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July 16th, 2015 Random number generators are generally uniform, ie. any number inside the range is equally likely to be chosen. But what if you’re generating numbers that need to fall along a normal curve? For example, what if you’re generating people for a game and those people have IQ...
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November 5th, 2013 TechStars Austin just finished up. I met a lot of super smart and passionate people over the course of it, and I hope they all make a trillion dollars. I’ve noticed something about companies that get investor attention that I’m going to share. I was talking to...
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September 11th, 2013 As part of my attempt to make setting up Jekyll sites bonehead easy for myself, I wanted to make the script smart enough to actually set up the DNS records for a new site without any human intervention. I could just hit the DigitalOcean API raw, but...
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September 7th, 2013 I’m going through the process of converting all my WordPress sites to Jekyll. Jekyll makes it easy to convert by providing import scripts from various platforms including Wordpress. All I had to do was Export the xml file from the Wordpress admin panel, then run the Wordpress...
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September 6th, 2013 The Problem I have a bunch of small sites that are well suited to using Jekyll, but I didn’t have a bonehead easy way to get them online. My non-solution so far has been to have a DreamHost VPS, and just spin up a WordPress site on...
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March 15th, 2013 I started my first “company” when I was 13, and pretty much haven’t stopped. When I’ve taken a more traditional job, it’s been as a strategic stepping stone to being an effective and credible entrepreneur. At the same time if you had asked me when I was...
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February 9th, 2013 Rails Girls is simple. Tech needs more women, so the organizers of RailsGirls put 40 interested women and girls in a room for the day, and took them from nothing to a complete Rails application (with picture uploads!). I had the pleasure of being able to just...
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January 30th, 2013 I’m working on a book based on a essay I wrote a while back called Achievement Porn. A section of that book is devoted to the state of our education system, and so I jumped at the opportunity for a short presentation at an Education Technology conference...
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rel=”No-Refresh” January 21st, 2013 Asyncronous javascript is a marvelous tool, that was tacked onto a language that wasn’t built for it by clever hackers at Microsoft. In 1998 they released XMLHTTP which was an Internet Explorer component, and by 1999 the XMLHttpRequest javascript object that was based on the original...
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January 14th, 2013
Aaron’s death hit me harder than I thought it would, so I wrote something about what his life and death means
to me, and how he’s inspired me to do truly important work.
The full essay is here: The Life of Aaron Swartz
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January 11th, 2013 I’ve always had a weird relationship with frustration. It pushes me to do things I didn’t think I could do. There was a time I was seven years old in the hospital after an accident. I couldn’t walk, and people were hauling me from the hospital bed...
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January 8th, 2013 I have a weird problem that has a weird solution. The solution turns out to be more useful than I thought. The Problem I have a wide circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and I’m extroverted so I love talking to them all. But I’m also introverted,...
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January 7th, 2013 If you’re on a linux host, you might find this useful. It will backup all the websites and their MySQL databases into an archive folder that you can download regularly. This script runs weekly on my host, and backs up my dozen or so sites and databases....
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January 7th, 2013 Hypercube is a JavaScript toy that’s sort of pretty, and kind of fun. It uses trigonometry to place “vertices” in a 3D configuration. It was written before HTML5 and canvas were things, it uses html characters as the vertices. Click here to check out the demo. Follow...
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January 6th, 2013 I’ve been blogging for years, and in that time I’ve tried to shoehorn all the things I’m interested in into the same site, which turns out to be like packing a wild hyena and a honey badger into the same giant ziploc bag. It sounds exciting, but...
