I often find myself following a pattern: open Terminal, cd to a folder, then use the subl or open command to open the folder in Sublime or Xcode.

I figured that I must be able to use Alfred to shortcut this particular workflow. Low and behold, it’s pretty simple. I thought I’d need to write some code, but Alfred’s Workflow feature has everything you need built-in.

This does mean that, before starting, you need to buy Alfred’s Powerpack. This allows you to use Workflows, which are needed for this shortcut.

One of the better and more concise arguments against tax havens, appealing to something other than anger at corporations:

Tax havens should be illegal in international law. They are patently unfair. […] They bear few of the costs of the modern nation state, while sucking those states dry of the revenue needed to sustain them.

Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian.

A recent security anti-pattern I’ve found is websites containing code to disable pasting into password fields. As far as I can make out, this is one of the most brutally effective ways of encouraging users to create insecure passwords.

With many backfiring policies, I can see some benefits; this one is rare in that I see zero benefits to the approach.

You’ll have some jQuery that looks like this:

$("#newPassword").bind('cut copy paste', function(event) {
  event.preventDefault();
});

So you’ll come to generate your long, secure password using 1Password or whatever, then come to paste it in and – bam! – nothing happens. Instead, you’re forced to transcribe it one character at a time. It’s enough to make you resort to pAssword1.

CouchDB 2.0 (in preview) has clustering code contributed by Cloudant, which was inspired by Amazon’s Dynamo paper.

When using CouchDB in a cluster, databases are sharded and replicated. This means that a single database is split into, say, 24 shards and each shard is stored on more than one node (replica). A shard contains a specific portion of the documents in the database. A consistent hashing technique is used to allocate documents to shards. There are almost always three replicas; this provides a good balance of reliability vs. storage overhead.

The New York Times has more information on the often awful balance between editorial content and adverts in The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites.

The difference was easy to spot: many websites loaded faster and felt easier to use. Data is also expensive. We estimated that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte downloaded over a cell network costs about a penny. Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.