Category Archives: Tech

Finally closing all bank/brokerage accounts with virtual keyboards

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UPDATE: I don’t recommend Schwab anymore

4 years ago I blogged about how much I hated financial sites with virtual keyboards. They are inconvenient, and they encourage shorter, easier to type, less secure passwords. Also 1Password can’t automatically fill them. I tweeted about it once and @tradeking replied and said it was to prevent keyloggers. While that might be true, it certainly didn’t prevent the guy behind me on a plane or at a coffeeshop from knowing my password.

I recently opened a Schwab account mainly because they refund all international ATM fees with no minimum balance requirements, and no fees whatsoever. I love them so much I ACATed my TradeKing account over, and I will also be moving funds from 2 other online checking/savings accounts and then closing them when the transfers complete. So now with HSBC and TradeKing gone, I no longer have to tolerate virtual keyboards.

If you’re not completely happy with your bank, I highly recommend Schwab. Also take a look at Fidelity, they have similar offerings and an AMEX 2% cashback card. Schwab had a 2% visa signature card a couple of years back, but it is now gone.

The real reason we?re upset about Sparrow?s acquisition

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This is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens.

via The real reason we’re upset about Sparrow’s acquisition. So true. I paid for Sparrow for Mac and iOS and

I don’t even use them. I use Mailplane and Apple’s iOS Mail.app, mainly because I can’t deal with using IMAP, not even with IDLE. I bought Sparrow because I wanted to support an awesome independent software company and a lot of my friends love both Sparrow clients. No one owes anyone anything, we paid and got great software for more than a year, and people moved on. This worries me a bit though, what if 1Password gets acquired? I depend on it so much that my life would literally be different if one day it stops getting updates with new versions of browsers and OS.

late bloomer, not a loser. I hope by Dave McClure

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and so here I am: still standing in the arena, in hand-to-hand combat with demons mostly of my own making, aiming to make a small dent in the universe. nowhere near a great success story, yet fighting the good fight and perhaps helping others to achieve greatness as I attempt a bit of my own. I’ll be 46 in a month, well past the age when most folks have already shown what they’re made of. but I’m still grasping for that brass ring.

via late bloomer, not a loser. I hope by Dave McClure.

Finally reverted Lion’s clamshell setting back to that of Snow Leopard

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Lion has this feature to switch to the external display when you close the lid of your Mac laptop. It seems like a welcomed feature at first. I do a lot of screen sharing over iChat/Messages Beta, and had to switch from dual-desktop to single-screen for screen sharing to work nicely. In Snow Leopard I had to close the lid, wait for Mac to go to sleep, and then wake it up with my keyboard or magic trackpad. However, there’s a huge problem with the new clamshell setting in Lion – the machine gets very hot when used in clamshell mode, especially when you do development on it such as hacking in Xcode, with the iOS app running in the simulator, the app itself talks to a local Rails app served up with Pow, and the Rails app also talks to MongoDB or MySQL running on the same machine, Redis, and a whole lot of other standard techs we use to get things done.

Today I finally got fed up and switched back to the way Snow Leopard worked, there really isn’t a documented way to do this, but you can get the old behavior back by changing the nvram boot arguments:

sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0"

Bounce the Mac after that and you’ll get the behavior back.

If you see weirdness when using jquery.iframe-transport.js and/or remotipart…

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This took a while to figure out. Remotipart overrides the render function in Rails to return the response in a textarea that jquery.iframe-transport.js expects to see, if you’re working with JSON (and who isn’t?), make sure you don’t have any type of JSON pretty-formatter browser add-on/plugin/extension installed.

That is all. And AJAX file upload still is a pita to do.