Figuring out how cardinality works in Alloy* was fun. First off I had to ask the TA how to even get a count of a set in Alloy* which looks like this #{SomeFormulaOrSet} Within it you can’t use the quantifiers such as all, some, lone, etc. Then I had to understand how bounds work. For… Read more »
Posts Categorized: software and tech
RIP SSL 3.0
RIP SSL 3.0. Long live TLS. We use IIS for the marketing site at work as soon as I saw this news break I started poking around its https settings and found nothing. Ended up Gogling the issue and of course it’s a registry edit that needs to be deployed to every server and added… Read more »
You kids get off my lawn with your Meteor JS
I have a few friends who swear by Meteor, but after reading over the website I’m still not sold on using it over Sails.js, CompoundJS, or any of the other node frameworks. I’m not trying to knock Meteor down, but I do want to explain to my friends why it won’t be using it for… Read more »
Getting the Vagrant ‘ssh command’ to Work on Windows
SPOILER: It works fine out of the box if you have git’s bin directory in your path. I was chatting recently with friend of mine, David Jacoby, and he mentioned a desire to purchase a Mac for development. Since he already had a Windows machine, I asked him why. (A few years ago, I would… Read more »
Best Practices for Linking To and Opening PDFs on your Website
Every now and then I get a request to change the behavior of the links to PDFs on our website. Currently we follow Jakob Nielsen’s recommendation on the issue: … prevent the browser from opening the document in the first place. Instead, offer users the choice to save the file on their harddisk or to… Read more »
Failed development processes for the 3 person website team
Things that have been working well for us: Publishing code live weekly or every other week as it’s ready. Using JIRA to store bugs, plans, and good ideas. Problems we’ve faced: Starting any project that takes more than a day or two for a single developer, as priorities can change week to week. Any estimate… Read more »
picking a server-side language
I made my girlfriend a one-page website for Valentine’s day. It’s cheesy and I won’t link to it, but it’s basically a slideshow of our photos with dates and some commentary. It’s pure html/css/javascript right now. The next step is adding a way to authenticate users and adding an interface for them to upload images… Read more »
What happens to your old pages when you create a new website?
I’m not here to teach, but I wrote this for a web marketing blog at work that never went live. Didn’t want it to go to waste. Thinking about a website upgrade? Is it on a new system with all new pages? Is anyone thinking about the links to the old pages? You’ll want to… Read more »
posting a form to two places at once
I’ve spent a lot of time at work lately struggling with how to send a form submission to two different places at once. I started just using the jQuery get method. Why not, right? That’s all I wanted to do, was make a one way request to a remote server. It worked fine as expected… Read more »
Comments Were Not Working
Comments weren’t working on this blog for some reason. Problem When trying to post you’d be redirected to the post’s URL followed by /comment-page/#comment-. But, it should look more like this /comment-page-1/#comment-74. I’d also get an email about a new comment, but all the normal fields would be blank, i.e. Author, Email, URL, WHOIS, and… Read more »
SEO Testing Update
Still ranked 6. Google has picked up my new blog title and my previous post. The current list looks like this: RP’s (robert pate’s) on the White Pages, an RP on linkedIn, an RP on Facebook, the RP wikipedia entry, the RP Cal State page (cstv), and then me. If you’re testing your own stuff… Read more »
Comparison of Free Software Licenses to Creative Commons
Back when I was dabbling in writing, I familiarized myself with the various Creative Commons Licenses. Now as a programmer I’m familiarizing myself with the various Free Software Licenses. Unfortunately, the official list is worthless to someone who doesn’t already understand the differences between the basic types. In googling the issue, I found a few… Read more »
SEO for This Blog and Domain
I’ve moved my blog around a lot over the years. I did this again recently because I realized I was getting 9th place in search results for my name. As a web admin I should be ranking higher simply because I know how to setup a site for good SEO. So I decided to fix… Read more »
Hello Dolly Plugin with Dance Commander Lyrics
Do you use wordpress too? Are you more interested in awesome than in hope?
Then take my Dance Commander Plugin, which replaces the “Hello, Dolly” lyrics with all the lyrics from “Dance Commander” by Electric Six.
Time Warner, Google TV, and the Internets
You probably didn’t see or don’t even remember the little tiff in august that Time Warner had with ESPN/ABC and Disney.
Or the one in december 2009 with FOX.
That’s nice that they kissed and made up, but it’s probably for the last time. The whole model should be, will be, shifting as the internet gets faster and the cable networks wise up.
Multilingual Dialogue on the Web
There are some neat things being done these days to facilitate multilingual dialogue, such as Ted Talks allowing open translation of their talks and Meedan enabling multi-lingual dialogue.
Use QR codes to link RL to DBs via the WWW
here’s a quick idea. First, QR codes are similar to barcodes but are square, hold more information, and are easily scanned with a digital camera lens like the one in your phone. No cumbersome laser scanner needed. Just download the QR Scanner application that’s commonplace on Japanese phones and catching on here in the states…. Read more »