Ian Channing ianchanning

Spurred by recent events (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244700), this is a quick set of jotted-down thoughts about the state of "Semantic" Versioning, and why we should be fighting the good fight against it.

For a long time in the history of software, version numbers indicated the relative progress and change in a given piece of software. A major release (1.x.x) was major, a minor release (x.1.x) was minor, and a patch release was just a small patch. You could evaluate a given piece of software by name + version, and get a feeling for how far away version 2.0.1 was from version 2.8.0.

But Semantic Versioning (henceforth, SemVer), as specified at http://semver.org/, changes this to prioritize a mechanistic understanding of a codebase over a human one. Any "breaking" change to the software must be accompanied with a new major version number. It's alright for robots, but bad for us.

SemVer tries to compress a huge amount of information — the nature of the change, the percentage of users that wil

Operational PGP

This is a guide on how to email securely.

There are many guides on how to install and use PGP to encrypt email. This is not one of them. This is a guide on secure communication using email with PGP encryption. If you are not familiar with PGP, please read another guide first. If you are comfortable using PGP to encrypt and decrypt emails, this guide will raise your security to the next level.

#How I built an audio book reader for my nearly blind grandfather

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Last year, when visiting my family back home in Holland, I also stopped by my grand-parents. My grand-father, now 93 years old, had always been a very active man. However, during the presceding couple of months, he'd gone almost completely blind and now spent his days sitting in a chair. Trying to think of something for him to do, I suggested he try out audio books. After finally convincing him -- he said audio books were for sad old people -- that listening to a well performed recording is actually a wonderful experience, I realized the problem of this idea.

####The problem with audio devices and the newly blind. After my first impulse to jump up and go buy him an

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

Working with ansible-vault

I've been using a lot of Ansible lately and while almost everything has been great, finding a clean way to implement ansible-vault wasn't immediately apparent.

What I decided on was the following: put your secret information into a vars file, reference that vars file from your task, and encrypt the whole vars file using ansible-vault encrypt.

Let's use an example: You're writing an Ansible role and want to encrypt the spoiler for the movie Aliens.

PSQL

Magic words:

psql -U postgres

Some interesting flags (to see all, use -h or --help depending on your psql version):

-E: will describe the underlaying queries of the \ commands (cool for learning!)
-l: psql will list all databases and then exit (useful if the user you connect with doesn't has a default database, like at AWS RDS)

	var selector = 'img' // Replace this with the selector for the element you want to make transformable


	jQuery.getScript('//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.10.3/jquery-ui.min.js', function() {
	jQuery.getScript('//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/numeric/1.2.6/numeric.min.js', function() {

	(function() {
	var $, applyTransform, getTransform, makeTransformable;

	$ = jQuery;

	<html>
	<head>
	<title>Minimal River Reader</title>
	<script src="http://fargo.io/code/jquery-1.9.1.min.js"></script>
	</head>
	<body>
	<script>
	var theRiver;
	function onGetRiverStream (updatedFeeds) {
	theRiver = updatedFeeds;

	(*
	http://zoesmith.io
	Export Bookmarks from Evernote to Pinboard
	v1.4 12th September 2012

	This script takes selected notes in Evernote and sends an email for each to Pinboard, extracting each note's title, source URL and associated tags. The user should enter their Pinboard email address in the pinboardEmail property below, and can choose a default tag to add to each bookmark on import.

	This code is hacky, horrible and non-error checking (but it worked for me). Don't use on thousands of notes at a time, it'll go all crashy. Try selecting one test note first to see if it works for you.

	Change log: