tomwalsham

9 ms·

1.
by tomwalsham 11y ago
I'm in the 'sooner rather than later' camp, and have one more key driver. Insurance. As soon as human drivers are provably poorer than automated drivers, the cost to insure a meat driver goes up. It will not take long to buil
2.
by tomwalsham 11y ago
You just literally described trains and buses. Don't assume the form of the vehicle remains the intimate 3-across sedan style.
3.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
The best way to improve email delivery is to understand that email addresses represent humans. Address validation and long-term deliverability is primarily a problem of social engineering, not technical. Ordinarily I'm in favour of things t
4.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
This is definitely good email sender behaviour, but I would hesitate to purely put this down to the altruistic notion of 'keeping your inbox tidy' - Inbox Zero is a problem fairly isolated to the Newserati and similar thin slices of populat
5.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
I always like Eric Ries' take on this. You can test the theory: If you have one 'great' idea, chances are you have more. Take your _second_ best idea and do all you can to get someone to steal it. Target individuals; shout from the rooftops
6.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
I would add one additional point of caution: The Rails community seems unusually keen on the 'curl example.org/script | sh' as an installation method (see Pow.cx etc.). I'd usually recommend reading these scripts before execution, but for n
7.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
At PostageApp.com we focus on transactional emails, which these days are moving heavily towards HTML email as a standard now that deliverability is much more focused on IP reputation than content. We provide a templating system which allows
8.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
Just as a reference point, this brought to mind an old app (in the desktop sense) from 2001 - http://www.16color.com/ The site is still up, and they claim 40,000 movies were created between 1999 and 2004 (timeline from the DVD : http://w
9.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
My personal favourite quick-fix (which doesn't stand up to targeted attacks, but is a very effective band-aid), is to put the following : <input type='text' name='website' style='display:none'> Then disallow any form submissions ser
10.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
These sorts of issues (primarily related to auxiliary functions in grep, sed, etc) can cause portability issues when developing locally for linux systems, but no worse thanks, say, writing for fedora on an Ubuntu box. Brew is okay but a bit
11.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
A nice visible reason why the Rails/Node/OSX FOSS community really need to stop doing the following sort of thing for their installations (seen most recently on yeoman.io, but common to get.pow.cx, npm...):: curl get.totallytrustworthyapp.i
12.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
Primarily because the Web is a Pull medium, whereas email is Push. To get my eyeballs on the web you first have to trick me into going to your location. To get my eyeballs on Email you just have to know my easy-to-guess personal address.
13.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
There's an interesting disconnect between the public perception of email transmission and the reality, even from technically savvy observers. The view you're espousing of the 'basic' nature of email can usually be summed up as : "It's just
14.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
This is a great overview for people looking to run their own servers, with one of the clearest explanations of DKIM and SPF I've seen. Awesome. As a counterpoint, I'd like to add that from the point of view of an email sender (our company
15.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
I completely agree. These days there's very little wrong with sending HTML-based transactional email provided you've covered your bases on all other potential flags and send as multipart with a plaintext component. At PostageApp many client
16.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
It was my first association as well, but I assumed it was used in a jokey linkbait fashion, rather than trying to trade off the reputation of McColo ;) Always great to see new tools in the email space - would love to get an invite to check
17.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
Some stream of consciousness thoughts on the history of internet communities, particularly those centred around tech. Usenet had immense value in well defined subgroups prior to the Eternal September (and for some time after, regardless of
18.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
Speaking of weirdly complex, I've always been a fan of the totally deadpan delivery of the 'Straight Line Tutorial' [gimp lacks a 'line' or 'shape' tool] http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Straight_Line/
19.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
Sending HTML-only email is still a large spam flag, even at major ISPs, independent of the concerns about client compatibility. At PostageApp our solution to the problem is a templating engine where you can write your HTML/CSS separately an
20.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
Email deliverability these days is heavily based on sending IP reputation, to a lesser extent domain reputation, and finally content. Once you have ticked the core boxes of compliance - clean html in your templates, never send just HTML ema
21.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
This strikes me as somewhat of an edge case - to add a full rules engine for what is essentially a very app-specific set of behaviours. One main reason the application is the best place to manage these rules is that it's rarely just the ema
22.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
Can you comment on the status of Priceonomics (YC) in this context? They're building a rich interface on top of CL listings data, presumably using 3Taps to get the volume of data without drawing attention. Is the endgame for these companies
23.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
While I like the idea, I feel the dollar sign is a poor choice of character. There are plenty of free chars that wouldn't expect to cause conflicts with things like sass, or appear at a glance to be a variable reference.
24.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
The representation of this move as a gateway for 'glory hunters' or wantrepreneurs is surely at odds with the intentions or the likely implementation (not that many of the applications no doubt fit this). I don't imagine the interviews to b
25.
by tomwalsham 14y ago
While many jurisdictions hold the same, that 'facts' can't be subject to copyright, there is often a (lobbied for) grey area surrounding compilations of facts. The usual suspects in these cases are recipes, Geodata and my personal favourite
26.
by tomwalsham 15y ago
rπ is a great project, but it's hardly out of left field. There have been plugins for years, at seriously affordable prices. You can buy a netbook for $100 these days and run Windows/Linux on it happily. rπ is interesting because of its pos
27.
by tomwalsham 15y ago
Asher's Gridlinked supposed a limited set of society [operatives & wealthy] who could manage this fulltime connection, and even then it was perceived as unhealthy. Wikipedia has undoubtedly changed how our generation views knowledge, bu
28.
by tomwalsham 15y ago
Some would argue Email is little more than USPS over IP. I think the most interesting aspect of modern communications - accidentally in the 90s, deliberately in the post-twitter-era - is the simple addressability of people. There was a trad
29.
by tomwalsham 15y ago
Facebook (and Twitter to some extent) solve one of the biggest problems of email which is the concept of verified sender. I add it to the paradigm shifts as it resolves (in its own [large] namespace) a longstanding problem with email. I add
30.
by tomwalsham 15y ago
This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat.

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