Jason's Notes About Stuff

As I continue to go through my old blog drafts, this is another one from 2010 where I took down some rough notes and never quite put something together. At the time, there was significant press (and a movie ) about how Mark Zuckerberg has "stolen" the idea for Facebook from the  Winklevoss twins . I would argue that there was very little original or truly innovative ideas that went into the core functionality of Facebook. On the other hand, it was pretty innovative to build up a huge database of his classmates' information without their permission...  ☺ --- I've read  Atlas Shrugged cover to cover, and I totally get the theme and the very real problems it discusses. What I don't understand is how anyone thinks that modern intellectual property laws provide any type of solution. If anything, they tend to make matters worse, since people that come up with the most profitable ideas today are usually bound by agreements that automatically assign ...

Who remembers 2006? 12 years ago, Google launched a truly innovative suite of products to compete with Microsoft's behemoth Office suite called " Google Docs and Sheets ". This promised to revolutionize the way we work. Instead of having to email Word and Excel attachments to co-workers and worry about old versions , conflicting changes , etc., the document was hosted in one place, and everyone could always access and update the very latest version with no fuss or muss. Cloud Computing was The Next Big Thing™* and everything was going to be better ! *NOTE: Cloud Computing was not really new, but more a reboot of networked timesharing from the 60s and 70s distributed on a global scale. But that's another story for another time. Fast forward 12 years , and Word and Excel files are still everywhere ! Now, there are still a few cases where Docs and Sheets are missing features that Word and Excel have. For instance, I sometimes miss the automated hie...

About a month ago, before the big Cambridge Analytica scandal , I wrote that " Facebook is over ." My feeling was strong enough that I divested all FB holdings the same day. Glossing over the details at the time, I simply stated that Facebook had "lost its way." After posting, several of my friends and relatives (on Facebook, of course) suggested that I should create the Next Facebook . Funny enough, I'd already been there and done that. My reply: " I started a project called "FriendPortal" in 2003 that was to be a simpler, better alternative to Friendster. Before I could finish it, some scrappy Harvard kid beat me to the punch. Somebody will make the "next" Facebook. Odds are decent that it won't be me  :) " I thought it would be interesting to go a bit more in-depth on this topic. History Lesson In my mind, the first modern "social networking" site was Friendster (2002). It was quickly followed by M...

"Should I buy Bitcoin?" This is a question I've heard a lot the past few weeks, so I'd like to quickly answer it in a public forum. My official answer is: "You should spend no more on Bitcoin than you'd be comfortable putting into a Vegas slot machine." As far as I'm concerned: Bitcoin is  not an investment . Bitcoin is a speculative, risky commodity gamble . If you do choose to put some chips down, remember that Bitcoin (BTC) can be subdivided up to 8 decimals places. Although fees make it difficult to trade very small amounts, you can easily trade down to 0.001 BTC, which at publishing time is worth about $15 US Dollars (USD). So at least you're not required to put a large amount of money at risk to play the game. Coinbase, one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges (where you can trade "real money" for Bitcoins) recently sent out an email: "Please invest responsibly." This might as well read: "Pleas...

Windows 1. Download sketchy .exe file from Internet. 2. Double click it. 3. Press [next] about 5 times. 4. Done! Linux 1. Download sketchy .tgz or tar.gz file from Internet. 2. Google the right command line options to extract it. 3. Change to the new directory. 4. Look through all the files and try to guess which is the install script. 5. Run the install script. 6. When the script crashes, Google the library incompatibility errors. 7. Search for different versions of libraries and attempt to install them. 8. Break other stuff while attempting to install new libraries. 9. Bang head against desk. 10. Google more error messages. 11. Spend a few hours trying various suggestions from the Internet. 12. 50/50 chance of a) finding magical solution, or b) deciding it's not worth it and giving up.

I think most people, do better when they open, look at, and deal with physical , postal mail rather than email. For me it's the opposite. After growing up with email and having it be a critical part of my life for so many years, I can read, process and respond to email wickedly fast. I use a pre-screener that lets me quickly archive and mark spam, and I know the Gmail shortcut keys instinctively. Getting to Inbox Zero in the morning generally takes minutes. On the flip side, if someone hands me a piece of postal mail or paper, I literally have no idea what to do with it. Paper blows around in the wind if it's not weighted down. Paper is flammable . It gets lost in stacks or under things. There's no way to set a reminder about them (unless you go all out and use a physical " tickler file "). I use paper for grocery lists and sometimes jotting down quick notes that I'll transfer to digital later (although I'm using Google Keep more and mo...

