December 2012
1 post
A better way to describe RESTful architectures:... →
November 2012
4 posts
Restful Authentication: Tokens or Cookies
What’s the best way to authenticate clients for RESTful web services?
The clients may be AJAX (or single page web applications) running in the web browser or other machine-services.
Cookies
Cookies are easy to use for both native browser-based applications (HTML forms) as well as AJAXy applications.
A simple design might be:
POST /session creates an authenticated session and...
Jeff Bezos and the Story of Amazon →
Why Myers and DJs' Online Plans Won't Work →
Basically, consumers in the US have a “very strong catalogue culture” whereas customers of large retail stores like Myers and David Jones just walk in to browse.
June 2012
1 post
Perfect Dev Environment for Building Single Page...
jQuery (+ mobile), Backbone.js, Coffeescript and HAML-Coffee.
I started building a single-page mobile web app side-project on the weekend (hopefully I’ll release it in the coming weeks). I spent a couple of hours creating the perfect development environment - its definitely share-worthy so here it is.
Node.js + Express
Node and Express provide the basic compilation architecture....
April 2012
4 posts
Using an Auskey on Mac OS X Lion
If you’re using an Auskey and you upgraded to OS X Lion you may find that you can no longer login to the ATO Business Portal.
The fix is very simple:
Open Java Preferences (search for it using Spotlight by pressing Apple-Space and typing it in).
Check the ‘Enable applet plug-in and Web Start applications’
Restart Safari.
You’re Auskey will now work again.
Keeping Today Clean
Never have a list of things you have to get done ‘today’ that lasts longer than ‘today’.
I use Things to store and plan tasks that I need to get done. When I first started using it, I would stack up my ‘Today’ list with aspirations - things which I thought I might be able to get done today. Then I would come back the next day. And they would still be there....
Different Reasons for Concurrency and Solutions on... →
Really interesting slide set on managing state on the JVM and the different problems we try and solve with shared state.
A Better Website Editing Workflow: Word to...
For the SULS website, most people prefer to submit content in Word format (docx or doc). This presents a slight problem since the website uses Markdown for content.
The solutions:
manually convert the word files to markdown (extremely tedious and spirit crushing);
teach everyone how to use markdown;
automatically convert the word files to markdown.
The second option seems reasonable, until...
March 2012
6 posts
Apps are Better aka Why Windows 8 Might Just Work. →
Take almost anything – news, weather, stocks, social services like Facebook – you name it. PC users have to interact with these things via the web, reducing their super-powerful PC to a dumb terminal. But mobile device users get rich, smooth apps that are a lot more fun to use.
Why is using Flipboard or the SMH App on an iPad better than the experience on my laptop?
Hint: it’s not...
Never Negotiate Piecemeal. →
“Mark, you need to stop negotiating point-by-point.
Our goal here isn’t to have a negotiation line-by-line. We want to know what all of their issues are first. You’re compromising on each point and that makes no sense.
Let’s get all of their issues on the table. Let’s then convene privately and rank the issues we care about and which we don’t.
Let’s be very flexible on the issues...
How to be Relentlessly Resourceful [A Practical... →
Step 1: Learn enough to get clue
Step 2: Actually take action
Step 3: Repeat until you succeed
Give it five minutes. →
it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.
Being first doesn’t mean being right. Take time with your...
Make the decisions you take the ones that actually... →
To nearly every question, I would answer with “sounds good, let’s do it”.
We are bombarded with hundreds of decisions each day: most of which will have little effect on lives - even if they do - the effects were probably not predictable at the time the decision was made.
The fact is, I didn’t decide at all. I just happen to default to “sure, that sounds good” for those questions.
...
Earbits: Marketing done right. →
Sent an email out (with a fun title) asking customers to install Earbits for Chrome. Interesting that weren’t trying to sell to the customer (by proffering the benefits of the extension) but instead asked because tehy wanted to get to the top of the Chrome Web Apps Store.
Apparently it worked. I have a feeling it had something to do with the playful tone in the email.
Hey Joey,
We...
February 2012
2 posts
Statically Generating the new SULS Website.
I’m the IT Officer for the Sydney University Law Society (SULS) and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks updating our website from a Drupal based system to a statically generated Nanoc based system.
I built the old website by heavily customizing Drupal. The main shortcomings of this approach were:
difficult to develop and test new features: most new development had to occur on the...
2 hour side-project to 2 million visitors →
Gramfeed is a side-project turned startup that grew quite successfully with the rise of Instagram.
At launch it was just a website to view popular photos, search photos, view user photos and view user feed.
Most of the features and UI changes were implemented based on user feedback … Obviously watch for any product mentions on twitter and engage with users.
Getting Mentioned.
...
October 2011
2 posts
Startup Pitching Advice
On Tuesday I attended the University of New South Wales Startup Pitch Event. There were some great ideas - but they just weren’t expressed right. Here are a couple of things I took away from the pitching.
1. Make me feel the problem.
Mathspace is using the internet to make learning math easier. They listed a few problems (ie. manual marking is time consuming for teachers) at the start of...
Walled Gardens.
iPhone applications cannot talk to each other. As lonely as they get, it’s worse for usability. After reading The App Wall, I’ve realized that the current siloed approach, where no application can communicate with another, to iOS applications is flawed. I have to go to a different application to access data that is semantically the same but provided by a different vendor.
iOS...
April 2011
1 post
Permanence and Formality.
Computers are too formal - and anything on them is too permanent. Yesterday I was speaking to a Dell Support Technician and had to write down my case number. I scribbled it down in my paper notebook. I use a whiteboard as my ‘todo’ list. I keep track of my day in a diary. This is despite the fact that I have purchased/tried to use many applications to serve these...
March 2011
1 post
Passion.
Before Benjamin Zander’s TED Talk I used to think classical music was boring: no one I know listens to it; it’s stuck in the past; and it doesn’t connect with me emotionally.
Zander makes classical music interesting - if you haven’t, watch the video below. Quora’s community voted it as the second most must-see talk, with about 2,000 people liking it. Supported...
February 2011
1 post
Give the Send Button Accountability
Have you ever sent an email asking for something? Did you forget since they never responded? I lent a book to a friend a long time ago. I sent them an email when I remembered it. They never returned my email and I soon forgot about the book.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could attach labels to your emails when you send them? I could have labelled it with ‘reminder’ so I could...
January 2011
1 post
