Global Spin

Passwords bug me. Specifically, password management on most websites is maddening. Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing yours: List your password-format rules up front. All too often, sites ask for a password with no indication of their format rules, then scream “ERROR!” when you don’t guess correctly. Yell at your [...]

Posted by Chris in Technology on January 6th, 2012 | Comments Off

Yesterday I did something dumb, and I only realized it today because I don’t trust an easy success. Let’s see if you can spot the flaw in my reasoning: Background: A process (X) is run on a series of items in a queue. Items are added to the queue continuously, about 500 per hour. A [...]

Posted by Chris in Technology on September 16th, 2010 | Comments Off

You may have noticed how quiet Global Spin has become, yet again. With the rise of Twitter and Reader and Tumblr and other such thing-share-ers, our little community no longer has much reason to post their thoughts to a group blog. In response, I’m quitting! … checks notes Oh wait, that’s not it… shuffles papers [...]

Posted by Chris in Animals, Technology, Web 2.0 on April 30th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Starting today, I’m going to remove all my personal information from Facebook and “unfriend” everyone. I’m responding to a pair of status messages that appeared on my profile over the last few weeks, though I didn’t put them there. (John calls them “phantom status messages.”) According to the site itself, the messages were both submitted [...]

Posted by Chris in Technology on December 30th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Looking at my to-do list today, I noticed for the millionth time how two key attributes of a task seem to be either redundant or in conflict: its due date and its priority. It always seemed to me that you should only need to assign one or the other. If you have a deadline, then [...]

Posted by Chris in Business, Science, Technology on November 30th, 2009 | 1 Comment »