As I dive into the craziness that is fund-raising for Querki, I may as well blog about it for posterity. No deep thoughts, just a bit of diary entry for amusement, and for those who might want to go down this road someday ( Read more... )

[For the programmers]

Here's a delicious little security alert about a vulnerability in eBay, which potentially allows malicious vendors to steal your eBay credentials and such. I recommend reading down to the details -- the JSF**k hack itself is kind of brilliant ( Read more... )

• Time to track down the bug: 3 minutes
• Size of the fix: 1 line
• Time to add enough pieces to the new test harness to *validate* the fix: 8 hours

It's necessary, and it'll pay off in the long run, but *man*, I had forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to build a good Selenium-based harness. On the plus side, this little fix required adding a lot ( Read more... )

[For the programmers -- this is a pretty technical intermediate-level "mistakes to avoid" lesson. Likely useful to folks who are learning programming, and ruefully amusing in a headdesk way to the experienced programmers.]

Today's fire-drill for Querki was a bug report (from alexx_kay, who has my deepest thanks for pointing it out) that, under certain ( Read more... )

Okay, here's a curious question: what sets of gender-neutral pronouns do you prefer ( Read more... )

Today's project is starting to implement Multiple Choice. (AKA enumerations.) The concept has existed for a long time, but it's a manual PITA to create a multiple-choice Property, and I'm tired of it, so I'm turning it into a proper Type. That's complicated, but so far well in hand ( Read more... )

Way back in the early days of Querki, I was figuring out what the major Property Types were going to be.  Figuring out the list was easy; figuring out what to call them was another matter, since I'm trying to avoid techie jargon in the basic parts of Querki.  So instead of "Markup", it's simply "Text", and "Integer" is "Whole Number".  (Yes, ( Read more... )

Today's Querki release has one major change: the first appearance of the "Apps" menu. It's hard to overstate how important that is. When I originally figured out what an "App" would be in Querki, three and a half years ago, I realized that I had a viable business here, not just a tinkerer's toy. It's taken all those months to get to the point ( Read more... )

[A legal question rather than a programming one, for a change.]

This article reminded me of a question that's been nagging at the back of my mind ever since the ECJ ruling came out, striking down the Safe Harbor pact: what, exactly, does "personal data" *mean ( Read more... )

[Mostly for the techies]

I was just reading this recent article in TechCrunch -- it's light on detail, but makes the likely-correct point that APIs are going to become ever more important in the industry in coming years. So I'm pondering: what should Querki be doing with them ( Read more... )