Category: Technology

Fill the gaps in your toolkit with Skillswap

June 4, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

Nobody can do it all, no matter how broad your skill set is, it’s likely that at some point you’re going to take on a project where you need to bring in some help – somebody with the skills you lack. In this situation you can either pay to hire somebody with those skills, or, you can find somebody willing to do a skill-swap. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of skill swapping, it’s based on the premise that you trade skills rather cash. For example, if I need somebody to help me with web development, in return I can offer to help them with a logo design. The concept of trading skills is by no means new but thanks to…

Original Article Can be Found Here:

Fill the gaps in your toolkit with Skillswap

Also published on Medium.

Web Scraping: Getting Data from Awfully Complex Websites

June 3, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

Intro In this article, you will learn about some tools for scraping and parsing data from websites with Ruby, Capybara, Nokogiri, Firefox, and PhantomJS. We will then try out a script that does site scraping by launching a separate web browser. Next up, we’ll launch a headless browser to do the same thing. Finally, we’ll wrap it up in a server side sinatra app for Heroku. Challenge Find active health professionals teaching recent classes Practice scrapping data from websites Search by studio ID on MindBody Online Prereqs Command Line Script using an automated browser instance Let’s check out Kali Yoga Studio in Columbia Heights. We want to see classes that are posted and click on….

Original Article Can be Found Here:

Web Scraping: Getting Data from Awfully Complex Websites

The Conversion Optimization Flaw You Need to Know

June 3, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

You tensely sit at your desk and watch the data pour in from the first few days of your new conversion optimization campaign. Not good – no sales and no inkling of a winning variant. As the days turn into weeks you feel your blood pressure rise as you stare at the site intently, as though you could simply will conversions to happen. Of course you cannot. Every time the phone rings, you hope it isn’t your client. You would rather receive a call from the IRS than see your client’s number come up. You start to panic because you are spending your client’s money on PPC and labor and are not …

Original Article Can be Found Here:

The Conversion Optimization Flaw You Need to Know

Also published on Medium.

TrueCrypt Is Back, But Should It Be?

June 3, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

Last week I wrote about the suspicious and abrupt announcement that TrueCrypt, a popular free open source encryption solution, was being abandoned and is considered “harmful and no longer secure”. In the article I covered the potential motives for this including the technical challenges with producing full disk encryption on modern hardware and operating systems. Whilst at this time there is little to add in terms of the potential motives for this sudden announcement a variety of interesting things have happened to the project since – including announcements that mean TrueCrypt may not be as dead as we thought. When the page at truecrypt.sourceforge.net was changed to a warning (and a set of migration instructions for Microsoft Bitlocker) the source code and old versions …

Original Article Can be Found Here:

TrueCrypt Is Back, But Should It Be?

Moo0 File Monitor Shows Real Time File Changes In Windows

June 3, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s really going on in Windows’ background. The Moo0 File Monitor shows you real time file changes so you know what’s going on, like when you’re installing software for example. The only sign of anything happening when you’re installing some programs is a notable increase in CPU and RAM usage. You can tell your machine is working, but you’re not sure what it’s doing – or if it’s actually stuck and it’s working hard for no reason. Open up Moo0 File Monitor and you can see what files are being created, deleted, modified, or moved, and you can see when it happened. Bonus: got a jump in CPU and RAM usage and you’re not installing anything? Open up the monitor and you might…

Original Article Can be Found Here:

Moo0 File Monitor Shows Real Time File Changes In Windows