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About Me
I'm Michael Koby, and I love technology. I'm also a programmer, currently doing Ruby on Rails development for a small Houston startup. Here I talk about technology, programming, politics, movies, music, and anything else I feel I need to talk about. If you would like to know more, you can check out the About page.Popular Series
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Author Archives: Michael Koby
Intro to iPhone Development at Houston Open Dev User Group
Last night at the Houston Open Development User Group, I presented an introduction to iPhone development. Through the course of 2 hours I covered the very basics of iPhone development, from Objective-C to actually creating and wiring up a user interface for an iPhone application. For the demo application, I built a simple Twitter search application that allows a user to type in a search query and see the first 15 results returned from the Twitter search api. Continue reading
Houston Techfest 2011 – Wrap Up
Had a great time this past weekend at Houston Techfest. Attended a couple of great sessions and also presented a couple of sessions of my own. If you attended either of these sessions, please click the SpeakerRate links and rate the sessions and leave comments on anything you felt was missing so that I might be able to better present at future events. Continue reading
Posted in General, programming
Tagged .net, c, houston techfest, mono, presentations, presenting, rails, ruby, ruby on rails, speaking
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Why Amazon’s Tablet Makes Sense for Amazon
In case you missed it, Techcrunch has announced that they’ve played with Amazon’s soon to be released seven inch Kindle tablet. Since then there’s been a lot of talk about if this tablet will really be able to compete with the iPad. And that’s where people start missing the point. Continue reading
Have an idea? Ship It! – A Houston Code Camp Presentation
Yesterday, I attended and presented at Houston Code Camp. You can see what others were saying by looking at the twitter hashtag #houcodecamp. The event was a resounding success and I’m hoping we do another next year. Regarding my presentation. … Continue reading
XKCD & Password Security
If you were on the internet last week, you probably saw an article, twitter, or Facebook post about the xkcd comic on password strength. The comic, which was (most likely) inspired by an article entitled, “The Usability of Passwords” basically says that using a multi-word password (3 or more words), is more secure than what I have referred to as “complex passwords” in past articles on this blog. The writer of the original article makes the point (which is what the xkcd comic points to) that passwords using three or more dictionary words, has more entropy and is thus harder to crack, therefore making them more secure. While there is a bit of truth to the article, it leads to some false understandings of how hackers actually go about hacking passwords, and make assumptions that aren’t entirely accurate. Continue reading
Cutting Worker Costs on Heroku
When we launched LiveShow, we utilized what Heroku calls a “Worker Dyno” to handle background tasks, specifically sending emails. Using a Heroku worker dyno allows you to offload work to a background task so that it doesn’t hold up the actual web server portion of your app. The downside to worker dynos is they cost money, $0.05/hour to be exact. And when you run one all day, everyday for a month, that can add up. Continue reading
