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 ...

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...

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...

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"....

SELECT AddGeometryColumn('public', 'table','column', 4269, 'POINT', 2) This will add a new column to the table and add an entry to the metadata table (the 4269 specifies my reference system, more on that below). It will also add a column to "table" and several constraint checks on the new co...

Step 2 - Construct the query Yahoo offers a REST interface to handle the conversion so we can use either a plain HTTP GET request, or if you want to do it inside of a script that is doing many other things you can use CURL, a set of very useful functions for querying and "scraping" web pages and ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...