Trolling for Dollars

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit this week against a litany of Internet companies claiming they had violated patents awarded years ago to Allen’s now-defunct Interval Research. Many writers, including one passing himself off as me, claimed this made Allen a so-called “patent troll. ” I don’t think that is the case. Patent trolls are [...] [...]

Facebook Bot: FBCbot.pl

Facebook Bot: FBCbot.pl FBCbot is a bot written in Perl to interface with Facebook on the users behalf. The bot is still in its infant stage and could definitely be improved upon. Currently FBCbot was developed on Linux though since it is written in Perl it can be modified to run on Windows as well. [...] [...]

Looks like books are coming to an end

From the pen of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee comes a downbeat letter written in September of 2008, at a time when a flurry of worrying developments in the world of traditional book publishing had seemingly brought about – in Lee’s words – “t… [...]

Squirrel Bottles

Above, three kinds of squirrel bottle. 1. Above, left: An 1800s Squirrel Bottle from the Moravian potters of Old Salem, North Carolina. (another style with mold on right) “Of all the bottles produced at Salem, the squirrel form was the… [...]

Pull Requests 2.0

GitHub launched with a simple pull request system on day one. You’ve used it to send 200 thousand pull requests in just over two years. Now we’re taking it to the next level with a re-imagined design and a slew of new tools that streamline the process … [...]