Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Using Single Vendor Credit Card Numbers with Amazon

I often use single vendor credit card numbers for my online transactions because in the event of a breach or theft, the numbers cannot be used elsewhere. Many credit card companies offer these under other names, such as Discover who calls these “Secure Online Account Numbers.” These work really well, except for the fact that these do not work well with Amazon purchases. There are a few other cases they fail, but Amazon is the biggest nuisance for me.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Sunday, March 10, 2013

Suddenlink's Speed

Suddenlink seems to think that this is 15Mbps: I’ve called them at 5-10 times in the past few weeks, and this is still the speed that I get. I have tried changing modems and three separate technicians have said that my connection is good and yet it is no better. This is consistent across nearly every evening. Using these numbers, if I were to extrapolate the speed to the 50Mbps plan, I’d still not get achieve 15Mbps in the evenings.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, February 20, 2013

What Objective-C Has Learned

In a few of my recent posts, I outlined some things which I believe that Objective-C can learn from Java, the most recent discussing error handling. In order to avoid the impression that I may not like Objective-C, I figured I should outline some of what I believe are the most important improvements Objective-C has made. Properties When properties were first introduced, I read several who described them as simply syntax sugar.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Tooling Matters

In the debate between Mercurial and Git, I’ve long held the side of Mercurial. This is mostly due to the fact that Mercurial’s commands are far easier to understand, but I’ve also liked the fact that Mercurial doesn’t encourage rewriting a repository’s history as much as Git does. This has encouraged me to seek to use Mercurial as my favored DVCS, but that’s now changing. Mercurial has a tremendous advantage in that it’s command structure is easier to understand.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, November 10, 2012

My Media Setup

While I’ve described some of the pieces in my media setup, I have not described it as a whole. I started the process when I got annoyed with DVDs that don’t allow you to skip the copyright warnings, commentary disclaimers, trailers, endless menus, studio logos, and other crap when I simply wanted to watch the movie. It was time for something better, and now I have it. Storage I’ve written some on my storage setup before, but I’ll describe it briefly here.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, June 5, 2012