Author Archives: Garrick van Buren

Shorting Toxic, er, Social Media

Over on the Twitter the other day, I wrote: “Yes, that giant sucking sound you hear is me buying up CDSs against UGC-backed securities. #shorting_social_media” Right now, the similarities between the overheated real estate market of a few years ago and the current chatter around the marketing potential of Twitter and Facebook are uncanny. Turns …

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First Crack #123. Building CitizenWausau.com with Dino and Andy

CitizenWausau is one of the coolest, homegrown citizen journalism projects I’ve seen since I’ve been looking for them. I called up Dino Corvino and Andy Laub, the editor and technologist respectively, to discuss the project, how it’s grown, and it’s relationship with more established media in a smaller city market.

Building CitizenWausau.com

In First Crack #123 – Building CitizenWausau.com, I call up Dino Corvino and Andy Laub, the editor and technologist respectively, to discuss the project, how it’s grown, and it’s relationship with more established media in a smaller city market.

First Crack 122. John Hoffoss on Usability and Network Security

John Hoffoss, a network security engineer at one of Minnesota’s larger institutions, and I dive into computer security, security versus usability, the insecurity of URL shorteners, and some of the reasons Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer are more often targets of security exploits than other platforms. Stay til the end for a discussion of the …

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Passenger + Sinatra Tip: DocumentRoot is Always /public

I was getting 403 errors after deploying my newest Sinatra app with Passenger. Turns out Passenger assumes and requires a /public folder. This app is so tiny and new, it didn’t have one yet – so I was pointing Passenger at the app’s root. Resulting in the 403 errors. Solution: Create an empty /public folder …

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