


full parts list @ pcpartpicker





The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an
unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed.  To install






It was time to get help.











Hello Justin,


“I would advise the customer look at this thread:


















Crossposted to medium

Is an Economy of Leisure closer than we think?








It’s Good to Promote ‘Women In Tech’


Something must be wrong.





I quickly retweeted, and FAILed at twitter with


This spun out of control, and my point was lost.








Is Facebook Fingerprinting Chrome extensions?

This morning I noticed something new in my Chrome Console while working on a Chrome Extension. It looks like Facebook is now looking to see if you have a set of Chrome extensions installed in your browser. Most of the extensions I looked up on Google’s web store and via their search engine and they look like they are Malware of some sort, but a few of them look like they are much less harmless. It’s hard to see what the extensions actually do because they have been pulled from the Chrome Web Store, but some of these look like they modified the appearance of Facebook intentionally.

Some users don’t like being forced to see walmart colors all over the web and have used various tactics to customize the web to their liking. Some other users might do it for usability reasons or just plain augmentation of the web.

Does Facebook have the right to do this? It feels like an invasion of my privacy. I think the latest version of Chrome protects us from this sort of attack but that does not mean that Facebook won’t invest in other ways to discover this information or that they won’t lobby google to discover it. Some extensions also have the ability to open up channels to other extensions so if facebook had it’s own extension it might still try to fingerprint which extensions are there.

This isn’t all bad, in fact it really depends on how it’s being used. If it’s only used to defend our privacy and security then it seems fine, but if this little trick is being abused this could really sour things.

I guess I am mostly just surprised that Facebook is doing this.

Screen Shot 2012-09-05 at 10.30.49 AM

To get this to occur in your own browser you will need to be a bit sneaky and use a private session. Once Facebook runs the finger print they don’t do it all of the time, I think they only do it on auth and then they cache the result in some way. In fact since some extensions have access to the cookies I wonder if one could ‘skip’ the finger printing by setting the proper cookies or localstorage setting.

Finger Printed Extension IDs


Whose Responsible for our Country?















In Silicon Valley, to buy a home or not to buy a home

As many Americans are currently evaluating decisions they have made. I am currently evaluating a number of decisions that I will make in the future.

Owning a home might be one of those decisions. Right now I am working out the math on the topic. And it seems to me that owning a home allows one who has earned income to potentially do two main things.

  • move retirement income into a hard asset with fewer rules.
  • allow you to take a portion of your income and stash it in a hard asset.

The math is preliminary, but let’s just say that 1 year worth of rent in SF is about


So far is seems like the rent on a mortgage + taxes and stuff for the same type of place would require I buy a $500-650k condo.
The net year cost on that would be

~$30k + possible association fees.

The income tax code says that I can write off the interest on my income, and since it’s a new home most of that mortgage payment can be written off.
Right now the government says that I can write off about $7-11k per year.
This means that my post tax cost for the home is

$20k a year again.

some portion of that $20k that get’s spent is actually principle.

let’s say $5k

As that principle grows, I can use that equity, even though it’s trapped in a home, to take out an SBA Loan with only 25% of the total covered.

So that means with a 5% down ( yes this is still allowed on some homes ), in 5 years turns into

$50k. ($25k down payment + $25k in new equity )

This should allow for an SBA loan of up to $200k that you can use to buy hard assets. Now this does not get you that much if you plan to do software start-ups like i do, but it does provide you leverage on those hard assets. My point being is that just because money is at work in one place, it doesn’t mean that you can’t still get leverage other places.

So, there is a case for moderate leverage. But, what about buying pressure?

As people pay off their mortgage, more principal is paid off and less of that payment is interest. Over time they get less and less back from the government. I think this creates a sort of pressure to be on a new mortgage. I wonder if this has anything to do with why people tend to move every 7 years on average. There are also some interesting rules around selling a home and saving on taxes if you have lived in the home for 2 of the last 5 years. I also think that people get board, and want to move for various reasons, more kids, fewer kids, etc…

Heck I’d like a *maker* room for crafts, electronics hacking extra. In fact at maker faire one of the exhibits was for a company called the 100k garage. So yeah, i’d like to *paint* the walls but i’d also like to continue playing the *start-up* game a bit longer and it seems more and more like they are mutually exclusive if I am going to be really good at either one of them.

