I’m Mustafa Paksoy. I code for a living, take pictures on Instagram, dabble in Twitter, and, publish code on GitHub. You can contact me via email.
Introducing the “Save to nvALT” Chrome Extension : I just published Save to nvALT , a Chrome extension for saving pages to nvALT , a note taking app for Mac OS X. Pages are saved as clean Markdown, without any fluff. Like Readability or Instapaper. Download Save to nvALT from the Chrome Web Store. How do I use Save to nvALT ? Click the Save to nvALT buttom in the Chrome toolbar to save the current…
“As pedestrians walked towards the crossing, they would step onto the green sponge and as they walked, the soles of their feet would make foot imprints onto the tree on the ground. Each green footprint added to the canvas like leaves growing on a bare tree, which made people literally feel that by walking they could create a greener environment.”
A screenshot from the summer when I really learned C, 2005. My current work setup has 8 browser tabs open to Hacker News and one terminal window with a compilation failed message. Progress!
On Swarthmore’s Sorority : Tim Burke writes regarding my alma mater’s first sorority in recent history: This is the space where college communities like Swarthmore can fall pretty flat in their aspirations to diversity. We have students who will go all around the world to meet, live among and humbly try to understand a community of people whose history, culture and material conditions are very…
Written regarding Mark Suster’s rebuttal to Paul Graham’s essay about startups and growth . I agree that the question is better asked “who should be raising VC funding?” vs. “what companies are startups?” What do you get by defining what a startup is? I don’t know. But if you’re gonna be VC funded you need growth otherwise they’ll eat you…
“I’m so close I can taste it. It tastes like chicken wings from last night.” - http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1848
“According to legend, Almon Strowger, an undertaker, was motivated to invent an automatic telephone exchange after having difficulties with the local telephone operators, where the wife of a competitor was one of them. He was said to be convinced that she, as one of the manual telephone exchange operators was sending calls “to the undertaker” to her husband, who ran a competing undertaker…
“Hank: Lord? Hank Hill here, Methodist. Sorry about missing the homeless prayer service. Now, about Bobby, I’m pretty sure we’re on the same page about this lama thing. I was kind of hoping you could have him fail this test tomorrow, you know, like you’ve had him fail so many tests in the past. Oh, and the starving kids. Gotta go, amen.”
I wrote this in response to a friend who was asking if it’s worth learning Git. Short answer: yes. Long answer: Yeeeeeeees. Actual answer: Good tools enable good development practices. Continuous integration encourages thorough testing. Change management encourages planning. Git encourages iterative development and experimentation. You commit when you’re ready, not when the build is…
The ride down from the Castle of Ljubljana in HD.
Unix permits non-root users to delete files that they do not own including files owned by the super-user, aka root. You can create a file, change its ownership to root and delete it. $ touch foo $ chmod 600 foo # make the file only read-writable by owner $ sudo chown root:0 foo # change ownership of file to root $ ls -l foo -rw------- 1 root root 0 2011-01-24 12:18 foo $ rm foo $ ls -l foo ls:…
Wacky anti-spam idea: detect usernames or passwords that belong to the same low-entropy PRNG sequence. What spammer bothers to reseed their random number generator between generating a new batch of usernames and passwords for their spam accounts?
Sortbox — Organize your Dropbox : I wrote this cool thing with Kanishka and Sid. It’s like e-mail filters for your Dropbox.
Omitting semicolons in JavaScript is OK for the most part except for when it isn’t: If you choose to omit semicolons where possible, my advice is to insert them immediately before the opening parenthesis or square bracket in any statement that begins with one of those tokens, or any which begins with one of the arithmetic operator tokens /, +, or - if you should happen to write such a…
Web Based Truth Table Generator : I wrote this a while ago, recently ported it to run on GitHub Pages: http://mustpax.github.com/Truth-Table-Generator/
From Malcesine, Italy.
Netflix just announced that they are spinning off their DVD-rental-by-mail service under a new brand Qwikster while the streaming service retains the Netflix name. Many commentators have duly noted Netflix’s boldness in leaving its cash cow behind and looking to the future, a true example of a company facing up to the Innovator’s Dilemma . However, this latest change serves a purpose…
“Leadership is about taking risks, while management is about mitigating them. They are thus often in direct tension. Yahoo had a lot of management and not much leadership.” - Joshua Schachter on Hacker News
Not everything runs the same on production as it does on localhost so you need a staging environment to vet changes before making them public. When developing Piazza ( on GitHub ) we put together a simple workflow to manage production and staging deployments. Our app is built on the Heroku Cedar stack with Java and the Play framework but this workflow should be applicable to all other apps on…
From “Go the F*** to Sleep not funny” “She has good reason to be concerned about the message behind such a parody. Demarest was the prosecuting attorney in one of Oregon’s most high-profile child murder cases. […] Nobody is suggesting that there’s a connection between Adam Mansbach’s book and child abuse or child neglect.” Dear CNN op-ed author, I believe…