"No more or less liberally used by hackers than the rest of the population uses "hacker" liberally to mean someone who does anything technology related that they don't understand." - Andy Bakun
"I love this place. Walking distance from my house. Delicious breakfast bagels (although, admittedly, I don't often stray from my regular order). Almost too large, I both love and hate how the egg…" - Andy Bakun
"I love this place. Walking distance from my house. Delicious breakfast bagels (although, admittedly, I don't often stray from my regular order). Almost too large, I both love and hate how the egg…" - Andy Bakun
“Linux distributions that are targeted for servers but have an installation process that is desktop focused is lame. For instance, I do not need to create a non-root user account during every server installation.”
“We just had a discussion, and eventual agreement, in the office about how we wouldn't give each other up as the only way to reliably win the Prisoner's Dilemma. This came up thanks to Rick Astley.”
"Not sure what this was really getting at. Replace "web developers" with nearly any profession and the issue is the same. They'll deal with it the same way everyone else has and does." - Andy Bakun
"I really think that any documentation that has to do with interacting with a database via SQL needs to not even hint at the fact that you should, or even can, build queries as strings. The security in apps have truly suffered because of PHP's documentation in this regard." - Andy Bakun
"I think the idea behind leaving a legacy in the post was more along the lines of how people will remember you rather than if, or which of, your specific accomplishments are remembered. I think there is definite value in living your life in such a way that people reflect upon you, your actions, and your ideals favorably and look up to you and strive to be better. I have a friend at a previous job from a decade ago who every so often tells me he gets inspiration on solving some hard technical problem by looking at my old code and configurations; and I do the same for peers and superiors who have had some kind of influence on my life and work habits. Conversely, I've had some terrible bosses who left quite a legacy, such that I'll think "What would X do?" and I do the opposite because their legacy isn't one I look favorably upon." - Andy Bakun
"There are two sides to stability: "stability through lack of change" and "stability through tracking upstream". I seem to get bitten by the former more frequently than I'd like with certain distributions.
Then there are problems with upstream some times, this Mysql 5.1 GA release may end up being problematic for distributions that track upstream really closely. But I consider that to be more bleeding edge than not.
I'd like to see some distributions smartly packaging both a considered stable version and a closer to bleeding edge version, without goofy include-the-version-in-the-package-name cruft (except in the case where upstream does it, like sqlite did with sqlite and sqlite3 naming), so it's easier to pick and chose and move between versions without double installs and a lot of conflicts. Its more likely easier to just stay on an older distribution release than it would be to maintain this." - Andy Bakun
"Apple must have the last website that still requires a plugin, Quicktime, to view videos on their web pages. This seems odd since most of the videos are marketing related, and they are making it _harder_, not easier, to be marketed to. It doesn't matter how good the quality of quicktime is (if it is better), it's not a video if I can't watch it." - Andy Bakun
"I read "Fido" and thought Fidonet and said "wow, Canada _is_ really out of date". Although it would be cool to go old school and get access to a fed Fidonet BBS on your phone." - Andy Bakun
"Other scientists have said that more species are created and go extinct than we've ever cataloged and that this has been going on for millions of years. And I don't have a reference either.
Statistics are like standards: there so many to choose from." - Andy Bakun
"The PHP website is one of the most complete and easily navigable and searchable language documentation websites I've ever used, and I directly blame it for my being so well versed in PHP that PHP has (grudgingly) been my tool of choice for years. The quality of the documentation on php.net has actually gone down since they started wrapping everything in objects and using automatic documentation generators like doxygen. That's great for reference, but not so great when you're trying to learn it. The documentation for SPL (largely http://www.php.net/~helly/php/... ) is an example. The php.net website has traditionally been good for both reference and learning. On the other hand, a lot of that "bad advice out there" is actually in the PHP documentation (like building query strings directly), which has caused it to pop up in other places. The comments on the documentation nodes are a great idea, but use anything in them with caution. If one comment says "Here's how I solved this..." - Andy Bakun
"This would be a lot easier if EVERYTHING that you've ever done is stored in your home directory because you can't write anywhere else (and neither can apps you're running) as your own user. On Windows this is a problem because sometimes apps write to the application folder in Program Files, then there are registry changes, sometimes stuff is stored in Application Data, and some stuff is stored in hidden directories that are, by default, invisible.
I've moved the entire home directory between installs of different versions of linux distributions and between entirely different distributions with only minor issues (related mostly to an old format of a config file not being recognized by the newer application). I've had the same .opera directory for years.
Running applications in their own VM is a good idea for security. It's a good idea to work around system and file management deficiencies in the operating system and the application itself also." - Andy Bakun
"It's too bad that a company with such prominence as 37 Signals doesn't know more about why IE is doing exactly what it should be doing in this case and that Safari is actually a problem. If IE was stricter in a lot more cases, we'd have fewer "Well, it works in IE, it must be good" problems overall. Caching issues aside, few people know that the protocol is actually optional and is inherited from the base url (just like the origin/server name portion is). So if your entire site can be served by HTTPS, you can still use relative paths anchored at different server names. On https://www.example.com/someth... following relative paths will also be requested via HTTPS: /somethingelse //www.example.com/media/styles.css //media.example.com/images/buybutton.gifWildcard certs come in handy here. Then it's up to your app code to make absolute _individual_ links and/or redirect (with or without https) when you want a page to be requested securely. Building URLs for internal resources is much..." - Andy Bakun