It seems to me that buying a home is only good if you have earned income, and secondly if you don’t expect to have to move in 3-5 years. Out here if your company get’s acquired by google or facebook, you might have to start driving to a new office 30 miles away. It’s been a pain for some people I know and it’s been part of the reason they shed the golden handcuffs a bit early.

If I bought a home out here, i’d have to make some major decisions about what my life is going to look like for 3-5 years. It would limit my job choices or my time, which can already be a 60+hr work week, before transit. I’d have to decide between living in the city ( san francisco ), on the peninsula near FB and Google ( where prices are 30% higher ), in the north bay ( very pretty and better schools, no public transit to the city ), around berkely/ oakland. Each has their advantages and their disadvantages.

I’m just not sure what needs to happen to maximize all of my options, and secures a future. I’m just not sure earning an extra $5k in home equity a year is worth it.

If not a MacBook Pro, what Laptop should I buy?





Here are list of graphics cards and their frame rates.


HP High Performance Laptops


Sony S series, stylish performance





Let me know what you decide.

The Truth of Libertarian-ism..









JSLint-Feature – Error Severity

Hi Douglas,
I have been to a good number of your talks, and I love the idea behind JSLint. I even don’t mind it when JSLint makes me cry every now and then, however, I feel like the priority of JSLint should be around launch successful code early and often.

Here at Kabam we build games that run as HMTL5 apps, and recently we have started to use JSLint as part of our build process. In a few cases it has caught some minor errors and we were later able to resolve them.

Our build process uses Jenkins, which is an open source version of Hanson. These continuous build automation tools make use of another wrapper library you might be familiar with.

So in this sense let’s say a develop wants to add a new piece of code, and this code causes a problem.

JSLint reacts in the following ways,
– it has a an error limit and stops reporting erros after a certain amount
– errors are not prioritized based on ‘newness’ – because that would be hard
– errors are not prioritized based on priority.

The end result is that a team must fix all errors to get the maximum value out of JSLint.

I propose a 2 part solution.
1. JSLint should not set error priority, unless it sets sensible defaults
2. JSLint should report an error code so that a wrapper like jslint4java could use a config file set an error priority.

This would allow teams to triage error types as part of their build/ development process.

On line 1326 you have a function warn() defined I propose it’s written something like so, including a new warning property, defining an error.type property using the bundle[] accessor name as the error code.

If you think of some other change that could get to the spirit of what I am looking for that would be great too. If I get the time I might try to implement a prototype. Hudson and Jenkins have 3 levels of errors, High, Medium, and Low.

Would you have some suggestions as to what would make good defaults for each of the error.types?

I feel like this change would better support agile development and continuous integration, and would allow teams to prioritize their development efforts.

Thank you for being a beacon and leader in the community.

function warn(message, offender, a, b, c, d) {

        var character, line, warning;

        offender  = offender || next_token;  // `~
        line      = offender.line || 0;
        character = offender.from || 0;

        warning = {
            id: '(error)',
            raw: bundle[message] || message,
            type: message,
            evidence: lines[line - 1] || '',
            line: line,
            character: character,
            a: a || ( === '(number)'
                ? String(offender.number)
                : offender.string),
            b: b,
            c: c,
            d: d

        warning.reason = warning.raw.supplant(warning);


        if (option.passfail) {
            quit(bundle.stopping, line, character);

        warnings += 1;

        if (warnings >= option.maxerr) {
            quit(bundle.too_many, line, character);

        return warning;

Netflix, Rushing Roulette?

Like many of us you might be wondering why Reed Hastings is tearing a great company in two. The company had had a solid decade of growth and now it seems to be faltering at every step. In the past decade Netflix has gone from ~$3 a share to ~$300 a share a 100x return, so investing $100 in the company would have made you $10,000, not bad. In fact that return is so good that you would find it hard to find a bet in Vegas that would give you a return like that. Roulette only nets a 35x return if you bet on a single number, and in Craps you can make an unlikely bet to earn 30x, by betting either on a 2 or a 12, both requiring a pair of doubles to come up.

