Stuff Yaron Finds Interesting – Page 5 – Technology, Politics, Food, Finance, etc.

Picking a backlog manager for Thali

I evaluate below a bunch of backlog managers. I picked them based on what looked interesting. Not an ideal methodology but there are so many of these I had to narrow it down. The one that did everything I wanted was YouTRACK by IntelliJ, even the pricing was outstanding. But I rejected that option (for now anyway) because their UX is just too confusing for me. I actually had settled on Flying Donut and started to use them but I quickly realized that they were too simplistic. They didn’t do a good job of allowing me to manage iterations, epics and releases separately. So Tim Park had mentioned he had used Pivotal Tracker at his previous company and I tried them out. They aren’t perfect and their beta has some bugs but they had a really great balance between simplicity and flexibility. So hop on over to our new tracker and see how we are using them!

Where to stash emergency cash?

In this article I explore the options for places to stick my emergency cash. This is cash I need in case things go ’bad’ for us. So my primary concern is safety. Below I walk through the options and discuss how I handled things. Since I am not a financial expert and don’t play one on T.V. your mileage may vary.

[Original - 11/27/2011, Updated - 9/3/2014 to add Floating Rate Notes]

But I don’t want to be a jerk! – Software development and Foo camp

One of the sessions I went to at Foo camp was about being a jerk. It seems we in software development land have a real habit of being jerks to each other and to our customers. The question the session discussed was - does it have to be so? I think the answer is actually, given how we run companies, probably. So let’s change things!

Thali and Foo Camp – Silicon Valley doesn’t like it, but the rest of the world will

Thanks to the outrageous lies that Jon Udell told about me to Tim O’Reilly and Sara Winge I managed to get invited to Foo Camp this year. I had a chance to talk to a bunch of people about Thali. What I learned is that Thali doesn’t fit the Silicon Valley model and that’s just fine.

Zooko’s triangle – I don’t think it’s solved in the real world

Zooko’s triangle proposes that a global naming system can be human meaningful, distributed or impersonation proof - pick 2. Below I look at Pet Names, the traditional way of handling Zooko’s triangle. Then I look at proposals that claim to actually solve Zooko’s triangle and show several attacks that these systems don’t appear to solve and so argue that Zooko’s triangle still stands.

Why Google’s support of PGP Mail might not be such a brilliant idea – Or, why I don’t like digital signatures for social networking and how Thali addresses this

Google announced that they may (the code is not officially supported yet) support PGP Mail in GMail. This might seem like an unabashed win for user privacy since it would make it impossible for Google to read their user’s mail. This article points out a number of problems with Google’s actions (I still think Google should be commended for doing this work) but I’d like to focus on a different issue than covered in the article - why digital signatures are a bad idea in general for social networking/email and how Thali deals with this problem.

Sygic Sucks (and so does Google)

In this article I explain the multiple issues I've had with Sygic that make me strongly recommend that people avoid it if at all possible. I actually wanted to post this as a review on Google's app store but you can't do that if you don't have a Google+ account. Apparently having a Google App store account with both a credit card and mobile phone associated with it isn't good enough. Well screw that! So I'm posting my review here.

Investigating Java on iOS

Investigated how well Java runs on iOS. The answer is - it runs. But it seems like there are issues. I enumerate them below.

11/5/2013 – General and Special Election, Seattle, King County, Washington State

It’s voting time again. As I have explained previously I don’t vote for Republicans or Democrats, including those running for nonpartisan offices (with the exception of Jim McDermott). I did loosen the rule a little for the school board. The good news is that there are some really juicy things to vote for! On the position side there is 522 to label genetically modified foods, Kshama Sawant for Seattle City Council, Sue Peters for Seattle School District and Seattle Proposition No. 1 to give us public campaign financing! There are even good things to vote no for like Initiative No. 517 (the Tim Eyman employment act) and Seattle Charter Amendment 19 (the Gerrymandering act).

Making HTML5 peer to peer web friendly

HTML5 is built on the assumption of a client/server web. Below I walk through the issues this raises for the peer to peer web. The good news is that we really don’t need terribly many changes to HTML5 to make it peer to peer friendly. Basically we need a new same origin policy that is based on certs rather than hosts, a way to handle mutual auth requests, standardized support for node.js (or equivalent) and a few other minor things.