Pursuing Unvalidated Ideas Made Me Better

The startup world is abuzz with advice for entrepreneurs. Of that advice, encouragement to validate ideas is the most abundant.


How to fix strange characters in MySQL

I admit, I borrowed this from How to fix strange characters in MySQL database – Vinh Pham. But I also added a few more that were missing.


Make iPhoto show pictures with unnamed faces

I've got about 11k photos, and lots of them have faces of things like wax figures, or people I don't know in the background. I don't really care about those "people", and so I need to remove them.


SWOT Your Business

Entrepreneurs are almost always aware of the biggest opportunities and threats that lie ahead for their businesses, but not too often does that analysis happen on paper. For most, we keep it in the foreground of our minds, and we think that’s good enough.


2013: In Review

2013 was a good year for me: we bought a new house and I got a promotion. 2013 was a good year for this blog as well: 12,000 total page views, 4,300 unique visitors, 5,200 visits, 21 posts, and two new authors (who'll begin posting in 2014).


Finding deleted files that are still opened by a process

Recently my server ran out of space, but my checks (via du) reported that only about 60GB was actually being used. That's because if a process has a file open that is then deleted, the space is still claimed, but the file doesn't appear.


Deleting local git branches with a missing remote branch

I have about 100 git repositories at $job, and of those, about 90% of them have branches that were created locally that were set as tracking branches, but never pushed to a remote. It makes looking at the output of git branch very annoying, so I wrote the script below to clean up those branches.