PayPal Security Sucks; or, Why Two Factor Authentication is Worthless Without Strong Account Recovery Policies

Even though two-factor authentication isn’t the silver bullet many make it out to be, I’m still a big fan of it and think that it should be offered by any web service that wants to be taken seriously. It’s completely pointless, though, if the service doesn’t also have strong account recovery policies, or if their customer support […]

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Challenges for the WordPress Community as it Matures

Mike Jordan’s post on the WordPress community has some great insight and challenging thoughts. The truth is, however, that our community does not have these rare traits simply because its members are just that awesome. The primary reason that our community is so approachable, is that for the first several years of its life we had to […]

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Hide PHP Warnings and Notices from Poorly Written Plugins

Update: Zack Tollman wrote a plugin called Ostrichize that does an even better job of this, so I’ve reverted my version out of my functionality plugin skeleton and will use his in the future. Pro tip: search for existing code before writing new code ;) * * * There are a lot of WordPress plugin and theme […]

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The Values Behind Startup Culture

What Your Culture Really Says is a compelling peak behind the startup culture curtain.

This is not a critique of the practices themselves, which often contribute value to an organization. This is to show a contrast between the much deeper, systemic cultural problems that are rampant in our startups and the materialistic trappings that can disguise them.

Making Xdebug Pretty Not Ugly

Xdebug is an essential development tool for me, but, to be blunt, the default output style is kind of hideous. I looked for a way to customize it through xdebug.ini, but there doesn’t appear to be one. You can, however, use a browser extension like Stylish Stylus (FireFox) or Stylebot (Chrome) to override the default styles with CSS. .xdebug-error { width: […]

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