Here's a quick e-commerce lesson for you: Don't validate credit card transactions based on IP address location. I left the internet fax provider I've had since 2003 because they wouldn't let me pay them . I wasted an embarrassingly long time trying to find a cheap/free way mask my IP address. I eventually gave up trying to give them money. I Googled, read a few quick reviews, and found a new, better provider in 5 minutes . Lots of customers travel or live outside of their home country . Don't make it difficult (or impossible ) for them to pay you.

With all of the travelling we've done recently, we have the planning down to a science. Step 1: TripAdvisor First we hit up TripAdvisor and check out their "Things to Do" section. Step 2: Google Maps Then we map out everything we want to see and do on a shared Google Map, so we can start grouping things that are close together. Step 3: Google Docs Next, we create a shared Google Doc, start listing the attractions, and figuring out which day to do what. Once we start booking flights, trains, hostels, etc., all the times and confirmations numbers go here. Step 4:  Mobile phone/apps For this trip, I've used the Labs feature in Android Google Maps to download all of London for offline use, in case I don't have a mobile signal. I've also installed two different apps that give live train and tube schedules. Step 5: Paper As great as technology is, it's not quite perfect. Laptops and phones can break or run out of battery power. Before we lea...

For the longest time, I've been searching for a quick, easy way to take quick meeting notes. I used to use a text editor called SciTE, the same editor I use for quick code editing, but I find managing files in a file system to be a real pain. When I had an iPad for a while, I liked the default Notes application, but hated that there was no cloud storage or synchronization. (No, the crappy Gmail sync doesn't count) Then I heard about EverNote . I thought that was the answer to my prayers, but unfortunately those guys decided  to add every conceivable feature in the universe and have ended up with a bloated mess that takes an hour and a half to load. There's a bunch of others I've tried too, like UberNote , Springpad , and the Diigo mishmash of apps. But nothing was small enough, or simple enough for my taste. So I did what any good developer does. I created a "learning" project to scratch my own itch. I used technology I've discussed at the...

In Gmail, it's really easy to see how long it's been since you emailed someone, because it displays it right in the interface: Lately I've noticed something very strange. Most people seem to respond: Within 24hrs Exactly 3 days later Exactly 7 days later Or never Has anyone else noticed a similar pattern? I wonder if it has anything to do with how people manage (or mis-manage) their Inbox. How long do you usually take to respond to emails?

It may sound strange, but whenever I receive a business lead from my website, one of the first "qualifiers" I look at is the email address . Over 7 years and hundreds of leads (most of them useless), I've discovered that an email address can say a lot about someone. Even before reading the project description or budget , I look very carefully at the email address.  From there, my qualifying process is a bit like this: 1. Is it a company address or free email service? If it is a company address , that's positive.  I use the domain name to go to their website and try to determine: a) How long they've been in business b) Their relative size c) Any affiliations with larger companies/organizations 2. If it is a free email address , it is usually one of the following: Great: Gmail: This is what most technical people use, and it is by far the best. Ok: Yahoo Mail: This was a great service back in the 90s, but has since declined.  This might indica...

Click above for more pictures We've arrived on the small, tropical island of Koh Phangan, Thailand. After a few days, my initial impression is very positive. The Thai people are very polite and clean. Shoes need to be taken off before entering any building. Prices are cheap, but not massively cheap. Our small furnished house, with air conditioning in the bedroom, a living room, a kitchen with gas range, and hot water shower, cost 15,000 baht (about $500) for a month, plus about another 3,000 baht ($100) for water, electricity, and ADSL internet that is probably better than an average Bell connection. A load of laundry can be sent for washing, drying, and folding for 120 baht ($4). That's cheaper than when we did it ourselves at the hostel in Australia. Western (imported) products cost nearly as much as back home. Food-wise, you can get cheaper stuff when it only has Thai writing -- if you can figure out what it is. A 1.5L bottle of drinking water costs 15 baht (...

I recently watched an enlightening documentary called " We Live In Public ". It made me completely rethink   my previous notions about online privacy . I'd like to believe that we can all be adults about things, and accept people's differences, but I could be wrong. The  1999 "Quiet" experiment documented in this movie almost seems like a visionary warning to "future us", a decade later. Although some may think that people can live together in truth and harmony , it didn't seem to work in this particular setting. How does this relate to the online world? Well, for one, having your opinions and interests public certainly makes you think a bit more about what you post. For example, I "like" the television show Weeds  on my Facebook profile.  Does that mean I support the legalization of marijuana, or simply that I enjoy the show? (It's a hilarious dramedy , by they way -- highly recommended) Different people could...

