Latest Stories

  • R

    Resources for learning about Integral Theory/Spiral Dynamics/Metamodernism

    Over the last couple of years, I have read many books and sat through many videos on  Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, and Metamodernism so that you don't have to. Below are my best recommendations for further investigation, with some notes and cautions. Note:  Many of the r…

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  • R

    RSI Supplements

    There was a time when I was incredibly skeptical of what one might call “alternative medicine”, including herbal supplements, massage therapy, acupuncture,and anything else not prescribed by a doctor. However, I have come to appreciate that medical science doesn’t have all the answers. In my …

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  • T

    Tax benefits for entrepreneurs willing to move to Puerto Rico

    A few years ago, in order to encourage investment in Puerto Rico, the legislative assembly passed Act 20 and Act 22. Act 20 provides tax benefits for founding a Puerto Rico company, Act 22 offers tax benefits for entrepreneurs and investors willing to move to Puerto Rico. This post will cover the d…

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  • A

    A guide to Section 1202 tax benefits for entrepreneurs

    UPDATE – In the Omnibus appropriations bill of 2015, Congress made this provision permanent and retroactive to the beginning of 2015. I’m writing this post because in my nine years of being in the startup world, I have never met an entrepreneur who had ever heard of section 1202 or sec…

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  • M

    Modifying pg_backup to include a latest directory

    I wanted to use this script to back up my database, but I needed a directory that would always have the latest version in it. I added/modified the following lines in the script: LATEST_BACKUP_DIR=$BACKUP_DIR"latest/" rm $LATEST_BACKUP_DIR"$DATABASE".sql.gz cp $FINAL_BACKUP_DIR"$DATABASE".…

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  • R

    Really hairy problem with (seemingly) random CRLF and spaces inserted in emails

    Troubleshooting I isolated the process into three components: the email builder (my code), the mailer application, and the sending application (in this case, smtp through postfix). I followed the below process to troubleshoot: Changed the mailer application to use the built in PHP mail() fun…

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  • H

    How to configure your web application to correctly deal with character set/encoding issues

    Background I'll just link to the best places i've found to read up on the background. Read these first if you want to understand whats going on: Excellent intro to character encodings Joel On Software, on Unicode The Details In order to get your website working harmoniously with …

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  • B

    Books on User Experience and User Interface Design

    Having spent the majority of 2011 in intense self-study to finish my transition from developer/project manager to UX engineer, I thought it would be useful for others out there to share my reading list and some brief thoughts. Steve Krug- Don’t make me think The best book for a quick introd…

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  • U

    Usability lessons from neuroscience

    I have just finished a wonderful book, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, which ostensibly is about the origins and the neural underpinnings of the human ability to read. Dehaene not only takes on the conventional wisdom that reading is a sequential, letter by letter process, but…

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  • M

    More ModRewrite - Using a dbm file instead of a txt file

    The most confusing thing is when you use the perl script on the official apache site here it's written for the NDBM format (which isn't available on my box). Here's the perl script: #!/path/to/bin/perl ## ## txt2dbm -- convert txt map to dbm format ## use NDBM_File; use Fcntl; …

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