Category Archives: tech

TurboVote at Harvard and Personal Democracy Forum

On May 24, Seth Flaxman and I told the story of TurboVote Berkman Center for Internet & Society: Yesterday, we talked TurboVote at Personal Democracy Forum:

Mind WIND Mobile stick phones home

I recently purchased a new internet stick from WIND. It’s a Huawei E1691. In addition to improving the device hardware, they also replaced the software. Instead of a slow Java monstrosity, it’s now a Windows XP-clone written in QT. Ugh. … Continue reading

HOWTO setup multistage deployment with Capistrano

When I wrote about deploying PHP sites with Capistrano, step 6 was a bit of a throwaway — hey, here's a quick hack for handling multistage deployment. I'd been using variants of that technique for quite some time but figured … Continue reading

Dear Adobe: please don’t crash while logging

I recently upgraded my copy of Creative Suite to CS5. When you install CS5 Design Premium, you don’t just get Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and the like. You also get a ton of other bits, like Adobe Help (despite the existence … Continue reading

WordPress batch upgrade

If you run a web server and have multiple installations of WordPress, upgrading them all is a pain. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update a dozen WP installs at once? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could … Continue reading

GenerationX updated for Snow Leopard

When you work on your family tree — or genealogy project — you’ll work with GEDCOM files. Sites like Geni and ancestry.com can export (and sometimes) import these files. There are a few Mac programs for editing GEDCOM files: Reunion … Continue reading

HP’s Epic DFS fail

In hardware engineering lingo, DFS is “design for serviceability.”

How to solve the “undefined method `deep_symbolize_keys’ for nil:NilClass” error in Rails

I was trying to migrate a table in my Rails app and got this error: undefined method `deep_symbolize_keys’ for nil:NilClass It’s a strange error, and there weren’t very many hits on Google. A lighthouse ticket provided a clue. The problem … Continue reading

The FCC just sold you out

Fixing the mysterious “Element script is missing required attribute src” error

Suppose you're using the W3C validator to validate HTML5. Here's a sample document: <!doctype html> <html lang="en" xml:lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>Hello</title> <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"> //<![CDATA[ var foo = 1; //]]> </script> </head> <body> </body> </html> Everything looks right, … Continue reading