Chametz Contract/Bill of Sale for Pesach

BILL OF SALE We, Ariella and Michael Radwin (“SELLER”), in consideration of $1,500 (one thousand five hundred US Dollars), do hereby sell, transfer and convey to John Doe (“BUYER”), our not-Kosher-for-Passover food (“CHAMETZ”) and Sascha the cat (“CAT”). Chametz are leavened foods that are forbidden on the Jewish holiday of Passover. According to Jewish law, […]

gzip encoding (mod_deflate) on DreamHost

It took me all of 10 minutes, and I just sped up Hebcal.com by enabling Apache mod_deflate on DreamHost. I used the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to measure the performance of Hebcal, and it complained that we weren’t gzip-compressing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Turns out this is not enabled on DreamHost sites by default. What a surprise! So […]

Context switching

It’s the start of a new year, and like everyone else I’m trying to get back into the swing of things. For the past couple of weeks during my time off from work, I’ve been coding up a redesign of Hebcal.com based on the Bootstrap front-end framework. It’s great fun to learn something new and […]

UTF-8.com redesign

I’ve been maintaining a collection of UTF-8 resources at utf-8.com for the past 13 years. I registered the domain name back in 1999 when I began working on internationalization and character sets. After years of looking like I hand-coded the page in Emacs html-mode (which I did), I finally decided to move to a more modern […]

Commercial Graph: A Map of Financial Relationships

I’m speaking today about Intuit’s Commercial Graph at the Strata + Hadoop World Conference. Slides: Commercial Graph: A Map of Financial Relationships (pptx format). Abstract Imagine the social graph where personal relationships are replaced by commercial relationships based on real financial data. Imagine the possibilities for small businesses to grow, connect, transact and prosper. Intuit is uniquely […]

Annual tech refresh: move to WordPress

radwin.org got compromised recently due to some sort of server-side vulnerability. Was it a MovableType bug? Some stale version of phpBB or a vulnerability in the ancient copy of PHP4 itself? Who the heck knows. I did a slash and burn and removed all stale PHP/CGI stuff and upgraded to PHP5. Looks like I got […]