Several years ago, when Heroku was young and fresh, I had a question about their service. The only way to ask them a question was to create an account and file a support ticket, so that’s what I did. Some time passed and then suddenly I started receiving monthly Heroku newsletters. While I don’t recall there even being such a checkbox when I signed up, I am always fastidious about not opting in to receive such junk, even with fiendish “By not unchecking this box, you agree to not unsubscribe from our crap” phrasing, but nevertheless I find myself enrolled in their newsletter.

I have been ignoring the newsletter because unsubscribing is usually more trouble than it’s worth and my spam filter knows exactly where to put it. Eventually, somebody (or something) at Heroku caught on and a month ago I received this email:

“You are receiving this email because we do not have a current subscriber status on you for Heroku emails.“

You’d think no status would imply no newsletter, right? That email was followed an hour later by the January newsletter. The status email itself continued,

“If you would rather not opt-in to receive Heroku emails, you do not need to take any action. We will automatically change your status to opted-out within the next 30 days.“

Today I received the February newsletter.

Today I received the March newsletter. Looks like Heroku has decided to change my status to opt-in instead. Thanks.

Despite my reservations about two factor auth, I decided to try implementing it. Don’t knock it til you’ve done it, right? I’ve previously played with Duo Security’s login_duo, and they have a nicely polished mobile app, but the command line tool doesn’t quite feel integrated with the rest of the system (it’s user opt-in, not admin mandated). Plus, it’s more fun to build your own. For this experiment, I picked Pushover as factor number two, which also comes with a nice app which can be used for other things as well. Now we just need some code to talk to Pushover.

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A more difficult challenge than Inbox Zero, but after years of effort I’ve finally achieved it. Facebook Zero. I now know everything my friends have ever done. There is nothing left to read about.

Despite their wonky customer service, I have generally been happy with Comcast’s technical service. Occasionally though, I have to question what in the world is going on with their network. Recently I noticed that my internet connection would alternate between working and not on roughly a two minute interval. One minute things work fine, the next minute nothing works at all, the next minute everything is fine. During the blackout minutes, making a new connection would timeout, but established ssh connections would remain up, but nothing would happen until the blackout was over. Here are a few pings I sent out (2014-02-13).

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The February 17th 2014 issue of Time magazine, with the Infinity Machine on the cover.

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I was reviewing the flak logs the other day (chasing an unrelated issue) when I noticed lots of requests with additional parameters, like utm_campaign=twitter. Huh? I’m not running any campaigns. GTFO.

I find these tracker tags in URLs annoying when other sites do it. It’s not the tracking that bothers me, but the fact that the URLs end up being long and ugly, and it means there’s several URLs for the same content. I much prefer canonical URLS. Different tracking URLs break duplicate detection on various link sharing sites, and trick the browser’s history feature. Boo.

Of course, it’s your site, you do what you want, but this is my site, so don’t dick with my URLs. To that end, flak now filters out extraneous parameters by driving you through a bounce screen. Hopefully this prevents the further sharing and posting of the infected URLs.

Try it out.

I usually check the weather using the builtin default app on my iPhone. It works well enough to tell me the important things, like hot or cold, raining or not raining, with a minimum of fuss. Sometimes I check the weather on my desktop, for which I’ve recently been using the forecast.io website. It has a clean design jarring distractions, people on the web tubes say it’s cool, and best of all, they’re based in the Indian Ocean.

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Everything I wish I knew before installing the newly renamed armv7 port on a BeagleBone Black.

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Do you miss the good old days? So does the Feb 1 The Atlantic.

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Get excited, the Super Bowl is coming, which means Super Bowl Squares are coming! It’s time to start thinking about the value of each cell in the square. You can let players pick cells, but it’s more fun to randomly assign them. That still allows trading cell for the skill player, but doesn’t leave a hobbled 2-2 cell lying around for some sucker to pick. Either way, it’s good to know the expected value of each cell.

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