Twitter is rolling out their polls feature. How many normal Twitter users care about polls? That’s obviously not going to be a big deal in terms of solving “Twitter’s problems” of not growing fast enough and not generating a ton of revenue. Twitter Polls is an ideal example of something that should just be a third party app. In a world where you can build apps on top of Twitter that seamlessly integrate into the Twitter UI and/or can live outside of it - this is an interesting product for a small team to build on top of Twitter. Everybody wins. At the same time, their CEO is apologizing to developers. I worked on a project built entirely on top of Twitter. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to heal the Twitter-developer relationship but it’s worth it. I would not build a software business on top of Twitter right now, because if it’s any good there’s a good chance Twitter will just build the same thing themselves. I think the only way for Twitter to succeed is to make it into the de-facto communication layer that allows both machine-machine, machine-human and human-human communication and regain developers trust enough for them to build real businesses on top of this layer. And they should charge developers for it. I think there’s “common knowledge” saying that you can’t justify a company the size of Twitter (~ 20B market cap) buy selling APIs. You must also sell higher order services, to larger markets (consumers, not developers). Maybe Twitter can be the one to break this mold.

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Beyond the usual hoopla over the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR hides a truly spectacular feat of individual Making (capital M) and a huge milestone in the history of (crowd)funding and selling a business. In my mind, it even eclipses the acquisition of WhatsApp just a month ago, as well as the acquisition of Instagram (all by the same acquirer, more on that in a bit).

Palmer Luckey, the founder and inventor of the Rift, began working on the product sometime around 2009 as a student at USC. He posted about his little project on August 21st, 2009:

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As more and more sad details surface about Apple’s legal crusade, I keep thinking why I’m using the iPhone and don’t just switch to an Android.

Yeah, it’s not as good still, and I always told myself I’ll get an Android phone eventually, when they’re good enough.

But then it hit me:

It doesn’t matter. Apple is not going to lose only because eventually its customers will switch to the competitors’ products. Apple is going to lose because eventually its own employees, the people that make it the greatest company in the world, will leave.

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All booze has an “Alcohol by Volume” measure specified. It’s denoted as a percentage which is supposed to tell you “how much alcohol” there’s in the specific drink, or, alternatively “how fucked up are you going to be and how fast”. Beer is typically between 4%-10%, wine 12%-14%, vodka and whiskey 40% and so on.

But how do they measure this quantity? How do they know exactly how much alcohol is there in a bottle of beer?

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The program can’t start because LIBPQ.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

If you’re getting the above error when starting Apache after installing Apache and PHP on your Windows machine, go to your PHP install directory (e.g. c:Program Files (x86)PHP) and copy the file libpq.dll into the bin directory under the Apache install directory (e.g. C:Program Files (x86)Apache Software FoundationApache2.2bin).

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A thought provoking article in the Atlantic about the education superpower Finland:

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known – if it was known for anything at all – as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life – Newsweek ranked it number one last year – and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

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I’m a big fan of good naming in code, here’s a recent example:

Suppose you have a unique index in a database table and you’re trusting that index to enforce no more than one record with the key.

So you’re using an insert ignore into…on duplicate key update statement.

So you end up calling something like DataAccess.InsertRecord(data) or DataAccess.AddRecord(data). Looking at such code it’s very unclear that what really happens is an insert/update and you’re only left with one record.

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If you have annoying scrollbars around your Facebook app’s canvas, here’s what you need to do:

First, go to your app’s settings, click “Edit App” and then “Advanced” on the right.

Scroll all the way down to “Canvas Settings” and change “Canvas Height” to “Settable”.

Second, add a call to FB.Canvas.setSize() (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.Canvas.setSize/). Make this call inside window.fbAsyncInit, after calling FB.init.

That’s it! Gorgeous app, no scrollbars!

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If you’re using the PayPal Adaptive Payments API in sandbox mode, redirecting the user to https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr and getting the following error:

This transaction has already been approved

The problem may be that you’re using an incorrect sandbox user as the “sender” in the transaction.

You need to go to the sandbox (https://developer.paypal.com/) and then to “test accounts” on the left.

You need to create a test account. Click “preconfigured” next to “new test account” and then make sure you select “buyer” under “account type”.

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“When we would become friendly with an office,” he explained, “and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work for us.’ Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to ‘em, that was it. We owned them.”

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