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. Today I discovered it has a built in auto-updater. Every now and then, it checks …
HOWTO setup multistage deployment with Capistrano
These instructions are outdated. They were written for Capistrano 2.x. As of March 2016, Capistrano 3.x is current. 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 …
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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 of a built-in Help Viewer), Adobe Application Manager and CS5ServiceManager. Many of these strike me …
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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 update the Akismet plugin at the same time? (WordPress releases independently of Akimset, and their …
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 ($100), Heredis ($70), MacFamilyTree ($50) and GEDitCOM II ($65). These are varying degrees of nice, …
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 wasn’t one of my plugins or gems — it was i18n itself. Upgrading from 0.4.1 …