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csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Bus factor

This came up in a meeting the other day where I asked someone to define technical debt. I instantly remembered the first company I worked for calling it 'being hit by the baby bus'. They were combining the concept of the 'bus factor' with the fact that 2 of the senior people on the project (out of 6 of us total) had babies within months of one another.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies

At my first job, 6 of us (all programmers) sat around a large conference table. If I had a question about the code, I peaked over my laptop's screen, someone else noticed and asked "What's up?" It was great for that quick collaboration, but it also exposed us to every annoyance possible. There was a guy who burped a lot and liked to sing show tunes. The guy next to me bought me earbud-style headphones because the cheap ones I was using leaked out a lot of sound. We also needed an always-be-working atmosphere to prevent a conversation unrelated to work from taking more than 5 minutes.

I've had my own office for the last 3 years and enjoy the privacy, but occasionally miss the instant answers and social aspects of that open plan.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Burnout

This is beautiful. I feel like it describes past, present, and future me and gives me hope and some nice guidelines.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Amazon Prime To Cost $99 A Year

Is it? I'd rather they split this into 2 plans and let me have just the fast shipping for $79 (or less) and people who want streaming can pay $99.

Netflix still has the better offering IMO. Not only content, but the video interface is better too. Initially Amazon's video player worked on Linux out of the box, but now it's just as hacky to get running as Netflix.

Due to this price increase, I'm going to reevaluate how important fast shipping is to me.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Where should I start learning Assembly?

For MIPS (recommended for starting out), check out my post. It walks you through creating the initial program in C all the way through finding its vulnerability and exploiting it. The buffer overflow building is done in Python through Bowcaster. http://csmatt.com/notes/?p=96 (also check out the links at the end). Good luck!

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Foursquare Raises $35M More, Says It Has 45M Registered Users

I'm 27 and killed my LinkedIn account because 1) I just don't find them to be a company that is concerned with user privacy and 2) I have not once seen a benefit to being on it.

I think it probably depends on your industry. I'm a programmer, so maybe if you're a finance major it's more useful.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: A Full-Featured, $38 Tablet Is Coming to the U.S.

I think the android project is starting to move toward optimizing for lower performing devices in an effort to get the OS in more hands. If that's the case, it may make a usable $38 tablet more feasible.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Google now lets you create your own Street View maps

Maybe Apple will have one for their maps soon? Google isn't crapping on anyone. This is brand new and they're not going to be able to support everyone, especially those in an ecosystem they don't control, right off the bat.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Popular Flashlight App has been secretly sharing your location

I would love that for Android. I miss the Cyanogenmod ROMs for Gingerbread where you could toggle which requested permissions YOU allowed an app to have.

Also, I've been saying it for a long time, but icons colored according to their security risk would be better than just names with descriptions. We have to make security more convenient.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: The $179 Moto G hits the US early

Both my parents were on virgin mobile and my mom couldn't stand it. Dropped calls, text messages that were never received, and there were a lot of dead zones. I switched my plan on t-mobile to a family plan and brought them on. They've been really happy with it so far.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Terminal Cornucopia

Is delivery to the stores and restaurants after the TSA related and our enforced?

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: A social safety net for entrepreneurs

Living in the U.S. and having gone through the effort of attempting to create a startup, programs, money, mentorships, etc. are out there, but you have to have a real drive and be able to brush off rejection. I don't think the process should be free of negative consequence and adversity. Both help weed out the people who won't be able to handle the more important challenges.

csmatt | 12 years ago | on: Run Windows 1.01 in your browser

As someone who really enjoys the history of computing, this is awesome! I don't think I've ever had a chance to play with Win 1 and probably wouldn't have gone through the trouble of getting it running myself. This and others like it would be neat for the Computer History Museum to have on its site.
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