Categories
tech

How to Avoid Adding Passwords to Git

I was working on figuring out how to log ftp scripts, and discovered how to use a remote file: .netrc to store usernames and passwords. So I’m going to have to apply that to a number of scripts in the DigitalSignage program I’m working on. Hmmm, which makes me realize I’m doing the same for the main RETS library I’m accessing!

Then I randomly clicked on a YouTube “Tech Code” channel and watched a guy describing how he accidentally hard-coded a password into his program, and saved it to git–thereby uploading it to anyone who has access to the source code. Yikes!

The solution to hard-coding usernames and passwords into programs that get moved about is to use an environmental file: .env (for python or laravel for instance) that stores the either local or remote (test / production) settings. Of course!

 

Categories
journal

I’d like a Check for A Million Dollars…


A friend wrote me saying he was coming up from the city this weekend and was there anything I’d like. I was thinking along the lines of “A check for a million dollars would be nice.”

Later in the day I was listening to a podcast on the way to town, and I heard:

Those who speak of faith (even without “radical self-understanding”) are involved with the Principle of Divine Communion, because they somehow “know” that the “twenty watts” of their ordinary life contain practically nothing of the Vast Power of Existence. Faith is the presumption of the Vast Power, the “Unlimited Wattage” of the One Divine Reality. The “Narcissistic” hope for the goods of life–“God, I want you to give me a million dollars”–is not faith. Faith is leaving behind the limited principle of the body-mind-“self” and the “world”, and presuming the Greater Principle of the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Divine Reality.

from MY “BRIGHT” SIGHT, by His Divine Presence, Avatar Adi Da Samraj, from the talk, “Guru, Faith, and Divine Communion”, page 9.

Categories
FinTech

The Train Has Not Left the Bitcoin Station

This is a short excerpt from Venture Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya on CNBC, Dec 12, 2017.

I wrote an article about bitcoin in 2013. There is so much asymmetric upside here. This is a thing that goes to roughly the value of gold. There’s very little downside.

Take 1% of your money and put it into schmuck insurance. This is now a confidence game, this is a hedge against autocratic regimes and banking structures that are corrosive to how the world needs to work properly. You cannot have central banks infinitely printing currency, you cannot have guys with misdirected and misguided fiscal policy…

So we’ve seen the first few chapters of this and now we have to see the great unwind. [Referring to QT: quantitative tightening]

All I’m saying is its a hedge against the infrastructure that made those decisions without our input is a smart thing.

I think 1 bitcoin will be worth $100,000 in 3 to 4 years, and in the next 20 years, a million dollars a coin.

Former Facebook Exec Chamath Palihapitiya On Social Media, Bitcoin, And Elon Musk (Full) | on CNBC.

Here’s the link: 10:20 in,  Let’s Talk Bitcoin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zyRpq2ODrE&t=620s

Categories
Marketing tech

Web Analytics: First Steps

Step 1: Find the best rated “Google Analytics” book on Amazon Search

OK, I found a couple books: Web Analytics 2.0, and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, both by Avinash Kaushik.  Looking good, but really old in internet years. I remember making a point to study the first book a long time ago…

Step 2: Google him!
I found a few interesting things: 1) his website is called Occam’s Razor. It formed the basis for his books, so I should be able to get a lot of info from them.

Next I found: “5 Avinash Kaushik blogs every digital marketer should read” in google search. Why not?! I’m getting distracted.

In signing up for Avinash’s newsletter, he refers me to an article featuring an icon of the design industry: Dieter Rams: Ten Principles of “Good Design”, one can’t go wrong studying Dieter!

So, time to do the “hour a day” in reading up on this. (Only problem, I’m already overbooked!)

Categories
Education Participation

Everything Altogether is Trying to Be a Revelation for you

Everything altogether is trying to be a revelation for you. It is just that you are not sensitive to it in your ordinary habit. The shaman, you see, has entered into a discipline to make himself sensitive. It is not that he is making the magic happen. The magic is already there. He is just not sensitive to it, not in a position to observe it. Thus, he must engage in a discipline that enables him to participate in what is already happening. Then all of a sudden he sees all kinds of magical things.

–the World-Friend, Adi Da, from The Transmission of Doubt, Talks and Essays on the Transcendence of Scientific Materialism through Radical Understanding, page 239