Category: misc

Other miscellaneous

Good Job GumRoad

Today I bought a bunch of ebooks. And then I had to put them somewhere.

I’ve bought a bunch of digital ebooks in the last few years. I do not know where they are!

So I decided to put it into the one folder, that seems to persist, no matter the years or machine… it’s my DropBox folder…

Man, that folder got some old stuff in it… but everything is still there! (Even a not so complete Books folder)

So I decided to put my purchases in there…

I then decided to find my old digital purchases to put into DropBox as well…

As you can get, most of the download links no longer works… except for one notable exception.

A 3 year old GumRoad download link, still works!

Go GumRoad. Good Job.

(note: the only other one that works was a custom home-grown solution.)

Anker Cables

I’m not sure why this story made it to #1 on HackerNews.

but this comment rings true to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508848

It’s about Anker cables.

For some reason the Apple lightning cables are horrible. It cannot withstand the abuse of a 2-year old.

Anker cables are amazing, they last the longest for me. But the best part is their 18 month warranty. That means when you spend the $10, you know you’d at least get 18 month worth.

I’ve had to “cash in” the warranty a couple times, both times it was 100% painless, I do not have to pay for shipping. Zagg invisible shield is horrible for this, I think they offer lifetime warranty? but gotta pay like $5 shipping everytime for a thin piece of plastic.

Anker definitely does it right.

I won’t buy another Lightning cable that isn’t Anker.

Am I a Designer or Developer?

If you’re a front-end engineer, are you a designer or developer?

Some designers produce really good front-end code. (Html/Css)

Some developers product really good front-end code. (Html/Css/JavaScript)

Only the designers can design… The developers cannot design… (Visual Stunning Work)

Is this true?

So the question becomes, if you want to become a professional, what do you focus on?

Setting up RamNode VPS for Node.JS Development

Recently I had to get a VPS (virtual private server) for remote development.

Below are my steps:

Once I signed-up for RamNode, I chose their $3.50 a month, 512mb plan. Dirt cheap for web development.

I went with Ubuntu, seems like CentOS was the default.

SSH in, (I’m using Secure Shell for Chrome)

  1. Create a user.

since you don’t want to use root as your main account.

(replace username, with what you want your username to be)

useradd -m username (create home directory
adduser username sudo
passwd username
chsh username
(change default shell to /bin/bash)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git
— add ssh key–
–add key to bitbucket–
then install your framework, currently in my case, Ember.

Twitter Brand Strategy

I’ve been thinking about what my Twitter strategy should be for a while.

Should you use multiple twitter accounts? Or one over arching one?

I have lots of websites/brands… but am self-employed. So there’s only one of me.

Using tools like hootsuite helps, but there was still a sense of inauthenticity.

Then I thought, who uses Twitter the best? Celebrities do.

And “who are they on twitter”?

They are themselves.

—-

So That’s who I am going to be on Twitter.

Just myself.

WTF is B-Tree?

You here it all the time, B-Tree this, B-Tree that… what da f*** is it?

It’s a way of storing data in an efficiently sorted way. In this video example of a b-treenumbers are being added to the tree in a sorted way. Larger numbers are on the right, smaller numbers on the left.

Basically, you have some sort of algorithm to decide where the new data goes in the tree. In this case, it’s simply “is the number bigger or smaller”.

Often, trees are “rebalanced”, like in this video, to keep the tree somewhat symmetrical, because it can make the tree more efficient.

Pretty good answer I found on reddit here.

Also on that thread, B-Tree are explained to be “A B-tree is a way of storing large amounts of data in such a way you can search for and retrieve it very quickly.”

And also apparently how they work is “pretty complicated”, so don’t feel bad if you don’t understand! I barely understood it until now!

TL;DR: B-Trees auto sorts & balance the data so they can be retrieved efficiently.