In the case of Netflix though there are a number of pressures bearing down on them. Content providers see Netflix’s 25 million customers and feel like DVD/ BluRays are more secure and feel like they can turn content on and off to A/B test how consumers view content. The US Postal Service is thinking about cutting 238 offices nation wide, cutting out up to 5 post offices per state, or more likely up to 10 offices per metro region. Netflix has had to adjust content pricing to afford them the ability to bring in new content, while, other long standing partners have decided to take their content libraries elsewhere. And then add to that that there are Trillions of dollars of investment, yes Trillions, invested in the group of company’s competing with Netflix over the content war brewing in your living room and you might start to see why Netflix is being brash about this.

As a Netflix subsriber, I have been more than happy to have items sitting both in my streaming que, and in my dvd que, and honestly if everything on Netflix was available via streaming or download, I would opt for that format. The kicker however is that so much good content is left on disc for one reason or another. I have seen content appear on various outlets, like Netflix, XBox Live, Hulu, and Amazon to name a few, but rarely is all of the content in one place. This is probably why Google feels the need to provide a TV with a search bar, and why Apple has been trying to figure out how to own the channel as well. However in the end, the customer still looses. I think in this case, right or wrong Netflix is just tired of talking to content providers about what format the content will be available. I think the re-brand is more of a point of discussion in contracts, and negotiations than it is a consumer feature.

The next chamber of risk brings us to the pending demise of the post office. Currently the US government has been looking for ways to trim the budget and the US Postal Service has been operating at a loss for as long as I can remember, however, today they are preparing for being on their own. There are a few bills in the House and Senate that might require the Post Office to be profitable, and so the Post office has proposed a plan that will cut 7% ( 38,000 ) of it’s workers, and 1% ( 238 ) of it’s offices from it’s budget just before Christmas. I think Netflix, which is one of the largest users of the post office next to Amazon is probably concerned that the cost to ship DVDs this winter will increase, and the delivery times will too. Right now I get my DVDs in about 1 day, sometimes 2. Imagine now that those discs now take 2 days or maybe 3. How much more pressure will there be to stream. The odd part is that all of the disc rental sites will have the same problem. And for a 2hour film waiting 2 days for a film, and the having to wait another 2 days for it to get back to Netflix/Qwikster might cut the number of DVDs you have cycling through by half. I would expect Qwikster to play with pricing over the next year to account for that. Splitting the two companies means that while Qwikster finds it’s groove Netflix can focus on getting content.

On top of all that, Netflix is a 12 Billion, strike that 8 Billion dollar company that is competing with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Comcast, Time Warner Fox, NBC, ShowTime, HBO, TNT, Viacom, Disney, etc… I think the market cap of their competition is near 2 Trillion dollars. Netflix needs to be more nimble than is competitors and if by doing this they can even gain a month or two on these companies it might be worth it. iPad beat several company’s by only 6 months, but by that time they had already sold enough devices to make it very expensive for other’s to compete there.

Finally companies like to manage their investors expectations and if the news was already bad, they have this habit of pilling on bad news or announcing bad news right before really good news. So if Netflix stock is already taking a hit, and you were going to separate the companies in q4, but now you can just do it in q3, you can write those numbers off earlier, you can push your bad books down into q3, and then you can set your self up for a decent q4. If Netflix wants to compare q4 of this year to q4 of next year, doing this now helps. I also thing that Netflix’s gross margins will skyrocket right now Netflix has a P/E of 40 at $150 a share, and it probably was a P/E of 80 at $300 a share which was probably a bit over priced with a gross margin of 15%, but let’s say that Netflix drops it’s DVD rental service, and it’s gross margins go from 15% to 50%? Even if the company looses customers it probably is better for the stock, and the company. The company would be cash rich and able to better acquire content. Right now Qwikster is expensive to run and competes on costs, and is probably constrained to 10-20% gross margins.

Netflix on the other hand has been experimenting with buying their own custom content and this may allow the company to do that more. I would love to know what the insider trading is doing with Netflix.