My thoughts on whether security should be considered optional in an MVP
No
Dan Singerman's Blog
Husband / Father Software Developer Founder & Director at Reason Factory. Creator of AppApp.io.
Latest posts
Sane BDD (or doing BDD without Cucumber and regular expressions)
Lots of rubyists like cucumber . Or in the php world behat . BDD seems like a very good idea on the face of it, especially for functional tests. But I have always had a problem with how these frameworks rely on regular expressions to process their tests that are written in human readable text. Jamie Zawinski famously said: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know,…
Queuing in Drupal vs Rails (with Delayed Job)
I have been doing quite a bit of coding in Drupal recently, although I consider myself more of a rubyist and Rails programmer. Now none of this is a fair comparison, Drupal and Rails are not directly comparable (Drupal is a customisable CMS, Rails is a framework), yadda, yadda… but after a few days of coding Drupal queues, it is an interesting comparison how the interface differs for…
Twitter effectively killing JSONP too
Lost in all the recent Twitter announcements about changing rate limits, killing ATOM, RSS and XML , and ‘sunsetting’ Anywhere , is the fact that by only allowing OAUTH authenticated requests to version 1.1 of the REST API (which come March 6th will be the only REST API available), they are also effectively killing JSONP access. What does this mean to developers? Well, in practice it…
How to block rate-limited traffic with Varnish
Varnish is brilliant. For those who don’t know it is a reverse proxy cache / HTTP accelerator which serves cached content quickly. Really really quickly. But don’t just take my word for it: At Abelson Info we have started work on a public API product, and one of our concerns has been how to implement effective and scalable rate-limiting. We already use Varnish to serve significant web…
The Stack Exchange Rep Recalc Ripoff
You will see from this page I am a moderately active member of the Stack Overflow community, and I have slowly been climbing towards 10,000 reputation (yes I know reputation, doesn’t really matter, that it’s just a gaming mechanism, but I like playing games, and 10,000 is a significant threshold as you get extra user privileges at that point) So I was pleased to find a question of mine…
Three Mobile, purveyors of pron?
I have a mobile from Three, and last week while on the train, I tried to follow a link to Richard Herring’s blog from his Twitter stream. This is what it started loading: Now Richard Herring on occasion is known to use bawdy and risque humour, but it is all just text, and I wouldn’t say in the NSFW category. Obviously his site is on some content blacklist, used by some software Three…
Geosay.com crawlable - success!
In my previous blog I wrote about how we had enabled ajax crawling of geosay.com. Now after less than a month of spidering (and much tweaking to how the spidering functionality works) we have over 50 pages of results in Google. This appears to have been achieved off just a small handful of links seeded around the Internet (this blog, a few tweets, and a handful of other places). This has resulted…
Geosay.com is now crawlable
Although the front end has not changed much in the last few weeks, some effort has gone in on the back end to make geosay.com crawlable by web spiders. As geosay relies heavily on JSONP requests from third parties, making the site spiderable has been non-trivial. Progressive enhancement would just not work for geosay. A few months back we enabled ajax urls (using #!); this meant it was possible to…
A quick update
I have been lax in keeping my blog up to date recently; I have an unpublished blog post about Virgin Media, which to be honest, I don’t really have the belligerence to publish yet (although if they annoy me any further I will. Lets say it is still not fully resolved.) I also have an unwritten blog post about 3 mobile. But in my final research I realised I actually couldn’t back up the…
Please: NEVER EVER use Virgin Media
I recently left the services of Virgin Media, and was emailed a survey to respond to for feedback about my experiences with them as a customer. Here’s what I sent them: Dear Virgin Media, Thank you for emailing me to ask how my experience with you as a company has been. Virgin Media are the worst company I have ever had the displeasure to be a customer of, but I would just like to describe…
What Jeff Atwood knows about UI
Let me start by saying, I am a fan of Jeff Atwood. At the time of writing there is a stackoverflow icon on the right, and you can see my rep is > 7,800, so I have spent a fair amount of time on his site. I also read his blog, and it is generally entertaining, offers insights to the tech-minded (even if it is sometimes plain wrong .) And I follow him on Twitter, where much of what he tweets is…
Twitter: (mostly) a force for good?
I like Twitter. I think it’s a great service, entertaining, and I think it does genuinely do some public good. During the 2009 Iran elections the protesters against the government were able to use it as a communication device, and to let the World know what was happening in a country where both national and international media are under tightly restrictive controls. On a smaller scale it is…
A Google Streetview / Wikipedia Mashup
While working on geosay.com, a super local information service designed to find geolocated information near to where you are, a comment about it on Hacker News piqued my interest “What about the little yellow guy?” In the effort to get our first release of geosay launched, integrating streetview hadn’t even crossed my mind, but this set me thinking. Just turning streetview on in the Google Maps V3…
Take my wife
I wouldn’t say my wife is a luddite , but she does profess to hate the Internet (despite spending a lot of time on Facebook and babycentre ). This is a conversation we had last night: Wife: I hate macs. When I had a PC it always worked. Why do people even buy macs anyway? Me: They are better for developers. Wife: I don’t know any developers. Me: I’M A developer! Wife: Oh really,…
Detecting a Browser's Language in Javascript
A new feature we are working on for geosay is the integration of Wikipedia. Most Wikipedia entries for physical locations list a longitude / latitude, which makes for the ideal data to include in geosay. Geonames.org provide a great JSONP service for accessing this data by location, which is perfect for integrating with geosay. However, one thorny issue I encountered was that the geonames API…
Shoefitr: Inspirational inspiration
I consider myself a ‘superfan’ of Jason Calacanis’s This Week in Startups podcast (it is also a streaming video show, but I listen to it as a podcast while commuting) and I have listened to all 66 episodes so far. To anyone interested in technical entrepreneurialism I cannot recommend it enough; it is both informative, and highly motivational. And say what you like about Jason…
The end of Lost
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for some time. I am (was?) a massive fan of Lost (the tv series), but I was left somewhat conflicted by the final episode. Yes, I know I am not the only one to have a view on this. But these are my views. As W.C. Fields said, opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one. Anyway, back to Lost; now it is nearly a month since the finale showed and…
The perfect chip?
How far would one man go to perfect a home version of the MacDonald’s french fry? This far: http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-how-to-make-perfect-mcdonalds-style-french-fries.html The level of detail is fascinating.
Jabulani Baloney
Every single world cup I can remember, there has been a new ball introduced, and there are always complaints about it. www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/jun/01/david-james-ball-jabulani As an exercise, lets see if I can find evidence for this assertion 2006: news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/footbal…6/teams/england/5054694.stm 2002: news.bbc.co.uk/sport3/worldcu…lk/newsid_2033000/2033395.stm I…