Category Archives: web

Speed matters

Performance is huge. We think of it as a feature. Speed is the best feature your product can have. Last year Google introduced these performance enhancements to Picasa to make flipping through photos faster, and the usage more than doubled. … Continue reading

Why I don’t like Salsa labs, reason #1

They don’t support Safari or Chrome: Here’s what goes wrong:

Handling Rails errors: custom error pages, logging, notification

I wanted to improve error handling In my Rails applications. Specifically, I wanted three things: a custom error page that matched the site's design the errors to appear in the error log (production.log) email notification of server errors Note: these … Continue reading

Facebook doesn’t understand Canada

When you update your Facebook account and link your interests and activities to the new community pages, Facebook automatically assigns a picture to represent each interest. Sometimes that doesn’t work very well:

Yelp hiding all reviews of Dr. David Shields

A week ago, I received this message from Yelp: Hi Paul, We’re writing to let you know about our decision to remove your review of Shields David S MD. Your review was flagged by the Yelp community, and our Yelp … Continue reading

Professor Larry Smith doesn’t understand the Internet

University of Waterloo economics professor Larry Smith doesn’t understand the Internet: This site is intended for the exclusive use of Larry Smith’s current and former students. Its use by other persons is expressly prohibited.

Another solution for WordPress’ “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

Many WordPress users have run in to the error “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” Sometimes, it is because you changed the table prefix and the solution is a database change. For other folks, it was … Continue reading

New AirPort base station?

The apple.com search engine seemed to have a spot of trouble with this one.

MAPLight’s awesome Money Near Votes tool

If you haven’t heard of MAPLight.org before, here’s what they do (which is fantastic): MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run … Continue reading

Hey Chase bank — 1995 called, they want their user agreement back

Buried in my Amazon Chase Visa “This E-Sign Disclosure and Consent” was this gem: Hardware and Software Requirements. In order to access, view, respond to, and retain electronic Communications that we make available to you, you must have: an Internet … Continue reading