Quandy Factory: Blog How to Write a Blog Post
Provide value for your readers. Valuable writing is personal, informative, instructional, revelatory, entertaining, and engaging.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted July 26, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated July 26, 2010)
The most basic guideline to writing a blog is this: Provide value for your readers. Valuable writing is personal, informative, instructional, revelatory, entertaining, and engaging. The object of ...
Designing a RESTful Web Application
This blog entry is my attempt to get all the concepts of RESTful web service design straight.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted June 21, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated June 25, 2010)
Introduction
I'm working on a couple of projects that involve building a web service, and I decided early on that because of our business constraints - having to communicate with a variety of d...
Ubuntu 10.04 First Thoughts
I just upgraded my netbook to Ubuntu 10.04. So far, so good.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted April 30, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated May 01, 2010)
Last night I upgraded my Acer Aspire One from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 (I use the regular edition, not the netbook edition). 10.04 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, meaning Canonical promises to suppo...
Shared Awareness: A Better Way to Manage Comment Trolls
If we understand what motivates trolls, we can manage their disruptions by removing their incentive to comment.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted April 15, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated April 15, 2010)
Trolling
As everyone who has spent more than five minutes on the internet knows, in the absence of personal accountability, some people inevitably turn into assholes.
CouchDB Working Notes
I've decided to learn CouchDB, and I'm taking notes as I go.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted April 09, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated April 09, 2010)
Note: this article is very much a work in progress. It functions mainly as a place where I can document what I learn about CouchDB as I play around with it and get a progressively better sense of what...
MPAA and Piracy
The MPAA is lashing out against piracy by punishing its legitimate customers, which will only push more of them to piracy.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted February 26, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated February 26, 2010)
When I was a kid, I had a Fat Albert book in which one of the Cosby Kids (for details of who did what I'm going on memory, but I think it was Bucky) gets upset about something and runs away.
The...
Review: Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python 3
If you're an experienced programmer, you want to learn Python 3, and you don't have a lot of time to waste, skip this review and just go straight to the book.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted February 08, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated February 08, 2010)
TL;DR Summary
If you're an experienced programmer, want to learn Python 3, and don't have a lot of time to waste, skip this review and just go straight to Mark Pilgrim's *[Dive Into Python 3](ht...
Top 10 Programming Lessons in 10 Years
Here's my top 10 (plus one bonus) list of programming lessons I've learned over the last ten years.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted January 14, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated January 25, 2010)
After reading Top 20 Programming Lessons I've Learned in 20 Years by Jonathan Danylko, a recent article ...
The Virtue of Forgiving HTML Parsers
Most of the time, you want code to fail fast if it receives junk data. HTML on the early web is a powerful counterexample.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted January 08, 2010 in Blog (Last Updated January 08, 2010)
Today Hacker News featured an essay by Alex Russell of the Dojo javscript toolkit in which he mused on [th...
Newsfeed Bug: Fixed
Links in the main newsfeed for this site don't work. Update: Fixed
By Ryan McGreal
Posted December 18, 2009 in Blog (Last Updated December 20, 2009)
I just noticed that the main newsfeed for this site has a major bug: links back to the articles don't, er, link back to the articles. I'll try to fix this tonight...
Confused About CanChild
How can it cost $100,000 a year to host a website?
By Ryan McGreal
Posted December 18, 2009 in Blog (Last Updated December 18, 2009)
I'm confused: according to the Hamilton Spectator, the website for CanChild Centre for Childhood Disability Research is threatened with shutdown after the Ontario go...
Challenging the MLS Monopoly
I propose an Open-Source Listing Service (OSLS) with the express purpose of killing the MLS monopoly and highlighting the earned value of truly competent real estate agents, while preventing under-performing agents from continuing to extract unearned value from their role as gatekeepers.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted November 25, 2009 in Blog (Last Updated November 25, 2009)
Introduction
After a recent exchange involving a real estate agent, I'm again reminded that the real estate business is something of a racket, and that many real estate agents are not worth the ...
Software as a Model for Government
The way software developers approach software may be instructive in helping us to think more constructively about politics and governance.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted October 31, 2009 in Blog (Last Updated November 19, 2009)
Introduction
I make my living as a programmer, meaning I get paid to create and maintain software applications. At the same time I have a keen interest (my close friends might say an excessive i...
Productivity and Procrastination
I wrote this essay as a way of not completing another, more pressing task.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted September 09, 2009 in Blog (Last Updated October 29, 2009)
Introduction
From outside, it sometimes appears that I manage to produce a lot of output. At least, people sometimes ask me, "How do you have time to do so much?" This confounds me, because from...
An Open Letter to Lily Allen
File-sharing is an opportunity, not a problem.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted September 25, 2009 in Blog (Last Updated September 25, 2009)
Dear Lily,
I know a lot of people are giving you grief right now over your recent [stance on music piracy](http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=36707169&blogId=510114316...
Installing gtk-gnutella on a clean install of Ubuntu 9.04 in 29 Easy Steps
An object lesson in the difference between developer-oriented Linux distributions and consumer-oriented Linux distributions.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted May 29, 2009 in Blog (Last Updated May 29, 2009)
Step 1: $ sudo apt-get install gtk-gnutella
Step 2. The application installed and then loaded loaded, but it would not return any search results. Then a dialog popped up informing me that I had a...