Social Networks for the life of the world
Many people surely know all this by now. Still, here are some things I’ve recently learned about notifying clients (browsers, API clients) about errors. Delivering errors from route handlers to clients This is remarkably easy, once you figure it out. Just use the http-errors package. (Beware, not the http-error package; it does something different. Call … Read more
I just got an email survey from our local monopoly internet service provider. Will you recommend Comcast to a friend? Yes=10 No=1 This betrays a profound misunderstanding of the usefulness of that kind of survey, called the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. Why is “will you recommend our lightly regulated monopoly to your friends” a … Read more
In this critical moment in our history, we are all struggling with what we can do to make the biggest difference. I’m writing to share with you a unique and powerful response to our political crisis that I learned about in a recent presentation: the Movement Voter Project. The Movement Voter Project (MVP) is a … Read more
I needed to do some simple web-page / Javascript debugging work on an Android device. My need was simple: look at the console log. But setting things up to do it was not simple. It didn’t help that most of the online information about this is buried in edits to years-old Stack Overflow answers. Desired … Read more
I was chatting with a co-worker today, and she said she’d heard “they” were thinking about calling Pluto a “planet” again after it was demoted in 2006. Is Pluto a planet, or a dwarf planet, or a planetoid comet, or a cometoid planet, or what? It’s a wonderful debate. It’s a debate about how to … Read more
Sometimes it’s necessary in Javascript in a browser to find out whether an image object loads correctly. You might do this to check whether a server is responding, or whether it’s blocked by a firewall. In plain HTML you would load the image like this <img src=”/maybe.png” /> then look for the browser’s broken-image indicator … Read more
The mode of a bunch of numbers is the most frequent number in the bunch. A bunch of numbers can have more than one most-frequent number. Given a table tbl with columns category and value, this SQL returns the mode for each category. WITH freq AS ( SELECT COUNT(*) freq, value, category FROM tbl … Read more
These days it seems like I can’t call any business at all to ask a question without getting a survey afterward. I called an insurance company to ask “hey can you look up my policy number?” The agent on the phone did so efficiently and securely. I said “thanks” and I thought we were done. … Read more
Back in the 1970s, the US government paid bounties to citizens who identified big polluters and helped bring them to justice. Some of those bounties helped found the Riverkeeper organization that keeps watch on the Hudson River to this day. Those bounties helped make water and air much cleaner. In the twenty-teens we have another … Read more
Stripe.com’s Stripe Elements is a great way to handle payment card information in a way that slows down cybercreeps. It’s secure because customers only enter card numbers into Stripe-furnished iframes, never into forms on the site taking payments via Stripe. Here is the sequence diagram for how Stripe Elements handles data flow