Nathan Birrell nathanbirrell

Markdown cheatsheet

(Also see [remarkable][], the markdown parser created by the author of this cheatsheet)

The most important principle: Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake. Almost everything that can go wrong in a startup will go wrong, and one of the biggest things that can go wrong is huge, angry, shouting matches between the founders as to who worked harder, who owns more, whose idea was it anyway, etc. That is why I would always rather split a new company 50-50 with a friend than insist on owning 60% because "it was my idea," or because "I was more experienced" or anything else. Why? Because if I split the company 60-40, the company is going to fail when we argue ourselves to death. And if you ju

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

	#!/bin/sh
	#http://getpocket.com/import/instapaper
	set -x
	cat >> /tmp/import.html << "EOF"
	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html>
	<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
	<title>Instapaper: Export</title>
	</head>

	/*
	Given a date, tzAbbr returns a short, friendly name for the
	user's time zone on that date, or an empty string if their
	client's Intl support is missing or incomplete.

	For example, a user in New York might see:

	tzAbbr(new Date()) // => "EST"

	Time zones are locale-dependent. Users traveling outside of

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns:jdbc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc"
	xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"

	xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
	http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc/spring-jdbc-3.0.xsd
	http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd
	">

	mkdir demo
	cd demo
	wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.8.1.0/magento-1.8.1.0.tar.gz
	wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.6.1.0/magento-sample-data-1.6.1.0.tar.gz
	tar -zxvf magento-1.8.1.0.tar.gz
	tar -zxvf magento-sample-data-1.6.1.0.tar.gz
	mv magento-sample-data-1.6.1.0/media/* magento/media/
	mv magento-sample-data-1.6.1.0/magento_sample_data_for_1.6.1.0.sql magento/data.sql
	mv magento/* magento/.htaccess .
	chmod o+w var var/.htaccess app/etc

	// convert 0..255 R,G,B values to binary string
	RGBToBin = function(r,g,b){
	var bin = r << 16 \| g << 8 \| b;
	return (function(h){
	return new Array(25-h.length).join("0")+h
	})(bin.toString(2))
	}

	// convert 0..255 R,G,B values to a hexidecimal color string
	RGBToHex = function(r,g,b){

Nathan Birrell nathanbirrell

Markdown cheatsheet

Table of contents

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant