I make use of emacs – my ability to customize the editor has made it easier for me to be productive. Switching between windows has always been a bit annoying in emacs. After reading Managing Emacs windows, I figured that I would give the ace-window library a try to see if it could solve my…

Chrome has a reputation for being incredibly unstable on Linux. It’s been rock solid for me on other platforms, but on Linux (Arch, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 14.10), I run into the “sad tab” multiple times a day. Since I use Chrome as a mail client, music player, word processor, calendar, and television, it’d…

What’s the point of an average, anyway? Common knowledge (the 1967 Children’s World Book Encyclopedia) states that an average has something to do with an arithmetic mean and/or a “central tendency”. I’m pretty sure that a “central tendency” is a sly sexual reference, so we’ll go back over to mathematics being mean. What’s an Average?…

The email started with “Your AWS account is compromised”. That’s the kind of thing that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and sit bolt upright. Amazon Web Services emailed me because one of my secret account keys had been posted to a publicly accessible web page – in this case, it was a github repository…

Let’s say you’ve gone and contributed to a project that’s hosted on GitHub. The usual way to do this is to fork the repository, make some changes on a branch in your own repository, and then send a pull requestback to the original author. What if you need to change something after you’ve submitted a…

I’m not referring to sensible naming conventions like “table names are always [singular|plural]” or “method names should be short but descriptive.” Those naming conventions are fine. They’re safe. They protect us from the stupidity of future generations of us (or at least uncaffeinated versions of ourselves). Poisonous naming conventions are the naming conventions that assume…