Updated 03-Aug-2025 Amazon is different than other companies. From the outside, this difference can appear as anomolies, odd things that stand out. I belive that there is a fundamental way of understanding the current state and dynamo of change within Amazon. Customer Centrism Amazon is meant to be the most customer-centric company on Earth. Likely ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Lots of Apple devices suffer from the innovation of Apple Computer, including the iphone/ipod touch and macbooks. Some reality First, let's just say that non-replacable batteries certainly are replaceable. I've had the batteries replaced (with new ones) in my 2011 Macbook Air, and two 2012 iphones. This happened in 2016. Batteries and heat ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 The first trillionaire will not be a human, it will be a bot (though a sophisticated one). Suffice it to say that making money, legally or extralegally, will be something that could be done by a system designed to do so, that could have enough ability to act in a marketplace, and enough ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Recent malware and phishing attackes continue to increase in scale and target gmail and other infrastructure. Since many folks keep email mostly in the cloud, and even worse, client synchronization would delete any mail removed from a mailbox, making the client ineffective as offline backup, a system is needed to ensure there is ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Below are bulletted list items. Later this will turn into better copy. Summary: Use Texvc when necessary, and KaTeX when possible. Math in Chrome SVG is the preferred method for Math on Chrome, though accessibility is still an issue Basically, for Chrome, the options are: ship small images at a great expense in ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Late to the party as always, as this has been going on for a few years, but hey. In any case, this is about Elixir and Phoenix: - Elixir is a 5 year old functional programming language, that runs on the - Erlang BEAM VM (which is very mature, fast, and reliable), and ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 The new Amazon Echo Show looks great. Watching the video, it is striking that the interface appears so clean. This is obvious when using voice, since buttons don't really count. Also, the fact that this is not just a piece of hardware and natural language interface, these are applications being shown. In terms ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Postfix Mail Transport Agent (MTA) Postfix is a Mail Transport Agent (MTA). It is not a complete mail system, but focuses on the MTA component, and does not include a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA), such as IMAP support, nor does it include a Mail User Agent (MUA), such as a web mail client. ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 For those of us early adopters who managed to snag a 50 user (or 10 user) free google apps accounts, things are sweet. New users have to cough up $ 5 USD/mailbox/month (or $ 4.19 USD/mailbox/month provided yearly billing). What Google really wants is the $ 10 USD/month or $25 USD/month enhanced cloud ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 If an important page is added or updated with important changes, then it behooves one to submit that URL to the various search engines, especially Bing, Google, and Yandex. Strangely enough, this is not as straightforward a task as one might think. First of course, one needs to be registered with the various ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam. You get spam with your analytics. These are not real visitors, just spam in the logs. Here is how to de-spam your analytics. Google Analytics Spam Filters Admin > Account > Filters Add custom filter, exclude by hostname Filter Pattern .*(hostname\.tld|hostname\.tld).* Note that a filter ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Two very popular content management systems are in their teenage years now: WordPress will be 14 this year, and MediaWiki will be 15. Those are a lot of years on the web. As teenagers, these two successful and interesting projects try and act like the adults they want to be. Unfortunately, this can ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Nano is pretty awesome, fully open source, and has mnemonics for most commands. Note that I use Fish Shell on OSX, CentOS and Ubuntu. Various benefits accrue, when scripting and also autocomplete and such. Various Commands and Such Set Nano as default editor of git in OSX Search and Replace Apparently this is ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Detecting a visitor's location can provide a semi-customized experience that can work out well. However, it can also lock visitors into an assumption that is incorrect, and that may create a worse experience. For example, changing default languages based on location is not a good idea (it is better to use cookies and ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Recently, I'm on a server that chrony just barfs on, so my preferred time mechanism doesn't work. Indeed, ntpdate doesn't work as well. Turns out that ntpdate is obsolete (or being obsoleted). After a lot of nonsense, it turns out that running ntpd from the commandline is possible, as long as it is ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 > Note: as of june 2018 I've discontinued use of Piwik. While it is reasonably good as a solution, the MySQL component requires too many resources, and frankly what it does better than Google Analytics in terms of actual data doesn't provide much value in my current use cases. Piwik is an open ... Read more

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Link disavowel is desired someone (a competitor, or simply a derranged troll) has created low-quality links to your site. In some cases, in competitive, global markets, this may actually be the result of perhaps hundreds of domains created for the purpose of wrecking large numbers of competitors by providing Google with evidence of ... Read more