Forest for the Trees

“ [H]ave you ever paid a company to fix a service you already pay for? You will.

— Khoi Vinh on AT&T’s plans to sell $100 miniature cell towers to its customers to improve its reception.

“ The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.

— EE versus CS

» Rails Envy

Gregg Pollack shares the inside scoop of what happened with Rails Envy (hint: no drama).

» (Un)shipped

It takes courage to cut features that were planned for an upcoming release. It takes even more courage to cut them if they were already implemented.

Love the list of features and the reasons they were left out:

Precise numbers looked cheap.

(via Lukas Mathis)

“ [B]usinesses and other enterprises are best run by enthusiasts who pursue excellence in their speciality. Financial success then follows from this but, if financial goals are instead made the primary objective, the business will then lose its vigour and may fail.

— Obliquity

“ Programming language tutorials shouldn’t be about leaning (sic) languages. They should be about something interesting, and you learn the language in the process.

— Rethinking Programming Language Tutorials

“

The Safari browser on the iPad doesn’t support videos based on the popular Adobe Flash Internet video standard.

The issue may be alleviated over time. Apple is backing an emerging video standard called HTML5.

—

Ed Baig in his iPad review

Talk about oversimplification.

“ [H]ere’s how people picked a racket: 1. Their friend or tennis pro told them to buy it, or 2. They picked it up, did a few fake swings, bounced their hand off the strings, pictured themselves holding it on the court, and either bought it or repeated the same test with another racket.

—

Shoes and software

The features buyers care about are rarely what the seller thinks.

» Moving to a safer password solution

Speaking of bcrypt, here’s a dead-simple way to migrate your Rails application passwords to bcrypt from an existing hashing solution without users noticing a thing.

» How To Safely Store A Password

Use bcrypt