP 8 anywhere online, so I copied the html version into pages and coloured the code. Here it is in case anyone else would like a pdf version of PEP 8!
RE: Did Anyone Solve the MU-Puzzle in Chapter 1?
EDIT 2: Alrighty, so it was quickly shown by both Joe in the comments and Alex over on his blog that my third hypothesis (“I’m missing something.”) was correct. No, I did not prove wikipedia wrong nor did I discover bugs in both Erlang and Ruby. The lesser Paul inside me is tempted to delete this post and my embarassing jumping to conclusions, but I think I’ll let it stand....
2009 - A look back (at Matygo)
I wrote this for the Matygo blog, but it’s probably worth posting here too.
matygo:
Ok, I know I’m about 2 weeks late for the “2009 retrospective” blog posts. I wrote this up around New Years but wanted to work on it some more and have it vetted it by the guys before releasing it on the world. Here you are:
...
No Tumblarity? What the hell? I was barely level...
Last night I was just telling my friend Joe, who joined tumblr yesterday, how genius tumblarity is. You want to raise it. Why? Just cause you do. It’s the insta-competitive crack feedback loop rpgs like WoW are based on.
But in this game, instead of getting points for killing mythical beasts you get points for contributing to the online world. Especially if it’s interesting. It...
Kurt Vonnegut's Letter Home after the War →
Sproutcore + Java (App Engine): Concept Proven
I just finished hacking my way through the extensive “Todos” Sproutcore tutorial.
Sproutcore is entirely a client-side technology and is ‘backend-agnostic’ (which sounds kinda like it swings both ways, but I digress), so the only tricky part of the tutorial comes when you want to persist things somewhere on a server. At that point, the tutorial veers off down a couple...
Two Awesome New Web Developer Tools (to me at...
1) Client Side: Chrome.
Lo and behold the Developer tools in Chrome KickAss. Firebug was good, Chrome Dev tools are fantastic. The javascript console even does code complete.
2) Server Side: HTTP Client
Nice, free, graphical tool to inspect HTTP packets. Send posts, gets, heads, etc… to any url and inspect the request and response with nice syntax highlighting. Makes it easy to see what...
Number 1!
Today I officially became Matygo employee numero uno! Thank you random gov’t tax form that motivated the bestowment. I let Joe be number 0 cause he’s closer to the metal than me.
Very Green Art →
Wordnik + Ommwriter = Awesome
Wordnik + Ommwriter. Makes me want to write again, which is pretty freakin awesome.