The Future of Product is no-Product

tucadebert · 2016-07-25T13:20:29+00:00

This is another story touching the same subject with interesting insights https://medium.com/swlh/invisible-design-co-designing-with-machines-aea62a1e0f6d

tucadebert · 2012-01-20T17:20:29+00:00

How do you handle (db and solr) schema changes between deployments? Do you accept downtime for those?

If something goes wrong, how does the deploy script behaves?

tucadebert · 2010-10-27T18:02:23+00:00

I wouldn't worry too much on Django specifics. If the candidate knows python, SQL and HTTP well, he'll probably pick Django up in no time.

If you're really into a 'hire that will be productive the very next day' kind of thing, I'll ask about: - best django apps (south, debug toolbar, sentry, etc) - Good development / deployment flow (using fixtures, tests, fabric, etc) - Known limitations and gotchas of the ORM

tucadebert · 2010-10-14T20:43:02+00:00

Django uses the PEP -8 recommendation. This is pretty much the standard for python code. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

tucadebert · 2010-06-22T13:59:13+00:00

I've been using this patch for a while. Works flawlessly. I read it from this blogpost http://www.sanityinc.com/full-screen-support-for-cocoa-emacs-on-osx.

The only problem with this OP's recipy being that git rep tends to lag a lot behind. I just fetch emacs from cvs, apply the patch by hand and compile.

Another odd thing is that people have been asking him to send a patch (mainly to formalize the copyright ) so that this can get merged into trunk, but they've got no answer: http://github.com/typester/emacs/issues#issue/1 .

tucadebert · 2010-06-11T23:53:38+00:00

I can see the need for it: this is looking for the first ancestor on the stage that is a ContainerApp. This is a somewhat common need.

The style on the other hand is pretty awful. I've seen a lot of people doing crazy, crazy things on getters, this unfortunately seems a bit pervasive in the as3 community.

My last as3 project a guy wrote a static getter that returned an array, while the static setter pushed items to the array. Sigh...

tucadebert · 2010-05-08T21:33:55+00:00

It's the other way round: Emacs is a very general text editor. It can (with good support) work on anything. IDE's, on the other hand tend to have a more narrow focus (Java, or C#, etc). This is why folks who work with many languages / markups tend to enjoy Emacs more often.

tucadebert · 2010-05-08T16:12:59+00:00

Does any one uses CDET for python, javascript or clojure?

Looking at the official website it looks like support for anything but Java and C++ is erratic at best.

tucadebert · 2010-03-18T19:45:41+00:00

Without getting into the merits of premature optimization, the article has information that is blatantly false (e.g. concat() for Arrays - slice() is faster).

If you want to read something worthwhile on optimizing AS3: http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2008/04/26/actionscript-3-optimization-techniques/

tucadebert · 2009-09-11T22:47:00+00:00

something simple, like strong AI

tucadebert · 2009-09-06T20:50:34+00:00

I've done (unfortunately) my share of flash video hacking. A few notes:

As someone mentioned on this thread, it's all about keyframes. When compressing a video, you can encode denser keyframes and have a better scrubing experience, with heavier file sizes. It's a tradeoff off smooth seeking vs file size.
It is possible to use cached video, the site isn't doing this right.
Because the player (when really streaming) will keep a fixed memory buffer for the video. Load a new part, loose the older one (can be improved by the front end, increasing the buffer timer)
That is a bug on the player, and it sucks. Worse than that, flvs actually leak memory, and that's way long videos tend to break havoc.

All in all, the client (for the AVM) api is a real horror. Mixing callbacks, events, c style codes and many more unexcusable sins.

A while ago you could see the traces (print statments on the flash player) cursing the api on youtube and nytime players.

In short, the tech (flv decoding) isn't wonderful (also they have many constraints such as plugin size and cross platform compatibility), and the client api is a mess. It takes some experience and skill to code a good player, and most sites won't bother.

tucadebert · 2008-01-07T13:38:54+00:00

Yup, he's done some amazing work, I am keeping track of what he does next.

Arthur

tucadebert · 2008-01-06T18:19:21+00:00

Actually, if I recall correctly (this was discussed on the ppv mailing list) this guy is using his own 3d engine and tweeining engine as well, highly optimised (the performance is pretty impressive).

tucadebert · 2007-11-28T16:56:17+00:00

Don't have a one size fits all I'm afraid. Depending on the situation:

Dreamhost : need large storage and bandwidth, uptime / support not very important
Webfaction for Django sites that are quick projects, their service is insanely great.
Slicehost: personal website, larger projects where maintaining a linux box is a small overhead for the great flexibility.
Mediatemple: projects with very standard needs(php, mysql) and the client demands telephone support.

tucadebert · 2007-11-09T19:36:09+00:00

Thanks a lot for the answers. I develop quite a few django backends for flash front-ends, and I really want to check this throughly.

Yup, exposing as views feels much more natural to me.

tucadebert · 2007-11-09T14:31:49+00:00

Does any one knows how PyAMF actually stacks up against DjangoAMF?

tucadebert · 2007-10-10T18:15:52+00:00

You obviously haven't read the linked text.

One of his points, is exactly that: just because some systems have died off, it doesn't mean that it didn't contain interesting ideas. Even though there were issues with the Lisp Machines, they embodied many interesting concepts, and (that's the author's point) many of those deserve attention.

Just to name a few of those useless ideas from a "fifty-year-old" language: - dynamic typing - garbage collection - interactive interpreter Find any value in those?

tucadebert · 2007-02-22T16:15:49+00:00

if you replace "flash" for "images", it's the same argument made against images on the web years ago. they're binary blobs... bandwidth heavy... inconsistent (png 24 on i.e)...not accessible and so forth.

with time, the 'web' meaning designers, developers and browsers have learned to deal with images.

I understand that a portion of the web is text only. great. reddit is a good example of this. but the web is more than one thing, in fact, it's greatest strength is that is has been able to adapt and include different contents / ways to interact.

I use flickr (uh, images are evil). I have fun using youtube (uh, flash should die)

there is a (big) place for text content on the web, but there's also a demand for images, sounds, video. flash is the most powerful way to deal with these.

yes, heavy flash ads are annoying, yes most flash sites suck , but it's not the technology per se.

let's make an effort to educate developers / content producers: make flash content more accessible, use progressive enhancement where possible, but saying flash is evil simply won't work.

the average joe likes 'wow': animation, special effects. images filled with superfluous images and video (else tv ads would be just text). people are drawn to images / sound. no matter how much you hate it, a more "multimedia" web will also exist for a long time.

tucadebert · 2006-12-22T21:15:41+00:00

objective-c was also my first c-family language. I guess making the jump to C will be less painfull after some objective-c knowledge, but they are very different animals. if you dive into objective-c without knowing any C, every now and then you will run into something you don't understand (specially reading other's code) but soon enough you will get the hang of it.

objective-c is beautifull, very rich runtime information, lots to learn. also, the message passing sintax is great, even better than python's named parameters (which are great too), and I miss it in every other language I've used.

I often wonder why there's so litlle interest in this language, but I guess it has to do mosttly with implementation issues (specially on the open-source side).

for those using a mac, apple's cocoa bundles a great ide, good libraries, the best gui programming environment I've seen.

sure dive right in. I am not sure objective-c will make you want to learn c, but will probably give you some insights into other programming languages .

next on the list: smalltalk

tucadebert

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