Note: This post is out of date. The AlmondPlus people sent a refurbished replacement to me, after charging $50 for shipping, and this thing doesn't work half the time, and takes 5 minutes to boot up normally. Piece of junk. Don't trust these hucksters. Oh, and the orginal device died a month after the warranty ... Read more

We can now contemplate the departure of the CEO, whom frankly I always thought was supposed to sell it to Google, as he did Feedburner. Not meeting expectations, what can we see as obvious failures? More Jackass Attitudes A prime example of the ongoing jackass behavior is how Twitter deals with third-party apps. How does ... Read more

It appears that for a good part of the world (the hot and humid part), the water problem will largely be solved. Combined with renewable energy resources (solar, wind, hydro, geo, tidal) this becomes a compound solution, both decreasing relative humidity and temperature, as well as generating clean water. Think of it as air conditioning ... Read more

There is some interesting device data if there is enough enthusiasm or boredom to find it. For one thing, it appears that the best Android visitors to sites use either Android browser or Chrome, and not Firefox. This is an area Firefox is failing fairly hard at. Another point is that for both Windows and ... Read more

I've heard the accusations, that Apple is into anorexic design and that the 2015 Macbook is as powerful as a 2011 Macbook Air (though that is an i7 Macbook Air). Since I actually use every day a 2011 Macbook Air (4gb ram, i5, 256gb SSD), I want to comment on this. Performance and Performance For ... Read more

Buddhism is not some religion of quietism, although it is that as well. But rather, Buddhism as a lived practice (specifically situated, as I am, in mainland Southeast Asia) could potentially inform economic development in the same locale. Let's find out... The Language of Business As an aside, it is important to criticize those works ... Read more

So, Etherpad is a thing (actually, Etherpad Lite, which is a NodeJS thing). That is, a real-time collaborative editing tool. Essentially the answer collaborative web-based text editors, free and open source. Last year a WebRTC hook and plugin was made available for Etherpad (!!). WebRTC WebRTC is real-time communication for the web. Firefox Hello Earlier ... Read more

fuser and lsof are two important tools showing which processes are using what files and/or sockets. Fuser is the simpler one focused on finding out what processes are using a given file (or port), while lsof can list processes without specifying, such as all open sockets Fuser fuser stands for file user and lists process ... Read more

A development server recently became compromised, and while this isn't necessarily a good thing, it does raise awareness and provides impetus to strengthen security measures. Access Control A few axioms: Access control is better through certificates (what you have) than passwords (what you know) Two-factor authentication is better than both (what you have + new ... Read more