Matt's Blog

To whom it may concern: “Up to” takes a finite argument and no modifiers. It is a limiting operator, instilling an upper maximum on the number that follows. If you can save “up to $100,” it means that savings cannot exceed $100. “Save up to $500 or more” is illogical, because you state a maximum [...]

While wrestling to get Rails back up and running on my laptop after upgrading to Snow Leopard, I noticed something interesting on the Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) site: it supports nginx. If I ever have free time (a laughable proposition), I’d like to give that a whirl. Something tells me that Passenger on nginx may outperform [...]

I suspect that Apple’s in a bind with Snow Leopard. In what has to be an unprecedented move for a software company, Apple announced that Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, would focus primarily on speed and stability improvements, not on new features. There were plenty of new features, but most of them were extremely [...]

I’ve been on the fence for a while about upgrading my camera setup. The Canon T1i has sat perfectly in that in-between zone that I always approach traffic lights in. (If I stop, I’ll have to stop really quick. If I go, it’ll turn red as I go under it.) If the camera were any [...]

Thanks to an exceedingly generous offer from Google, I wound up with a very modest advertising budget in Google AdWords. Since the blogs don’t make money (I don’t show ads or charge fees), I decided to treat it as an experiment as opposed to any focused, strategic ad blitz. First, a primer: two common terms [...]

The more I do with websites, the more astounded I am by how much there is that can be done in maintaining a site. For example, things like server maintenance and moving to a better network are things that one might not traditionally think of as the job of a webmaster. I’ve been doing a [...]

I don’t know why, but it seems that the people who read URLs in ads are more computer illiterate than the general population. A few things I would like to announce: You cannot “click to” a website. While strictly speaking, you can “click on” a URL, it makes no sense to ask people to click [...]

One of my professors was big into Eckhart Tolle, and often quoted passages. One of the things he emphasized several times was the concept of “energy vampires,” the type of people who drained you of energy through various means. The point he made is that you should really just cut your losses and leave them. [...]

I think I probably read the news at the time it was actually news, but glossed over it because it seemed boring at the time… CUDA is an Nvidia technology that, in short, allows people to write code to use their video cards for number-crunching, not just drawing pixels. This seemed absurd without knowing too [...]

I just discovered You Suck at Craigslist, a hilarious site that posts the most absurd ads on Craigslist. It’s written by someone who, like me, has an appreciation for grammar and some degree of intelligence. This post, about puppies for sale whose parents were both dogs, might be a good introduction.