Recently I bought this extremely cheap Tongtel brand pressure cooker from Sams Warehouse here in Australia. I’d been meaning to buy a pressure cooker for some time now and at the price of $49, it seemed like a steal.
It didn’t come in a box, all it came with is a lead, measuring cups and that’s it. No instruction manual.
Being new to the idea of electric pressure cookers, I searched high and low for an instruction book on how to start this thing to no avail. After plenty of trial and error, I worked it out.
The 2014 Australian budget and first for LNP party has caused quite the controversy. There are cuts everywhere, unviersities can set their own fees, HECS debt threshold reduced and the big one: people will have to pay $7 to see a GP.
The $7 GP fee which most will have to pay when seeing a doctor who bulk-bills (80% of all current doctor visits) is to be paid by everyone. Those who don’t see doctors that bulk bill will have to pay an extra $5 on top of the consultation fee thanks to a reduction in the medicare rebate.
Believe it or not in all of my career as a developer, I’ve never had to take a Photoshop character tracking value and convert it to a letter-spacing value in CSS until recently.
My first instinct is to usually Google my problems instead of sorting them out for myself (because, why reinvent the wheel), but this time I worked it out for myself and then Googled.
The formula is:
Photoshop value / 1000 = em value
Chances are if you’ve been using Git as your source control weapon of choice, you’ve encountered the detached head issue at some point. I’ve seen even long time users of Git get stumped on this issue.
So onto the solution, how the heck do you get everything back to normal? We are going to dive into the terminal for this one, I am not sure if there are any Git GUI’s out there like GitKraken or Sourcetree that can handle these scenarios.
Hacker News, Reddit and Stack Exchange all share a similar trait with one another: voting. You can either up-vote or down-vote depending on restrictions the site has in place. Social voting systems are inherently flawed and subject to manipulation.
Just a little food for thought:
Limit the number of up-votes a user has per day. If up-voting is more scarce, people will selectively be more careful with how they spend their votes. Limit the number of votes a user can perform in a 10 minute period. Imposing limits on the speed of voting means a user will be even more selective with how they up-vote content. If a particular piece of content makes it to the homepage (for example on Reddit or Hacker News) a user should be awarded X amount of up-votes to their quota which they can spend. This award value would be capped to prevent hoarding. Voting history is public. All votes a user has performed should be public: both up and down-votes. This will mean a users voting activity is public and thus will help reduce spam/gaming of the site. Possibly difficult: but a problem with a lot of voting systems, especially for social link sites is that people up and down-vote based on titles without clicking through to the content. Either checking if the user visited the link or imposing a timer before a user can vote would also help. Down-voting costs karma/points. Stackexchange already do this on all of their Q&A websites, other sites should adopt this approach. If you disagree with a submission, maybe leaving a comment is a better idea than down or up-voting it. The more selective a user is with votes, the weight their vote has. If a user has voted a lot, their votes should less weight than that of someone who votes more carefully.
You have your idea, you have the skills/means/money/time to build it: but where do you start?
The first reaction of many will be to rush right into design and or development of your idea. But wait, you haven’t even scoped out your idea yet. Why are you rushing off to start building something that is only 1% of the way there?
As a developer with limited design knowledge, I used to be the same. The excitement of potentially building something you think is the worlds greatest idea can sometimes get the better of you. I would rush right into the design and development phase without a care in the world and ultimately I would never complete the project because I never thought it through.
Almost a year ago I wrote about making the switch from iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone. I thought I would write a follow-up article about how the switch went and other observations.
I am still happy with the choice I made and cannot see myself ever switching back to an iPhone unless Apple all of a sudden make their phones less limited. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a solid phone, but there have been caveats.
Whilst looking on Designer News, after looking on Hacker News first (of course) I came across an interesting submission titled Kill Switch — A small bit of javascript to kill a website should the need arise
I won’t deny I’ve toyed with a similar idea before, but abandoned any such endeavour in favour of a well-defined contract before starting any work. Essentially this code is a back door, albeit a mild one.
Unless you’ve just connected to the Internet for the first time (and if so, welcome) then you would have heard about Facebook purchasing Oculus VR for $2 billion dollars. You would also be aware of the massive amounts of backlash and criticism Oculus VR have copped as a result of the announcement.
This isn’t an entirely new trend. Every time a users beloved service gets acquired, a small but rather vocal subset of users start shouting from the rooftops of their suburban rental homes.
I, too used to be a MongoDB naysayer and lets face it, in its early days and even up until recently MongoDB was a steaming pile of shit. Not only that, but completely forgoing things we take for granted in a traditional RDMS is something many have a hard time getting accustomed too (hello transactions).
Yes, prior to version 2.0 of MongoDB there were a few issues, one of those issues namely being the global write lock blocking all queries problem. In version 2.0 they basically addressed the issue, in version 2.2 they removed global write locks altogether.