Joe Cecil

Against sorting by descending likes

Twitter in Android Firefox seems to be sorting tweets on a profile page in descending order of likes instead of chronologically. This is annoying. It makes the site useless for catching up on an account's tweets. Now it's more like an account activity sampler to see

George Polya tutored the child John von Neumann

An interesting bit from The Pentagon's Brain: The famous mathematician George Pólya, author of How to Prove It, tutored the child John von Neumann. From page 29: "Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of," said his childhood teacher, George Pólya, also a famous

A failed experiment in brainstorming: The goal matrix

Today I tried an experiment in brainstorming project ideas that I called "the goal matrix." I had a general topic, high-level goals (or things we might want), and a bunch of previous work my manager and I had done within those. I wrote down the high-level goals and

Why Nginx needs the SSL certificate with chain, not just the bare certificate

Last year I ran into problems using a certificate-only PEM file with Nginx and had to use the whole-chain PEM. I'm attempting to understand why. The reason as I understand it is that the website certificate you're issued isn't signed directly by a root

Bookish mindset

A bookish mindset is that everything I need to know, I can find in a book. Or in some recorded medium, anyway. Maybe on the Internet, maybe in a library, maybe somewhere else. Sadly it ain't so, but it is close enough that it is hard to appreciate

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