When you say that you want to host your own email, you ll hear the standard line from folks: Don t do it. It s too hard. When they say it s too hard what they mean is that it s too hard to ensure that email you send will actually end up in other people s inboxes. If you persist, they ll advise you to configure your email server with SPF , DKIM , and DMARC . Oh and also make sure the IP address of…
Google is trying to hide the URL in Chrome . This has been tried before in various browsers at various times. I m deeply unhappy about this, not because of Google s move in Chrome but because of the general trend in the industry to make the URL a second class citizen. The current worst examples of this is an Electron app that I use everyday: Slack. When I run Slack in the browser I get the benefit…
If you prefer text-based documentation(markdown, etc) over WYSIWYG ( MS Word) , then this is for you! If you work in modern corporate America, Microsoft Word is unavoidable. Even though I wish it weren t so, most engineering organizations use it for technical documentation. I want to use markdown as the source and then automatically render Microsoft Word. Most folks online recommend pandoc for…
If you haven t heard the news yet, there was a record DDoS attack perpetrated against Brian Krebs last month. Distributed denial of service attacks are nothing new. But the particulars of attack changing. In the past, DDoS attacks used reflection or amplification techniques to take a large botnet and compound their effective attack traffic. The big deal with this new attack is that the botnet was…
There s a lot of talk about the IoT platform, what that is exactly and what companies will end up winning. Well, I think it snuck up on us without us realizing it. There are really two levels of IoT devices. Super low-powered - These are typically powered by a coin cell battery and run code on bare-metal. Higher powered - These are typically plugged in or Li-Ion powered and run Linux. The…
Ok so why haven t all my geek friends put smart lighting everywhere in their houses? I think it comes down to usefulness or bang for the buck. For the purposes of this discussion, let s define IoT as connecting a physical thing that hasn t traditionally been connected in the past. Ok, so after talking with Harlan about IoT in general(he s speaking next Wednesday on it), we came up with the…
Well friends. I think it s time to call it like it is. Android is Google Mobile Services. You see, Google would like us to think that Android is an open source mobile operating system that anybody can use and extend for free to do whatever they want. Here s the hitch: the Google Play Store isn t part of Android open source. The Play Store(along with other Google apps(YouTube, Maps, GMail, etc)is…
Mobile advertising is at a crossroads. Apple has just enabled ad blockers in iOS. And users are realizing how much mobile data is being consumed by ads . Since Apple has little vested interest in web ads and a huge interest in building the best product so that users will shell out a premium for them, ad blocking makes sense in iOS. Mobile ads can make pages load up to 3 times slower and consume 6…
At Key Ingredient, we re pretty heavily invested in Agile, Scrum in particular. This year we really wanted to try to ship some hardware in an Agile fashion. So after hiring a team and discussing, we decided that Kanban was right for the hardware projects. The first hardware project we tried was our little smart pan . The idea is that we d ship a new prototype every two weeks to dogfood . By using…
I m shocked that I need to actually say this. If you work with computers(sysadmin, programming, whatever), learn to touch type! I had a 15 minute conversation with a college student about whether he should go into network administration or security auditing. After we finished talking, he turned around to his keyboard and started two finger typing ! I m talking hunting and pecking folks. That s…
Freakonomics Radio has a great episode on temptation bundling . Temptation bundling is the idea that if you have a chore that you hate to do, you should bundle it with something that you like. The classic example is watching your favorite TV show only when running on the treadmill. The advantage of temptation bundling over some other similar techniques is that it makes both activites better. You…
As far as I m concerned, the killer app for Android, is Tasker . I don t think there s anything like it for iOS. Tasker allows you to associate various events with actions(sort of like IFTTT ). So if I m at work, tasker sets my phone to vibrate. At Work is defined as: Wifi is associated with the KeyArt access point(our AP at work). Here are some example of events: wifi related - a certain access…
My work setup right now is a Thinkpad W530 running Debian Wheezy . I ve been pretty happy with it. I m using chroots with Debian Unstable and the latest Ubuntu to install any newer userspace programs I need. I m using VirtualBox to run Windows 7 and Microsoft Office(under duress). The machine is pretty reliable. My current uptime is 47 days. tubaman @ cuisine :~ $ uptime 13 : 35 : 32 up 47 days ,…
On the recommendation of our product owner, everyone on the team is taking the VARK quiz . It s designed to tell you what your learning style is. The options are visual, aural, reading, and kinesthetic. Here are my scores: Visual - 0 Aural - 5 Read/Write - 4 Kinesthetic - 7 I wonder if those of us who gravitate towards the command line instead of pretty UIs have similar scores?
