We were working on some customer issues the other day and it another customer was having problems, you know double whammy. What was interesting is that a more senior person started talking about the customer about “they’re such a problem” and then talking about strange things they did in the past. As we dug into their …

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Quick bit of background, I’ve used many programming languages over the years. Though in general I would bias myself to being a procedural/object guy rather than a functional programmer. Though I can say that I’ve done big projects in most of the popular languages at this point [C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, …

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Looking at event IO frameworks and found some really good comments about the “ev” library, the challenge is that I would rather work in C++ than pure C – I like methods.. Found that the documentation is lacking for the C++ side of the library and needed to build a test harness. This is a very basic TCP Echo server …

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Over the last year I’ve had an authentication library that I’ve used to slice and dice public services and like most things it’s collected more than it’s share of dust, cruft and other ugly appendages that you wonder if it’ll work then next time you use it. I’ve been hot and heavy over django (even if it’s embedded …

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Brief bio background – I’ve been doing email in some way shape or form since my address was: …!uoregon!chemstor!koblas or …{ames,decwrl,pyramid,wyse}! mips!koblas If that means something to you, then you probably have a clue that I’ve done this for a while. If it doesn’t here’s some other tidbits, I can write a …

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Continue to poke away at looking at twitter data and what it means. One of the things I think about, because everybody else is doing it, is the idea of sentiment analysis. What’s interesting is that this posting reminded me of a Facebook “problem” — Sombody posts a note on facebook like “Broke my arm” and you end up …

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Code review time… In a conversation about URL shorteners and “Coke Rewards” realized that there was a case where I needed to be able to generate safe character strings that had high reliability for input back by human beings. The typical Base62 systems where there is ambiguity between (O, o and 0) make things hard …

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The project of the week, is something that I’ve been putting off for a very long time. Which is to get something running on Extra that’s more than just a nothing site. Part of the problem is that it’s a good domain name that I’ve had parked for a very long time, and it makes real $$ in parking revenue, which I would …

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Part of this post is the gratuitous, gosh that was easy to integrate! Of course part is a small point that I would like developers to think about. First off here’s the code snippet, which owes it’s history to: Zendesk Remote Authentication with Django and Unicode Names and Zendesk remote authenticatin with Djnago (the …

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I just read a post talking about the “Does your startup pass The Sleep Test“, in principal the idea is sound it’s a little simplistic. Fifteen years ago I worked as a consultant, the money was good but the problem I quickly realized is that fundamentally I was just trading time for money. We can all see how a …

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