Nathan Manousos

ben: I hate this bar in the current version of the Facebook app...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:52:57 -0400

I hate this bar in the current version of the Facebook app so much. Not the bar itself or it’s function.

The icons look like they’re from different sets and don’t have consistent weights. The spacing is off between the first two icons. Oh, and that fucking globe asset is BLURRY! Are you fucking kidding me!?

"There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 08:35:17 -0400

“There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

- Steve Jobs (via aboyinmidair)

laughingsquid: Arthur C. Clarke Predicts Internet and PCs in...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:29:35 -0400

laughingsquid:

Arthur C. Clarke Predicts Internet and PCs in 1974

Instafeed

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:00:27 -0400

Instafeed:

Great Instagram feed viewer. I like that it is simple, and shows the images at full size.

Summary of the Github/Rails Security Kerfuffle

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 21:26:00 -0500

Hacker News was full of posts about a security issue relating to Github and Ruby on Rails today. The story is confusing and I’m seeing some incorrect information about it. Here is a summary of my understanding of the events. I’m not casting judgement, just trying to make an understandable summary.

1. Github user homakov believes that a Rails default setting makes it more likely for Rails developers to overlook a certain security issue. He posts an issue report on the Rails repository github page explaining his concern.

2. His concern is dismissed.

3. He posts a comment on the issue which references a github issue seemingly created in the future. This is to demonstrate that the issue he raised has lead to a security hole in Github itself (which is built using Rails), which he used to post an issue with a future timestamp.

Note that this isn’t really a security bug with Rails. Rather it is a default setting that could lead a developer to create a security hole in their app. Homokov wants to alter Rails such that it is harder to make that mistake.

4. This stunt is largely ignored.

5. He tries another stunt - making a commit to the master branch of the official Rails repository. Demonstrating that he could potentially control any repository on Github. Unauthorized users should not be allowed to commit to this repository. It is a very high-profile repository, so many eyebrows are raised as a result.

This is like going to a mall that is built of Acme brand wood, which happens to have an Acme store inside. Then telling the Acme employees that their wood has a weakness if used improperly. The employees say “well, we designed that way, it’s not our fault if someone uses it improperly”. The he does a karate chop on their wall, smashing a hole in it and says, “See? even this mall where your store is located has used the wood improperly”.

L@@K!

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:15:41 -0500

A+++++

SCOOPING THE LOOP SNOOPER

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:59:52 -0500

SCOOPING THE LOOP SNOOPER:

fuckyeahcomputerscience:

A proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable

No general procedure for bug checks succeeds.
Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll show where it leads:
I will prove that although you might work till you drop,
you cannot tell if computation will stop.

For imagine we have a procedure called P…

I find this endlessly fascinating. It took me a while to wrap my mind around the concept, which is almost certainly something I was expected to understand in college but failed to. I wrote this bit of pseudo-code to help explain it to myself: https://gist.github.com/1526386

The Not-So-Simple Feature

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:47:00 -0500

I’m just about finished building a coupon system for my e-commerce site. Customers visit a special URL that includes the coupon code. Then the coupon is applied to the order they create.

Here are some of the things I had to consider when building the feature. This is why seemingly simple features can take longer than expected.

What is the most reasonable database structure for coupons that can take on different forms?
Is there anyway for an attacker to abuse coupons?
What if I issue a 50% off coupon, then a year from now I allow users to sell their own products and set their own prices, and a user sets a $10,000 markup on their own product and buys it 100 times using the coupon?
What if a coupon results in a negative price for an order?
What if a coupon becomes invalid after it has been applied to an order?
What if a coupon becomes invalid right as an order is being placed?
What if a customer adds a coupon to their order, then logs in and their account has an order in progress with a different coupon applied?
What if showing the original price and the discounted price side by side takes up too much space and it can’t all fit?
What if a customer tries to redeem an expired coupon? Voided? Nonexistant? Used up?
How will a customer see that their coupon has been applied?
How will a discount be reflected if the user updates the quantity of their order using AJAX where the total order price is calculated client-side?
What if a customer wants to remove a coupon from their order?
How will a discount amount be stored after the order is placed to ensure the actual discount amount is available for record keeping purposes?
How does the checkout page change if the total price of an order is zero?
Does the customer pay tax on an order’s discounted price or full price?
Should the coupon code ‘freestuff’ be recognized if the user types in ‘FREESTUFF’?
What if a customer redeems a coupon while a coupon is already applied to their order?
How should the checkout page change if the coupon gives free shipping?
What if a wholesale customer with a constant discount tries to use a coupon?

Bizarre Conversation

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:05:26 -0500

I was making a purchase, and someone within earshot was explaining that their dad loved toothpicks.

Clerk: Does /your/ dad like toothpicks?
Me: uhh...
Clerk: Oh no, don't tell me your dad is dead!
Me: No, but it's interesting that your mind went there.
Clerk: Well you know, it's like when you say "Adopted kids are weird" and then you find out the person you are talking to is adopted.
Me: Has that happened to you?
Clerk: You're not adopted are you?
Me: I don't believe so, but that would explain the weirdness.

Bone Marrow Donor Compensation Now Legal

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:11:00 -0500

My friend Amit has Leukimia. The disease, and bone marrow donation have been on my mind.

According to this article from the Washington Post, it’s now legal to pay donors (provided they are using the newer, less invasive donation method).

