Disqus - Friends of SaltyDroid

Re: Ruby Best Practices - The Universe between begin and end

charlieok — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:23:03 -0000

I'm still a little hazy on how throw...catch fits in with all this. My understanding is that you throw and catch symbols the way you can raise and rescue exceptions. This seems to be further clouded by the use of "throw" as a synonym for "raise", even though I think the two are definitely separate terms in ruby.

Re: Ruby Best Practices - The Universe between begin and end

charlieok — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:38:52 -0000

Yes, I did mean that. What I also meant was that in this blog post we're commenting on, "throw" is used a few times where I think what was meant was "raise".

Re: Social Media and PR In the Digital Age

charlieok — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:39:32 -0000

Re: twitter, it seems like the spam that's hard to avoid is the follow notices, since you can avoid the rest by not following the spammers. Do you know if there's a good service out there that can keep follow notices out of sight/mind if they're initiated by a spammy account?

Re: Retro Encabulator For Sale by a Bad Client

charlieok — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:38:35 -0000

These are fantastic

Re: RestClient 1.0, Now With SSL Client Certificates

charlieok — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:52:18 -0000

Cool! Wish the well-known asymmetric authentication/encryption methods were more widely used by webapps and more front-and-center in browsers (and not just for secure credit card payments).

Wondering if there's a good solution that operates at the application layer (say, in the HTTP message headers) rather than at the transport layer ala SSL? That wouldn't be so useful for encryption but it could be very useful for authentication...

Re: Reaching into Objects

charlieok — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:07:26 -0000

Broken link!

I'll attempt to paste the real one but character escaping may ruin that, too...

http://www.mongodb.org/disp...

Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale

charlieok — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:56:00 -0000

I know! Mount a super RAID 5 array with a bunch of disks as network area storage on a bunch of machines running a SQL server of some sort. Then just keep adding more disks, and more database servers mounting the disk array.

Ok, seriously, every time you post one of these I get excited about what Heroku must be about to announce.

Re: From The Set Top Box To iTunes To Netflix

charlieok — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:23:33 -0000

I latched on recently to a comment you made about queueing video content you come across on the web and watching it that evening in batch on the tv (or some other convenient time on your phone). I quickly found reeplay.it works great for this purpose (no involvement, just a happy user). The main thing they need to work on is detecting more videos in web pages (I'm sure there are all kinds of weird ways they're encoded/embedded). They get most of the main ones like youtube, vimeo etc and seem to capture 80% of what I throw at them. Then your feedreader of choice can catch it. In my case that's iTunes but I'm sure you could suck it in with Boxee, Miro or any of the others.

Re: HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox 3.5

charlieok — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:30:37 -0000

"With Firefox 3.5 all the major browsers (including IE!) support native drag and drop."

Do you mean, "With HTML5 all the major browsers (including IE!) support native drag and drop."?

Re: HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox 3.5

charlieok — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:57:33 -0000

Ah ok, my mistake. Very cool!

Re: A New Tool for a New Problem

charlieok — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:52:02 -0000

Feeling validated :)
http://twitter.com/charlieo...

Re: Product Continuum

charlieok — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:04:47 -0000

Not such a bad problem to have - it belongs, pretty much by definition, to the holder of the supermajority of the market.

Re: sign up, sign in, sign out

charlieok — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:29:24 -0000

This is great. And, I got a laugh out of reading this post to the bottom and then getting to the Disqus comment section which asks users to "Login below"

Re: Delurking Day

charlieok — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:59:32 -0000

Had not heard of delurking day before. Good idea, great logo. See you around Andrew!

Re: Censorship flamewar

charlieok — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:13:34 -0000

What's catching my eye here is the phrase, "because they have exclusive rights" which shows up in both of your cases without justification.

How about this:

Disney has exclusive rights to content surrounding Disney Princess movies because Disney created those Princess movies.

The Communist Part of China has exclusive rights to content surrounding the Tiananmen Square massacre because The Communist Party of China created the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Is that about right?

Re: Whence Fudge? Why Not Just Use/Extend Avro/GPB/Thrift?

charlieok — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:07:56 -0000

I'll add one to the "have you looked at ____?" pile:

http://bsonspec.org/

Re: NYTimes Stops the Presses

charlieok — Mon, 02 May 2011 13:20:54 -0000

Exactly. I definitely share in that emotion of the celebrations, but at the same time, I wish people would have a little more awareness that the world is watching.

This guy makes the point very well:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sa...

Re: My Seven Favorite Frames From Travel

charlieok — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:53:05 -0000

Awesome photos :)

Re: First+Round+Capital+rings+in+the+holidays+with+%26%238220%3BFriday%26%238221%3B%26nbsp%3Bspoof

charlieok — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:21:01 -0000

Your move Foundry Group...
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Mocked And Misunderstood

charlieok — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:14:42 -0000

“Don't do the obvious thing”

...except that twitter's parent company, Obvious, did the Obvious thing :)

Re: 2012: The Year That Movements Go Mainstream?

charlieok — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:06:38 -0000

Maybe there's a family of consumer devices here. Something you set up at home in order to:

- Host your own data as with Eben Moglen's "Freedom Box"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011...

- Provide network connectivity to immediate surroundings like the "Freedom Tower". Allow a threshold of untrusted traffic to pass safely through without interfering with your own network.

http://freenetworkfoundatio...

- Find other similar devices and peer with them with the aim of getting to a mesh network. Could be a great use for whitespace.

You could do some of this with existing hardware but most people won't. Make it
easy, shiny, auto-updatable.

Put a business model behind it that aligns with the "information freedom and privacy" interests of the users. Example: sell hardware, not advertising.

I'd buy one.

Re: 2012: The Year That Movements Go Mainstream?

charlieok — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:27:14 -0000

One difficulty with investing in a trend such as this one, is that a common thread of this trend is an aversion to “points of control”. Points of control are, I imagine, generally good investments.

Investing in this, to me, implies letting go of the need for control and, to some degree, going out of your way to enable competition on a level playing field.

Is it possible to get 10X or 100X returns with an approach like that? I don't know.

Re: 2012: The Year That Movements Go Mainstream?

charlieok — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:04:58 -0000

I don't think I gave any specifics of the implementation. I'm actually still trying to figure that part out.

Re: A 2011 Retrospective On The AVC Community

charlieok — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:06:44 -0000

On the inequality topic, TED posted an interesting talk recently:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ri...

Re: Techmeme's biggest stories of 2011, literally, as measured by height - Techmeme News

charlieok — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:29:56 -0000

Is there a way I can subscribe to an RSS feed from techmeme that only includes stories above a chosen threshold? Height or some other metric...