http://briansamson.com/b thoughts from brian samson Fri, 28 May 2010 15:00:02 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The iPhone is a great, magical, revolutionary device. I owned first-gen one for 2 years and loved everything about it (except AT&T). I think it's great how many apps are out, and how much emphasis the platform has put on software development in general. Without the iPhone ... http://briansamson.com/b/2010/the-iphone-is-not-facebook/ I'm sitting here trying to debug a very complex piece of "meta" code. This code generates web forms that have fields that automatically show/hide based on the selections in other fields. It's usually very nice to work in, and it makes creating dynamic forms easy, but it is ... http://briansamson.com/b/2010/the-worst-comment-ive-ever-written/ We recently switched to using Mercurial hosted at Joel Spolsky's Kiln. So far I love it. I think distributed source control is the way of the future and I'm all for it. Anyway, Kiln provides a number of useful Mercurial plugins, one of which is called ... http://briansamson.com/b/2010/kilns-kilnauthpy-crashes-under-python-24/ Tonight we didn't feel like going to the store so I thought I'd play a little Survivor: Kitchen. I found a chicken breast in the freezer, so I let it defrost in some teriaki/peanut oil/salt/peper and then sauted it with onion, red and green peppers, and an orange. ... http://briansamson.com/b/2010/survivor-kitchen-orange-chicken/ Bruce Schneier pointed out a couple of interesting posts about national security today, specifically about how politicians (Bush and Obama) exaggerate the threat of terror for their political ends (duh). The first one, at Tom Englehart's blog, is a very good read. Obviously, the risk of being killed ... http://briansamson.com/b/2010/national-security-fud-and-the-media/ My wife is taking an online class that has a requirement that she make some number of forum posts on their blackboard. This is not uncommon for online classes to encourage participation. The ridiculous part is that she is required, at the end of her post, she needs ... http://briansamson.com/b/2009/word-count-in-your-browser/ Either that or programmers are lazy. I've been working on an App at work that requires internationaliztion, and until you get used to doing it, its very easy to let strings just leak through. I just installed Google Chrome, and right there on the first prefs page is ... http://briansamson.com/b/2009/internationalization-is-hard/ I cancelled my AT&T/iPhone account last month on the 15th (1 day after my 2 year contract was up) and switched to T-mobile. During the phone number porting process, T-mobile told me I didn't need to do anything to cancel my old AT&T account, which is true and worked ... http://briansamson.com/b/2009/leaving-att-wireless-make-sure-you-call-them-first/ I play fantasy football on yahoo. For the last few weeks they've been hassling me to enter "security questions" so I could reset my password if I forgot it. I already have an alternate e-mail address registered with them in case I forget the same password I've been ... http://briansamson.com/b/2009/yahoo-learns-nothing-enforces-security-questions/ I've blogged before about how horrible the AT&T service on my iPhone is, and how unrepentent they seem to be. Well JD Power has a press release out today, optimistically titled Overall, Wireless Carriers Reduce Dropped Calls, Failed Connections and Static, Driving an Improvement in Call Quality Performance. ... http://briansamson.com/b/2009/atts-nework-ranked-last-in-two-thirds-of-us/