This video is from DefCon a few years ago. A friend showed it to me a few years ago. It’s really clever/awesome.

The most consistently bad category of websites has to be restaurant websites. Too many of them haven’t realized that the rest of the internet moved on from Flash based splash pages in 1997. They’re far to stylized and difficult to navigate. Most damning of all is that many of them don’t work well or at all on mobile devices.

Restauranteurs might have better things to do than become web experts, but someone should stop to consider their audience. I’m not going to visit a new cafe because they have music and a slideshow on their site. More importantly, if I can’t get quickly to the menu and operating hours from my iPhone, I’m going to move on.

Brilliant!

It’s always been an unfortunate fact in my life that nothing has driven change in me more than loss. In a former life, I was engaged to be married. I didn’t end up getting married, and the breakup was long and incredibly painful, but it triggered massive positive change in my life. I left a job that was no longer making me happy. I moved to beautiful San Francisco. I took control of my finances so, instead of going into debt as most Americans do after high school, I am debt free aside from my car payment, which I will pay off early.

This past weekend, my long time girlfriend and I broke up. Things hadn’t been going great for a while and we decided together that it was time for a change. To anybody who asked about it, I’ve put on a strong face and told them I’m fine, but the truth is, I’m heartbroken.

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Brilliant presentation. I hope this works out.

I was delighted to discover today that one of the projects I worked on before I started my current job was just featured on an iPhone commercial by Apple. The commercial is called “Itchy” and the app is called Howcast.

I’ve been wondering if it was possible to modify a commit or merge multiple commits in a local git repository. Of course, the answer was only a google¹ away. You can’t do this once you’ve pushed your commits upstream, but that’s okay.

There are some good reasons for doing this. The most obvious is probably if you make a mistake in the comments. I like to try to make my commits completely atomic, meaning whatever change I’m making is completely implemented within a commit. This is pretty easy to accomplish if you’re willing to just not commit until you’re done. However, if you have to wait to use your version control system, you’re completely wasting the value of having a local revision control system. If you want to try something out and you’re using git, you can commit, branch, commit, merge, etc. Once you’re happy with your solution, you can package all that stuff into a single, or set of, tidy commits that each make a single, atomic, change.

¹ google is used as the noun form of the verb “to google”, not the proper noun “Google”.

If you’ve been hearing a lot about our credit crisis, and you don’t really understand what actually happened, you should watch this video. The whole thing is very complicated, and this video makes it much easier to understand.