“Everything is amazing and nobody is happy” is a sentiment expressed by Louis CK and explained fairly well in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. Similarly, we are in the most usable time of technology and human ability ever. Access to information and functionality has never been more available to more people at any time in history than now.
Trust in Computing - Apple and "freedom from..."
25 November 2020
Introducting Atlanta's Best Sidewalks
31 August 2017
I’m sure many of frequent pedestrians in Atlanta have experienced the absurdities of the sidewalk conditions in the city. From just your basic “sidewalkus interruptus” to “sidewalk closed, use other side” on both sides of the street to just a big muddy hole you have to walk in, we have all been victims of the cruel joke of Atlanta’s best sidewalks.
Why people hate Comcast
22 February 2016
People love to hate their ISP/Television/Telecom providers, even more than their health insurers somtimes. Why the ire? Why do companies that provide what most people think of as an added-value service seem to hold so much emotional power over them? There seem to be many answers: high prices, missed appointments, service outages, bad support, pushy sales, and monopoly tactics. None of those could account for the absolute contempt that people have for their ISPs.
Atlanta urbanism: A tale of public space hostility
17 February 2016
There’s been a lot of discussion of public transit and urbanism in Atlanta recently. I wanted to touch on some observations I’ve made recently about public space.
Encryption is a lock on digital doors
15 December 2015
Another day, another politician saying that law enforcement needs the ability to define mathematics: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/carly-fiorina-encryption-backdoors-crypto-wars-2016/… not that I’m saying that Fiorina would make a bad president or a bad tech company CEO (she most certainly would and has). Plenty of other politicians, actually most of them, have made some kind of statement saying that we need TSA locks on every digital door.
Great breakdown on the past 4 years of my life
01 October 2015
It's a Trust Issue, not Net Neutrality
09 February 2015
The FCC chairman has come out in support of Network Neutrality and it looks like they will start enforcing a modified Title II very soon: www.wired.com/2015/02/fcc-chairman-wheeler-net-neutrality. I think it’s good that the FCC is finally thinking about consumers, but I do have some concerns that the proposals don’t address the heart of the issue and can do us a different kind of harm.
HUGECITY Secret Sauce
31 May 2013
So I’ve decided to spill the beans on some of the cool things we do at HUGECITY to get all those delicious events and event recommendations to you. Here we go with part one of a series of tech showcases: HUGECITY Secret Sauce.
Why can't I use points for bugs in Scrum?
08 June 2012
We use Pivotal Tracker for our development management at HUGEcity. It’s an implementation of Scrum methodology which uses an estimated point system to track velocity to enable estimation of complete dates. In essence, “score how I did to predict how I’ll do.”
EmailBack.Us - A Need Fulfilled
04 January 2012
So a few weeks ago, when I was writing the home page for hugecity.us, I was really excited to be putting together an entire site with no back-end processing whatsoever. After writing a few Ruby on Rails apps recently it was nice to be able to fit a bunch of separate applications on the same small Rackspace instance.
Z-Index and Jittery Overflow Scrolling in Safari
05 October 2011
Here’s a little tech tip I just learned. I can usually find solutions to problems like this from a quick google search, but couldn’t find anything about this. Hopefully this will be indexed and the next person will not waste as much time as me:
Hashbangs? Really? Here's a functional alternative
26 September 2011
So yeah, twitter does it. If twitter started putting up unskippable flash ads, would you put them on your site? No? Of course not, because it’s a bad idea. URLs are supposed to represent an actual resource on the server that you’re asking for, even for your fancy one-page site. Yes it’s impossible to make HTML5 URLs work universally (seriously IE, still?), but that doesn’t mean that we need to break URLs for well behaved browsers.
Social Counts Two Night Project
15 September 2011
Announcing Social Counts: counts.callawaywilson.com
Thinking of AJAX Requests as a Secure Web Service
15 July 2011
It’s VERY easy to unintentionally create security holes using the asynchronous features of modern web browsers. Time was when the only holes in a web server were the HTTP request for a file and the occasional CGI script. Now, ajax requests can outnumber the normal page requests by a significant margin. We don’t always consider that these request are coming from the client space.