I have long believed that there should be a market for organ donation. So this article was doubly interesting to me. Particularly this part:

“Advocates for paying donors said compensation will spur even more donations. Detractors argue that donor compensation will exploit the poor to undergo risky medical procedures to benefit the wealthy.”

To me this translates to “Detractors think poor people are too stupid to make their own decisions”.

A plantiff in the case that brought this decision, who’s daughter died of leukemia said:

“In the end, creating more and better bone marrow donor matches through a system of modest compensation will save the lives of patients, improve the lives of donors, drive down the costs of treatment and improve the quality of life of cancer patients as they battle to survive.”

He’s right, but why should the compensation be modest? This is clearly a word thrown in there to make the concept more palatable. I’d like to see the people who donate and save lives be rewarded handsomely.

How I Share Screenshots

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:17:00 -0500

I love sharing screenshots, I do it multiple times every day. I even remapped my keyboard shortcuts to make it easier.

There are several utilities for doing this. My favorite has traditionally been Gyazo. However, Gyazo places too much junk around my images (ads and such) and account management is weird. Gyazo’s pro account doesn’t use a traditional login/password approach. I don’t know how to access my account, I used to be able to.

I searched for a new tool. I looked at Grabbox, Cloud App and others. They all look really cool, but bother me for various reasons.

I don’t need the app to run all the time, just when I’m taking a screenshot. If you use an app launcher like Spotlight, Quicksilver, Launchbar or Alfred (as you should) then the cost of launching an app is near zero. I’d rather not have the app running all the time, taking up resources, and displaying an icon somewhere.
I don’t want the app to hijack my screenshot command. I’m not trying to upload every screenshot I ever take. I regularly take screenshots that I don’t want to share. I want screenshots to continue working like they always do, and I don’t want to accidentally share screenshots with private information in them. Some apps even rely on using the standard screenshot shortcuts, which I have customized.
I want to use the native screenshot UI. Apple’s screenshot UI is really good. It supports things like space + move, option and shift modifiers, and you can use space to take screenshots of individual windows. Apps like Skitch have their own UI for this which I’m not crazy about.
I want the URL of the image copied to the clipboard immediately after the upload is complete.

Gyazo is the only app I’ve found that meets my criteria. But it displays ads and other annoying stuff around images.

I talked a lot with my friend @naan about this, and realized it would be nice if I could use the Gyazo app to send images to Amazon S3 instead of to Gyazo.com.

Then I found this blog post by @cowboy describing how to modify a Ruby script within Gyazo in order to send images to your own server. The fact that this can be done with a Ruby script means I might stand a chance of figuring it out! I wrote my own script to send images to S3 instead of a normal Web server.

This is the best solution I’ve found, the best of all worlds!

If you’d like to use this technique yourself, grab my Ruby script and fill in your own S3 credentials at the top. Find Gyazo.app in your Applications folder, right click on it, and choose “Show Package Contents”, then navigate to Contents/Resources. Replace the file called, “script” with the one I provided. It’s a good idea to make a copy of the default script file first in case something goes wrong.

And let me know if you find a better way.

Photo

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:17:57 -0400

dwineman: Microsoft and Apple got ahold of multitouch...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:20:19 -0400

dwineman:

Microsoft and Apple got ahold of multitouch technology at about the same time.

Microsoft made a big dumb table for fancy hotels.

Apple made two new industries.

soxiam: Larry page explains anti-competitive patent attacks on...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:42:22 -0400

soxiam:

Larry page explains anti-competitive patent attacks on Google.

"In the last few years, when the ads began disappearing and the page counts began shrinking, many..."

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:44:52 -0400

“In the last few years, when the ads began disappearing and the page counts began shrinking, many magazines began to look like brochures. The industry responded by cutting costs on every front, including by printing on thin, gauzy paper that made them feel like brochures as well…If magazines are to survive, they’ll have to become something special, offering heft and a kind of “thing-ness” that gives them value over other ways of consuming text. The writing in Lucky Peach is bright and unexpected, the graphics are remarkable, and the knitting of images and prose is done with élan.”

- Lucky Peach Magazine a Comfort to Those Preferring Print - NYTimes.com

Having gotten to know a fair number of people in the magazine business since I’ve been in New York, I’ve really started to sense that print’s malaise may have as much to do with short sighted cost/quality cutting as a response to the threat of new technology as with the new technology itself. It’s awesome to see things like “Lucky Peach” demonstrate that people will embrace a print magazine with a lot of love behind it.
(via buzz)

whiskyvangoghgo: msg: CV Dazzle - makeup to fool face...

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:37:46 -0400

whiskyvangoghgo:

msg:

CV Dazzle - makeup to fool face detection found via benjaminpalmer

Second esoteric application of dazzle camoflague that I’ve been introduced to this week.

littlebigdetails: Chrome - Notification bar overlaps with the...

Sun, 22 May 2011 01:48:10 -0400

littlebigdetails:

Chrome - Notification bar overlaps with the browser UI, that way it can be distinguished from fake bars.

/via stefanwehrmeyer

Sconehenge English muffins.

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:49:49 -0400

Sconehenge English muffins.

Google Street view has a St Patrick’s day themed...

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:48:39 -0400

Google Street view has a St Patrick’s day themed easter-egg today.

Seems like someone at Hulu is a fan of Apple TV

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:52:43 -0400

Seems like someone at Hulu is a fan of Apple TV