If you run any sort of text messaging service, you’ll have to process unsubscribe requests. The standard such messages is “STOP.” To make things easier for customers, in addition to “stop”, I wrote code that also looked for “unsubscribe”, “quit”, “cancel”, “end”, “delete” and anything beginning with the word “fuck.” (Messages merely containing the word fuck often wanted something …
Author Archives: paulschreiber
Book publishers, infused with aggrieved privilege
Clay Shirky’s essay on Amazon and the book industry is so full of great lines, it’s hard to pick just one. The fact that any bookseller ever “runs out” of a book is now ridiculous. In the twenty-first century, not being able to correctly stock or distribute a product whose main ingredient is information suggests …
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NYC 311 service request status bookmarklet
Easily check the status of your service request without going through the clunky website or fighting a CAPTCHA: NYC 311. This works best with a plugin like JSONView.
Bruce Schneier briefed congress on the NSA
I suggested that we hold this meeting in a SCIF, because they wanted me to talk about top secret documents that had not been made public. The problem is that I, as someone without a clearance, would not be allowed into the SCIF. So we had to have the meeting in a regular room. This …
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We edit because we care
[P]roofreading is the hallmark of caring. I cannot write an email or add a Facebook update without subjecting my words to tedious revision. If I send a story to a magazine with a missing period or uneven spacing, I feel as if I may as well have submitted a dirty pair of underwear. —Jessie Ren …
New political tech group
Check out parra bellum labs, the RNC’s new innovation group.
Making Flickr badges work with https
Following Eric’s instructions, I switched paulschreiber.com to https. I then had to get rid of the pesky mixed-content warnings. Most were pretty straightforward — I had a few JavaScript files and images that used absolute URLs and HTTP; I switched them to use HTTPS. However, my flickr badge presented a problem. (It’s bothering some other …
Doing creative work
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, …
How to take your bike on Amtrak
After biking to DC, I needed a way to get my bike back to New York. There were a few options: Ship it (FedEx Ground would be best) Take it with me on a bus Take it with me on a train Have someone drive it back Since I was already taking the train myself, …
Ellen Miller’s brilliant vision for open government
Let’s imagine in for a moment what it would be like if everything the government can share publicly were made public as it happened. If every law, report, inspection, regulation, enforcement action, budget and meeting that we should be aware of is actually made available online and in real time. It would be nothing short …
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