There are a bunch of suggestions online about how to record a series of touchscreen touches and play them back. None of them really work for me though. I m looking for something that doesn t require another app and optimally would work over USB debugging with adb. So I ve hacked something together myself. I started out by just capturing all the events from my touchscreen like this: adb shell…
Well, the internet was all abuzz about POODLE and it finally bit me. I use selenium with phantomjs to do some web scraping . One of the sites I scrap uses SSL and they removed SSLv3 because of the POODLE vulnerability. When loading a page with phantomjs, it would not load but instead stay on the about:blank page. All the Googles say that I should just set --ignore-ssl-errors but that didn t help.…
My go-to toolkit for web scraping is python requests and BeautifulSoup4 . In combination, they provide a nice, clean API to interact with web sites and parse content. However recently I ve had a tough time logging into some of the more complicated web sites( ahem citibank). The problem is that citibank uses javascript to calculate tokens on the client that are then passed to the server for…
Debugging encrypted web traffic can be challenging. You have Chrome Developer Tools but I find that being able to export the data and browse through it in other ways can be easier. I usually use wireshark to browse cleartext web traffic. Now I can use it for encrypted HTTP traffic too. The key is to use mitmproxy along with wireshark s built-in SSL decryption. Here are the steps to get it working:…
In Austin, there are basically two ISPs, Time Warner and AT &T. That s not really enough competition to be good for consumers but that discussion is for another time. The lesser of these two evils is Time Warner so that s my ISP . The other week Time Warner sent me this: Triple the speed for no additional cost Sounds great, right? Maybe it s not as great as it sounds. You see, the Internet is not…
My new gig has forced me to grow as an individual and a software developer. When I interviewed I let them know that I had never managed a team before. They said that I would be fine. Needless to say it s been a bumpy ride. Over the last 9 months I ve come to realize that software in general is less about tech and more about people. I think it partially stems from the fact that software development…
Two years ago my trusty Motorola Atrix 4G fell to the pavement(ahem I dropped it) and the camera stopped working. So I went down to the AT &T store since it was time for an upgrade anyway, and bought a Galaxy S3. I ran with the stock firmware for about 30 seconds before rooting, unlocking the bootloader and flashing CyanogenMod. I really like stock Android in place of Samsung Touchwiz. I ve been…
Apparently there are now 3 standards bodies for the Internet of Things, AllSeen Alliance , Open Interconnect Consortium , and Thread Group . The only folks talking about protocol is Thread Group. That s where the magic is. AllSeen is the most useful today because they offer AllJoyn out of the box but nowhere do they specify the protocol. For a standard to take off, you should define the protocol,…
Here s a little API to get the level of Lake Travis. I m scraping the official Lake Travis website once a day to get the data. You ll have to sign in using your github account to get an API key.
I hit a major milestone today in my little Jarvis project. I got Dragon Naturally Speaking to execute arbitrary shell commands though an SSH session. This is pretty much the last link in the chain of awesomeness. Here s the flow: I speak the word hello into the mic on my earbuds connected to my laptop running Debian That audio goes into a Windows XP guest running under VirtualBox Dragon Naturally…
Ugh! Why worry about something trivial like extra whitespace at the end of a line!!? Do you have mental problems or something or do you just hate me? Software Engineers Just Tryin to Get Stuff Done TM Confession time. I think asking developers to remove extra whitespace is important. This is a touchy subject but I think I can make a case so here goes. Reason #1: Quality Is software engineering…
I have some idea of what my dream job would be like. I love software so it would have something to do with that. I also like working with smart, talented people so there would have to be some of those. Oh yeah, also I don t like being micro-managed so there should be none of that. Then it hits me I think I m pretty close to my dream job now! I work at a little company called Key Ingredient where…
We have a standard contractor agreement we use at work . It s pretty cookie cutter but for every contractor certain things needed to be edited. These edits included name of the contractor, address, start date of the contract, etc. After giving up on forms in LibreOffice, I found an elegant solution. It turns out that LibreOffice od* files are just zipped XML . So I created an Open Document…
All home or small business accounting software sucks. I ve tried Quicken for home, and Quickbooks for business. I stuck with ledgersmb for a long time with my business but the web interface was pretty old and clunky. Right now I m playing around with ledger-cli. Have something that you re happy with? Let me know .
Sylvia Nowakowski Day Sylvia Now Day S. Now Day Snow Day! In a crazy, unbelievable, beautiful twist, we are parents. God took us from 0 to 100 in a little over 2 years. Here s the brief history: January 2012 - Just me and my bride. No desire for kids. March 2012 - Several long talks and prayer. It turns out my wife and I both want to adopt. After considering private, international and foster care…
I m sort of jazzed about static site generators right now for some reason. And since I needed to build a developer blog at Key Ingredient, it seemed like a good opportunity. After checking out Jekyll , Hakyll , Hyde Nikola and Pelican I ended up picking Pelican. I considered Jekyll because it s got a lot of buzz around it right now which does count for something. Many times buzz equals users which…
Dear Embedded Hardware Manufacturers, We are embedded Linux developers. This is 2012. What gives? It s time embedded hardware manufacturers get with the times. You may be able to fool the suits but you haven t convinced us. That is, you haven t convinced us that your semi-walled garden is the way to go. Yes, you offer Linux support in your BSP . But that is no longer enough. You see, we have…