Archive for the 'Miscellaneous' Category

GPG for data at rest. TLS for data in motion

Friday, June 12th, 2009

It takes a while to read, but it’s very much worth it. If you still think you should be writing your own crypto code, or even using native crypto libraries, you are DOING IT WRONG.
P.S. Same goes for parsers! Learn to use ANTLR or any other of the hundreds of parser generators out [...]

Eclipse upgrade

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

I was trying to get eclipse to install an update and it just wouldn’t do it. Specifically the m2eclipse plugin. I kept getting errors about being unable to fix a dependency.
“maven eclipse can not find a solution 3.4.2.M20090204-0800″
Turns out several things help. 1) turn on every site as an available update site, [...]

I’ll Buy That For A Dollar

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Anyone can do the lame robocop and a unicorn thing, but unicorns are so 90’s when robocop is clearly a hardocore 80’s icon. Therefore he is better associated with rap music. The video below manages to pack the entire movie into a single 10 minute rap music-video.

Talking and Driving

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Over the past years I’ve driven many, many miles on Los Angeles freeways in conditions of heavy to light traffic. In that time I’ve seen lots of different, interesting, and sometimes even scary things being done on the road. Today was something I’ve never, ever seen before. I got to spend about [...]

Ryan’s Steak House Macaroni and Beef

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Found on the internet as a Best of Craigslist post.
A couple of weeks ago we decided to cruise out to Ryan’s Steakhouse for dinner. It was a Wednesday night which means that macaroni and beef was on the hot bar, indeed the only night of the week that it is served. Wednesday night is [...]

Expectation Management is Everything

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Whether you are in product development or customer service, more or less every single measure of success comes down to how well you have managed expectations. After all, what is a failure other than a customer or consumer considering you to have missed their expectations?
This can cut both ways, however. I recently ordered [...]

Top five both ways!

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

I was thrilled to see that in the 200 best/worst jobs list, I have BOTH the 5th best and 5th worst jobs. I am both a software engineer (rank 5) and an EMT (rank 196).

Frist post update

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

Turns out, it takes some getting used to.

Frist post

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

Well, I wonder if being able to blog from a mobile device is a good thing or not…

The Nature of Self Interest

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

“Evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to
the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community or the total community of humanity.” — Reinhold Niebuhr.