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 - Phoenix ... Read more
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 of video/voice ... Read more
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. Other popular ... Read more
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 services. Yeah, ... Read more
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 Webmaster Tools, ... Read more
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 can have ... Read more
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 lead to ... Read more
This is a terse collection of commands and utilities I find useful for shells. There is little distinction between programs and commands as commands are programs (and are installed or come pre-installed) and programs have commands. Also included is a shell (Fish Shell) and some other shell applications/utilities (Mosh, Nano). bc - basic calculator See ... Read more
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 also case ... Read more
If a phrase could sum up what we've seen so far in WordPress in 2017 it would be something like: > Bureaucratic nonsense, shitty design, tone deaf development. The Core crew and their work on Plugins has recently turned from tragedy to farce. While these hardworking plebes have put in the hours, their result is, ... Read more
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 reasonable defaults, ... Read more
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 not currently ... Read more
> 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 source, free ... Read more
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 negative behavior. ... Read more
As with security in general, escaping the scourge of WordPress form and content spam requires a layered approach. Here is what works. Databases and Behavioral Anti-Spam The first step is the one that nowadays works the least well. In the beginning we had Akismet, and things got better, but this is an arms race, and ... Read more
The EU-Vietnam Trade Treaty is still under discussion regarding the implementation details as of early 2017, due to the complexity and the level of reform needed to implement it on the Vietnamese side. Negotiation concluded on 02 December 2016, and the treaty will take force in 2018. The EVFTA is just one of a number ... Read more
While there are Webmaster Tools for Naver and Webmaster Tools for Baidu, both of those do not have an English interface. While it is possible to muddle through, it would only be worthwhile if targeting the Chinese market (in China) or the Korean market (in Korea). Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Tools, and Yandex Webmaster ... Read more
GSuite is the latest term Google is using for what used to be called Google Apps for Domains. Google Cloud is now a provider of GSuite (along with many other services). GSuite is akin to similar offerings by Microsoft, Yandex, and more anemically, Amazon Workmail/Workdocs, and Apple. CNAME Records calendar = ghs.google.com. drive = ghs.google.com. ... Read more
Zurb's 21 Responsive Design Trends That Will Shape 2017 is useful reading. Of course not everyone will agree on 21 trends, and 21 isn't actually helpful to focus on. Nonetheless, many of these should/will need to be dealt with in 2017. Here are the one's I found most useful: Split Screen Divide a site into ... Read more
Yandex is likely the 4th most important Search-based provider, with Google, Baidu, and Bing being ahead in terms of overall traffic. Yandex is certainly like Google and Bing (and Amazon) in terms of offering a combination of email and file storage along with file sharing and file editing tools for organizations. Essentially it is a ... Read more
Spending time looking into AMI (Amazon Linux), it is as usual with the plethora of Amazon products, sometimes hard to get info about what it is. I take this not as a bad thing (though it does take time) but rather a feature that emerges from the *let's develop lots of stuff all at once" ... Read more
Instead of a post about 2017, I want to postmortem 2016. It has been an enormous year of reckoning, being faced with previous decisions and facing them anew. Client chaos, a move into the suburbs, my son's development from months 2 to 14, and several injuries have made this a stressful year. In any case, ... Read more
When dealing with cloud-based office productivity applications (documents and spreadsheets), the main contenders are obvious: - Apple iWork - Google Docs, Apps, Drive, GSuite - Microsoft Office365 While Apple's offering is relatively unknown (little noted, therefore little discussed), the real sleeper is Amazon's WorkDocs and WorkMail The Kit and the Kaboodle Here I will deal ... Read more
Colorblindness Colorblindness affects approximately 5-8% of the population, mainly males. The visualization of these kinds of colorblindness is eye-opening, to say the least. The most common form of colorblindness is deuteranomaly, which is red-green. The colorblindness simulations show the color red as indistinguishable from a certain shade of green. Actually to my eyes the dichromatic ... Read more
Telegram is my favorite go-to chat. Unfortunately people are invested in their use of Facebook messenger, Line, Hangouts, etc., and you have to be where they are to chat with them. I have one guy who is only chatting on the apps I don't use: Facebook and WeChat. Sure, I might see a Facebook chat ... Read more
Woocommerce is a fantastic, though complex, time-consuming, and/or expensive ecommerce system. That said, it is the most popular on WordPress, and has a lot of potential for the future. It is getting a lot of development effort at Automattic, and has a fairly extensive functionality set, and some loosely- and tightly-coupled extensions and sister-plugin functionality. ... Read more
TPP and Copyright provisions There have been several developments regarding copyright law, the most profound being that TPP appears to be dead in the water. TPP copyright provisions would have negatively impacted many countries in terms of costs to consumers, including Canada, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Viet Nam. A New Zealand analysis disingenuously ... Read more
I've had some trouble troubleshooting a problem with a site. Regular browsers had no problem, and the certificate appeared fine. However, Bingbot was getting failure (503) on trying to access robots.txt. Once I allowed that to be available via http, the problem went away. Looking further I found some ideas: - Bingbot had a problem ... Read more
> This is as true today than it was more than five years ago when first posted. Due to the ongoing hacking of accounts and passwords on popular web services, it is a good time to consider the following suggested security practices. If you feel you do not have the time to deal with this, ... Read more
