Disqus - Latest Comments for ktheory

Re: Pairing with docker-spoon - Operation Bootstrap

Aaron — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 10:39:42 -0000

Very cool. Thanks. :-) Docker-spoon looks like a slick pairing workflow too.

Re: Pairing with docker-spoon - Operation Bootstrap

Aaron — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 21:34:44 -0000

That's a classy tmux theme. Is the config freely available?

Re: Irregardless

Aaron — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 12:06:05 -0000

I think "therefore" is a better substitute than "because".

"I didn't pay my taxes. As a result, I was audited."

Re: Irregardless

Aaron — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 21:27:21 -0000

Lol!

Re: Testing Your Factories First

Aaron — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 07:29:48 -0000

I love the word "fancytime".

Re: Doing the right thing

Aaron — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 23:07:02 -0000

Good tip Tim. Another way I've handled expensive destroy methods is to write a custom bulk delete method. E.g.

# In group.rb:
def self.bulk_delete(ids)
ids = ids * ',' # A SQL-friendly string of ids
# Delete dependent objects in bulk
Post.delete_all("group_id in (#{ids})")
Membership.delete_all("group_id in (#{ids})")
...
self.delete_all("id in (#{ids})")
end

It's not very DRY, but it's fast. Perhaps there's a way to introspect on :dependent => :destroy to avoid enumerating all dependent classes.

Re: MySQL for Statistics – Old Faithful

Aaron — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 09:17:37 -0000

Thanks for sharing!

I'm curious about the page fragmentation and the weekly OPTIMIZE TABLE command. Did you observe performance degrading due to fragmentation, and then decide to do the optimize table?

Do you see a measurable boost in read performance after the OPTIMIZE TABLE?

Or did you decide that fragmentation would eventually become an issue, and chose a weekly OPTIMIZE TABLE to prevent it?

Awesome post.

Re: Future of Opscode Cookbooks

Aaron — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:46:28 -0000

How about packaging cookbooks as rubygems?

IMHO, the process of making my own gems has become very easy (thanks to gemcutter & rubygems improvements since 1.3.5).

And bundler makes managing gems a breeze, whether from official sources, or community git forks.

Re: Puzzle #61: Movie tagline translation party

Aaron — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 10:41:29 -0000

#4: Erin Brockovitch: She brought a small town to its feet and a huge company to its knees.

Re: Asynchronous Email with ActionMailer and Delayed Job

Aaron — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:29:54 -0000

My favorite approach to async email is to run a postfix relay on each app server.

ActionMailer delivers the mail to localhost, so it's super fast. Postfix asynchronously relays the email to your real SMTP server (which has good deliverability).

The local postfix server automatically retries when the real SMTP server is unavailable.

Of course, it can still help to use delayed job if it's expensive to render the email, or you're sending many emails.

The salient portion of the postfix config is:

# In /etc/postfix/main.cf
# Only receive messages from localhost
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8
inet_interfaces = loopback-only

# Relay to your real smtp server
relayhost = smtp.example.com

In my experience, Postfix has been rock solid, and uses even less memory & cpu than nginx.

Re: Ask thoughtbot: college & degrees

Aaron — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:57:56 -0000

Heh, sorry for the double-post. Please delete.

Re: Ask thoughtbot: college & degrees

Aaron — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:54:56 -0000

Education has an important signalling value. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Employers choose to hire someone based on limited information. Let's assume it's easier for good employees to get through college than bad employees. Then a typical college grad is more likely to be a good employee than a typical person without a college degree.

All else being equal, it's reasonable for an employer prefer someone with more education.

There are certainly exceptions: some good employees choose to skip college; and some bad employees make it though college. But the general rule still applies.

This means education is valuable regardless of whether you learn anything useful. It can be purely a way to hint to employers that you're probably better than your comptetition.

If you choose to skip college, you'll have to work harder to convince potential employers that you're worth hiring.

Economist Michael Spence won the Nobel Prize for developing this model. IMHO, this explains why people (including myself) go to college (and strive for selective schools), even though most of what we learn isn't useful in our careers.

Re: UPDATED: Steam for Mac Is Finally Here! Where to Download It

Aaron — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:05:38 -0000

When I download the link above and login, I get an error: "Steam on Mac is currently in closed beta. Login with an enrolled account to continue."

Maybe that restriction will be removed later today.

Re: UPDATED: Steam for Mac Is Finally Here! Where to Download It

Aaron — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:05:38 -0000

When I download the link above and login, I get an error: "Steam on Mac is currently in closed beta. Login with an enrolled account to continue."

Maybe that restriction will be removed later today.

Re: BREAKING: Fire on Smith and Warren

Aaron — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:26:38 -0000

According to bystanders, no one was injured. People had left the apartments before the fire started. The first floor contains a shoe repair shop, which is apparently where the fire originated.

I shot some crappy video: http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: What’s the relationship between cost and price?

Aaron — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:34:50 -0000

Right on!

"It is true that cost is, over the long term, a lower bound for price – otherwise you’d go out of business."

This is misleading. The following is more accurate:

It's true that a firm's total costs (not just the cost of the product), over the long term, must be less than the firms total revenues. Otherwise you'd go out of business.

There a several examples where products are sold (or given away) below cost, even over the long term, and the costs are recouped from other revenue streams. E.g. ad-supported business models, or free commercial software that encourages people to buy more non-free products (the commoditized complements approach).

The Marginal Revolution blog recently had a discussion about costs and prices in the movie industry, and I weighed in with similar sentiments and examples.

Side note: I wonder why having prices well above the marginal cost of production so often feels unjust. We have some innate sense of fairness that thinks it's greedy and wrong to charge more than the per-unit cost. But we have no problem taking things for free.

Re: Unusual police sketch

Aaron — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:27:06 -0000

As reported on BB in 2007: Caricatures are more effective than police sketches.

This sketch artist apparently took that research to heart.

Re: Unusual police sketch

Aaron — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:27:06 -0000

As reported on BB in 2007: Caricatures are more effective than police sketches.

This sketch artist apparently took that research to heart.

Re: Francis Hwang: Casts

Aaron — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:18:23 -0000

Hey, if you like Dan Harris' snarky cultural criticism, I highly recommend his book "Cute, Quaint, Hungry And Romantic: The Aesthetics Of Consumerism"

http://www.amazon.com/Cute-...

Re: Javascript Rogaine

Aaron — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:13:25 -0000

Nice! I just want to pet all this soft hair.

Re: Fine news

Aaron — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:13:02 -0000

Congratulations! Great name. :-)

Re: Pownce Invites

Aaron — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:36:02 -0000

Thanks!

Re: Pownce Invites

Aaron — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 21:01:28 -0000

aaron-at-ktheory.com

Re: iPhone Barely Ripples Japanese Market

Aaron — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 06:00:37 -0000

If I recall correctly from Reingold's book Smart Mobs, Japan and other developed Asian countries have fewer computers per capita. Deluxe cell phones are a substitute for PCs in Asia to a greater extent than they are in the US...so there's not as big of a niche to be filed by the iPhone.

Re: Firefox 2.0 beta - the highlights

Aaron — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 22:57:14 -0000

"My favorite: Clicking the orange RSS icon in the browser bar can now subscribe you to that page’s feed in Bloglines, MyYahoo or the Google readers. Or you can select a desktop app like NetNewsWire."

I use the LiveLines extension to do just that in Firefox 1.5.