occasionally useful

Why not HTTPS every page?

Max — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:21:07 +0000

It frustrates me to no end when I find login pages served from insecure (HTTP) pages (I'm looking at you, VerizonWireless and CenturyLink). I'll often put in garbage credentials and hit submit so it'll redirect me to a secure version of the login page with the "invalid credentials" error on top. But it occurred to [...]

Discovering a Good Site Name with Mechanical Turk and AYTM.com

Max — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 01:40:09 +0000

Inspired by a post from Software by Rob [1] and in turn this Pixlin [2] post from 2007, I decided to give Mechanical Turk a whirl to help me come up with a product name. I'm going to talk about my experience and how I actually went about doing this. So the general idea is [...]

Finding a Freelance UX Designer?

Max — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:34:05 +0000

Question to any readers who've done this sort of thing before -- where do people normally go to get UX Design work done for them? Specifically, I have some ideas for a web app I want built, but I don't have the UX chops nor visual chops to design the interface. I want someone to [...]

Telling Android to Conserve Data on Mobile Hotspots in Android 4.1

Max — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:06:06 +0000

So it turns out there actually is a way to inform your device (as long as it's Android 4.1 or above) which WiFi networks are actually mobile hotspots. It can't (or doesn't, anyway) do this automatically, and having your other devices connect to your mobile hotspot and then download large program updates is no fun! [...]

Quick Start with Sequel 3 in Rails 3

Max — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:00:25 +0000

This guide is using Rails 3.2.6 and Sequel 3.37.0. If you're using a different version, these instructions may not quite apply. Edit: realized this morning the title was ambiguous, so I updated it to reflect the Sequel focus. Here's the easiest way to get going with Sequel in Rails: Add sequel and talentbox-sequel-rails to your [...]

Promising Java Installers

Max — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 16:35:06 +0000

I was digging around for some good Java installers; that is, programs that can bundle up my Java program and allow them to be installed by end users easily, optionally bundling (or jit downloading+installing) the JRE. I found a few that look promising: http://0install.net/ Free http://www.advancedinstaller.com/ $399/developer http://installbuilder.bitrock.com/ $1995/developer; discounted for small businesses (

How to configure a Zyxel router behind an Actiontec DSL Modem (Centurylink, Qwest)

Max — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:47:20 +0000

For many weekends (5?) over the past couple years I've spent hours trying to get my Zyxel NBG-419N to work in "Router Mode" instead of "Access Point Mode" when operating behind our (old) DSL modem, the Actiontec M1000. From juggling DHCP settings, to NAT-enabled settings, to Transparent Bridging, to attempting to configure PPPoE authentication and [...]

Sharing session state in Node.js between your HTTP server and websockets server

Max — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:00:36 +0000

At first, sharing your session state between your Node.js HTTP server and websockets server might seem difficult. However, if you're using Express and NowJS (or the technologies they're built on, Connect and Socket.IO, respectively), most of the work has already been done for you -- it's just a matter of connecting the right pieces together. [...]

CoffeeScript in Node.js

Max — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:00:28 +0000

Here's a couple common development patterns I've come across in Node.JS+CoffeeScript. Requiring Coffeescripts without compiling So for the last couple weeks I've been doing Node.js development while using CoffeeScript, but I've been using `coffee -cwb .` in one console (which compiles, watches, and "bare bones"-style on the current directory) while running `node app.js` in another [...]

Recovering your submitted form data in Chrome

Max — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 14:11:37 +0000

Have you ever submitted form on a website after filling in a lot of text (maybe a comment), only to get an error on the other side? And when you hit back, your nice long response is gone? There's a (sort of easy) way of retrieving it, if you don't stray from the landing page [...]