Especially the first year for a child, there is an enormous amount of growth and development for a child. Parents of course will worry obsessively, and breast-feeding mothers will become anxious and paranoid about feeding. Here are a few guidelines to help. - WHO and CDC growth charts, use WHO for the first two years. ... Read more
scp, the secure version of cp, aka copy, is pretty great, since it is straightforward to copy one or more files or directories from any one machine to any other machine (and the command could be running on a third machine). SCP Syntax Note: it is best to use sudo, and full paths for everything. ... Read more
I've reached the end of my patience for underpowered devices. I've entertained quite a few thin clients, including: Various Netbooks Chromebook Apple TV Chromecast Fire Stick Intel Compute Stick NEC MobilePro 770, 780, 790 (more on this below) Return on Investment The return on investment (ROI) of any device can be considered on the dimension ... Read more
Note: This started out as a page about MOSH, but I've moved on to AutoSSH, which is way easier without much configuration, and better at what it does. I had not been aware of Mosh (mobile shell), though clearly its own level of awesome is not a reason for that. Basically it replaces SSH, but ... Read more
Site performance comes down to two issues: Perceived relevance Perceived responsiveness Actually, perceived responsiveness could be considered an aspect of relevance (but not the other way around). To be relevant is to be speedy and relevant. Catch 22 - Speed vs. Functionality For WordPress, the architecture is one where responsiveness goes down logarithmically to the ... Read more
In Thailand, due to a period of mourning on the death of the King of Thailand, many websites have removed color and gone black-and-white (grayscale) for home pages, and some for all pages. There is a fairly easy way to do this with CSS, with the exception of images used as background images in CSS ... Read more
Star ratings, which indicate review averages, can be useful indicators of quality on search results pages. There are several tactics to include star ratings (or rather, rating/review stars). There may be an interesting use case for not having a root page / in a WordPress website. That is, forcing a redirect from root to a ... Read more
Public video can easily be hosted and streamed on YouTube at no cost. But for those who want some restrictions on the video, YouTube has only limited options. Currently YouTube only allows sharing private videos with up to 50 YouTube accounts, via including their email addresses or Google+ account, in the video manager. In addition, ... Read more
The WooCommerce team is introducing a huge amount of integrated functionality. WooCommerce must be considered a platform at this point (with WordPress as a much more generic, broader platform). Think of Windows and Office. Windows is a generic operating system and Office is a set of applications. While the analogies only go so far, WooCommerce ... Read more
2019 Update - I simply no longer use remailers. Everything gets shipped directly to Chiang Mai, Thailand whether that be from Ebay, Amazon, or more often, Lazada (the Amazon of Southeast Asia). I pay the extra shipping charges (at least on Amazon, as in many cases the shipping costs are the same on Ebay and ... Read more
Disposable diapers are a blight on the planet and the pocketbook of parents everywhere. They are made out of plastic and go into landfills. Soiled diapers are toxic waste but they are hardly ever treated as such. Even when the cost of diapers are around 10 THB (~$0.30 USD), with upwards of 4,000 diapers in ... Read more
Update 03-JUN-2024 - I'm migrating off most of this (Woocommerce -> Stripe links) the only functionality that seems important is a simple newsletter. The Alo Easymail Newsletter was great but hasn't been updated in 4 years which means it is out of step with the latest PHP / MariaDB used in WordPress these days. Mailbluster ... Read more
> Google's EU user consent policy > > When using Google products that incorporate this policy, certain disclosures must be given to and consents obtained from end users in the European Union where EU data protection law requires such disclosures and consents. > > For end users in the European Union: > > You must ... Read more
The Command Line Interface (CLI), aka shell, aka command prompt, is a powerful, key, and underlying interface to most operating systems. However, there are huge usability problems. The main issue is one of recognition vs. recall which has to do with human memory. While there are endless comparisons between GUIs and CLIs most of these ... Read more
> Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of the international ... Read more
My son at 10.5 months has six teeth, four up and two down. He's had them for a while now. He is very fussy around his mouth, because his mother has consistently forced a washcloth into his mouth to clean his teeth and gums. This means he avoids any cloth around his mouth (napkins, etc.) ... Read more
In February 2016, I wrote about the Coming of the 'Bots. Now it is September, and indeed there are more on the horizon, as well as a few I missed from 2015. However, bot utility is fairly constrained now and likely into the future, mainly because the mental model is one around artificial intelligence which ... Read more
Apparently Progressive Web Apps are a thing. (Thanks Leon!) Anyone know of any agencies who've developed #ProgressiveWebApps esp. with service workers? We have a work project for you...— Leon Paternoster (@leonpaternoster) September 12, 2016 While the technology was announced (apparently) in 2015, in the March 2016 Google I/O there were many training and presentation events, ... Read more
There is a public perception of the dangers of cow milk for children under 1 year of age. One reads this caution everywhere. However, the idea that a child from one day (365 days old) to the next (366 days old) can drink milk, and even what that means, is a bit odd. My son ... Read more
Baby Led Weaning is essentially letting the baby feed itself as early as possible. This of course requires age-appropriate food, patience, and a lot of clean-up. However, it can have positive effects such as eating a wider variety of food, and at the times of the spoon-feeding strikes around 8-10 months, BLW is the obvious ... Read more
This is a handy checklist since Bing conveniently forgets a few settings, and also doesn't fully support a few features (and so generalizes, naturally). - Currency differential in bids and budgets. Bing treats a number as a number, even when Adwords campaigns in Thai Baht is imported into a US Dollar Bing account. Use the ... Read more