Lots of milestones lately. Almost missed this one! It's been about a year since I unveiled my georeferenced online classified site, BuyMyStuff.com . It's funny. The first thing people always say to me when I explain the site is, "Looks nice, but doesn't Craigslist already own that space?" Despite what some may think, I did perform a bit of research on my competition prior to launch -- although not a whole lot :) What I found was actually quite interesting. Although Craigslist dominates online classifieds in the United States, a site called Kijiji has most of the Canadian market. Since then, I've learned that the international classifieds site market is extremely fragmented . It's difficult to get exact numbers, but using Google and Compete, you can get a rough idea of market leaders. For example, here's the top classifieds sites in Australia:  http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tradingpost.com.au+gumtree.com.au+ozfreeonline.com/ After lo...

Back in 2007, I wrote about the most popular web languages and frameworks . It seemed about time to do a quick update. Here are the current standings in my super non-scientific Google popularity contest: PHP: 7.5 billion results (154% increase ) ASP.NET: 158 million results (84% increase ) Ruby: 81.6 million results (19% decrease ) Python: 47.6 million results (not measured last time) As for frameworks: Symfony: 12.9 million results (180% increase ) CakePHP: 8.8 million results (83% increase ) Ruby on Rails: 7.8 million results (44% increase ) I'd like to add a few more numbers, however. The trend is moving towards browser-based programming using Javascript, so have a look at these interesting searches: Javascript: 561 million results YUI: 18.4 million results jQuery: 16.8 million results HTML5: 9.1 million results So based on these numbers, one might conclude: PHP and ASP.NET are going strong Ruby may have lost its luster, and Python is still a bi...

I was a bit annoyed today reading through a few of the comments on this article in the Globe and Mail today. Every time there is a debate about copyright law , there are always a slew of comments like the following: "I walk into HMV and try and pocket a CD, DVD or game chances are I will be arrested and charged. Tell me how is it any different than doing the EXACT same thing while sitting at home in front of my computer."  Ok. I'm going to tell you exactly how it is different . This is such a moronic argument, and it's just not amusing anymore, because people are starting to believe it. So here it is quite simply. If you steal something, in the physical world, the original owner suffers a true and physical loss .  They no longer have the thing you took. On the other hand, if you make a copy of something, in the digital world, nothing is lost.  In fact, there has been a net gain ! In the digital world, you can literally create something of value (co...

Ahh, the fresh smell of spring.  Time to get rid of the old and bring in the new. Inevitably when you start spring cleaning , you end up with a bunch of things you've acquired over the years that you don't really need anymore. When I found myself with a large number of things to sell last year, I did my best advertising everything on Kijiji . I sold most things in the end, but it was a real pain updating and managing the individual ads, marking things off after they were sold. It was also a bit annoying that the site was plastered in multiple flashing banner ads and sponsored links trickily designed to look like regular listings. So I did what any self-respecting computer geek would do, and built my own solution to the problem -- BuyMyStuff.com . To be clear, it is not the best place to sell a car.  It is also not the place to look for a home or apartment.  Don't go there expecting to find personal ads or job listings, either. It is not at all ...

2010-08-08 Update: Perhaps online privacy is important after all? The recent Google Buzz fallout has me confused. Why does everyone get so bent out of shape about public privacy ? Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big advocate of personal privacy .  People should be able to do whatever they want in their homes, behind closed doors  without being harassed -- as long as it's legal, of course :) Your online activities, however, are by default not really that private .  Maybe people just don't understand this. Even if you're using a brower's "privacy mode", anonymous proxies, etc., you're still leaving a digital trail behind you. Clearly things like credit card numbers , social security numbers, health information, etc. need to be protected, and that's what strong encryption and privacy laws are for. Likewise, it should be illegal for unauthorized snooping -- key loggers, spyware, etc. are like phone wiretaps and should be treated sim...

Has technology improved your relationship? Some people think that technology has hindered personal relationships, but I'd argue that its helped in some cases. My girlfriend and I use technology constantly to help us stay connected . In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I've put together a few examples that might be of use to other couples. 1. Google Calendar One of the great things about Google Calendar is that it lets you combine several different calendars into one handy view. Along with our own personal calendars, which we can make visible to each other, we have a shared calendar that we can both add to and edit. Have you ever been asked, "So are you ready for that dinner we have in half an hour?"  And have you ever responded, "Dinner? What dinner? You never told me about any dinner!" We've all been in this situation.  With a shared calendar, moments like this are a thing of the past. 2. Google Docs This is basically like hav...

What did we do before the Internet? For all the spam, scams, and general junk out there, it still amazes me what you can do via the net. Moving half-way around the world is all of the sudden less daunting when you browse for house rentals as if you were there. Google Maps Street View (not yet available in Canada) also lets you zoom in and basically take a walk around the neighborhood to see what it's like. You have to admit -- the Internet is pretty cool sometimes.