Ali's Tumblr

• 2012-03-05

  

  Amit from Mashery was really cool to me and my team at AngelHack. He also gave us these USB sticks (slash-bottle-openers) and merit badges.

• →

  Induction - Polyglot database client for Mac OSX supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB out-of-the-box

  thechangelog:

  Induction is an ambitious new project from Matt Thompson to explore, query, and visualize data from SQL and NoSQL sources including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB. While in early alpha, the project shows promise.

  

  Check out the project web site or grab the source on GitHub to contribute.

  Source: thechangelog

• →

  

  wired:

  [via warbyparker]:

  Whoa. The MLA has officially devised a standard format to cite tweets in an academic paper. Sign of the times.

  Tweet it.

  Source: warbyparker

• 2012-03-04

  A kickass Growl Notify function for your terminal

  Pops a Growl notification when you do something in your terminal.

• 2012-03-03

  Are you a developer? Fill out our survey for AngelHack!

  Doing a hackathon right now and we could really do with some more responses on this.

• 2012-03-02

  Play - Github's api/web driven office jukebox

  Github project of the week.

  What (I think) would be cool is being able to play songs not in the library by fetching from Rdio or Spotify. Or, if I’m the only person in the office, grab my Rdio/Spotify heavy rotation and play stuff from that. (But this paragraph would probably just be feature bloat.)

  We like playing music at the GitHub office. Everyone has their own library on their own machines, and everyone except for me plays shitty music. Play is designed to make office music more palatable.

  Play is api-driven and web-driven. All music is dropped on a central Mac system. Once it’s available to Play, users can control what’s being played. Users can either use a nice web view or the API, which lends itself for use on the command line or through Campfire.

  Play will play all the songs that are added to its Queue. Play will play the crap out of that Queue. And you know what? If there’s nothing left in the Queue, Play will figure out who’s in the office and play something that they’ll like.

  No shit.

• 2012-02-29

  When I was in the Air Force, there was one civilian structural engineer that knew how to code who basically wrote an entire facilities management system for Microstation (CAD program). Since it was such a small one-man operation, we could tell him what we needed and he would add features that were very helpful with a very short turnaround time because he loved doing it.

  This system instantly got the attention of top level people when we were able to use it to (long story short) prove that a few other bases couldn’t be shut down and relocated (yet) because our base didn’t have the room to absorb them that everyone thought we did. Upon realizing what an enormous asset this system had become, they decided it was too valuable to let one person SCREW IT UP so they implemented a board made up of Guard members that would review requested changes every couple of months. Disheartened by the bureaucracy and delays, the engineer basically gave up on it and the project stagnated.

  tl;dr:

  Sometimes the real asset isn’t the awesome toy, it’s the person/people who built it.

  — ComicOzzy, commenting on “Change Control Process Rage”

  Source: reddit.com

• →

  

  thanmack:

  Langston’s ant

  Langton’s ant is a two-dimensional Turing machine with a very simple set of rules but complicated emergent behavior. It was invented by Chris Langton in 1986 and runs on a square lattice of black and white cells. The universality of Langton’s ant was proven in 2000. The idea has been generalized in several different ways, such as turmites which add more colors and more states.

  Squares on a plane are colored variously either black or white. We arbitrarily identify one square as the “ant”. The ant can travel in any of the four cardinal directions at each step it takes. The ant moves according to the rules below:

  1. At a white square, turn 90° right, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit

  2. At a black square, turn 90° left, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit

  These simple rules lead to surprisingly complex behavior: after an initial period of apparently chaotic behavior, that lasts for about 10,000 steps (in the simplest case), the ant starts building a recurrent “highway” pattern of 104 steps that repeat indefinitely. All finite initial configurations tested eventually converge to the same repetitive pattern suggesting that the “highway” is an attractor of Langton’s ant, but no one has been able to prove that this is true for all such initial configurations. It is only known that the ant’s trajectory is always unbounded regardless of the initial configuration.

  (via hackedy)

  Source: Wikipedia

• 2012-02-28

  Master of none.: Hamming codes

  aepokh:

  Today in my general CS class we learned about Hamming codes. I regret that we only had fifteen minutes to learn about it but the professor had a meeting that couldn’t be rescheduled.

  Last semester, when the C programming prof said that recursive functions are functions that call…

  That’s kind of awesome

  Source: aepokh

• 2012-02-27

  

  Want

  (via )

  Source: weheartit.com

• 2012-02-26

  

  (via hackedy)

  Source: smosh.com

• 2012-02-24

  My Friday night

  Installing GitlabHQ, a really cool web-interface for git servers, on my Linode. I don’t really need a personal git server (I have a student account with Github), but it’s interesting to set up.

  The real reason I’m doing this is because I’m on the Project Hosting team, and I want to get this working so we can mess with it. If it all goes well, it might end up being used at Northeastern, which would be AWESOME.

  Right now I’m swapping out apache for nginx + passenger because I’ve always used apache. In addition to deploying Gitlab, I also want to deploy the NUHacks website, and see if I can set up Heroku-style git deployment.

• 2012-02-17

  

  (via imsoconfusedrightnow)

  Source: paulina-ho

• →

  Today’s sysadmin todo list:
  0. Get corporate membership with EFF.
  1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.
  2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.
  3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.
  4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.
  I’m sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don’t miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.
  Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

  — 

  foxylad on hacker news

  Today’s sysadmin todo list:0. Get corporate membership with EFF.1. Identify all … | Hacker News

  (via fred-wilson)

  (via rafer)

  Source: news.ycombinator.com

• 2012-02-16

  Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking

  There is one iOS “tip” that I keep hearing and it is wrong. Worse, I keep hearing it from supposedly authoritative sources. I have even heard it from the lips of Apple “Geniuses” in stores.

  All those apps in the multitasking bar on your iOS device are currently active and slowing it down, filling the device’s memory or using up your battery. To maximise performance and battery life, you should kill them all manually.

  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There are caveats to this but anyone dispensing the advice above is clearly uninformed enough that they will certainly not be aware of these subtleties.

  You’d already know this stuff if you’ve developed for iOS, but even then it’s worth a look.