CookWithMe

I'm currently working on a project that needs alpha channels. I've been optimizing the images with pngcrush, which helped (interestingly, images put out with Adobe products where already pretty optimized, but I'm generating thumbnails locally with sips, where pngcrush often saves 60+%).

Still, for photographic images, file size often remains multiple times larger than what I'd expect from a high-quality JPEG.

This is a Smalltalk/Squeak program I worked on in University back in 2008. Apparently, it is still maintained and on GitHub now. As you can see, it's all text files, e.g. here is a simple asString method: https://github.com/HPI-SWA-Teaching/SwaLint/blob/master/pack...

I wouldn't call it exactly portable, as you need a Squeak image to run it. Then again, I wouldn't call a C-program written against the Win32 API portable, just because it is saved in text-files ;-)

Well, speaking for Squeak: The image is just a file. You can open it and poke around in it.

I don't recall why I had to do it exactly (did some meta-programming with Smalltalk at university... maybe my program overwrote some fundamental functions in Object or similar), but I don't remember it to be terribly complicated.

Definitely not as simple as opening a JSON file, but not as hard as decrypting the assembly of a compiled C-program or analyzing the memory of a crashed program.

I won't use Smalltalk/Squeak professionally, and I've come to enjoy functional programming much more than OO programming (at least for non-UI tasks, which I generally enjoy more). That said, I do not regret learning and investing time into Smalltalk [1].

I'm dismissing the syntax-argument, as Obj-C has brought a Smalltalk-like syntax into the mainstream [2].

The one thing that I REALLY miss about Smalltalk sometimes is the ease of working with (stored) objects. You basically don't have to do anything. So much CRUD - just removed. I don't know how much time I wasted debugging or optimizing Hibernate-stuff in Java, or wrestling with CoreData in iOS.

With Smalltalks image, you just don't have to waste ANY braincycles on storing your data [3]. If you've created the object in memory, consider it stored. If you remove the last reference to it, consider it deleted. It's just so much more natural (for an OO program) than working with an ORM.

However, the image in Squeak was, in fact, the most difficult thing to get used to. The image contains not only your runtime, it is also your IDE. As an IDE, it had some good parts (similar to a browser where you can inspect any HTML-element, you can inspect any (visual) object with a right click), and after a while I was kinda OK with navigating the (not file-based) code. That said, it does neither rival a full-blown IDE nor Vim - the IDE always kept disturbing my flow somehow. And, with limiting your methods to a maximum of 7 lines of code, you're bound to use the IDE a lot.

> It's also hard to isolate a "program" in Smalltalk -- it's all one big heap of code, you may have added methods to Object, who knows what.

This hasn't been my experience at all. If you use some sort of versioning (we used SVN), you'll have to separate your code from your workspace. I don't remeber it to be any harder than it is in a traditional environment (do a diff before you check-in to make sure you've cleaned up everything and if your code/unit tests use any non-code files, make sure to check them in as well).

[1] In fact, I'd recommend anyone who is serious about becoming a good programmer to learn several (>3) distinctly different programming languages (i.e. Java and C# are too similar to count). And Smalltalk is really different, not only syntax-wise but conceptually a lot of stuff will broaden one's horizon.

[2] Thankfully, it's being replaced by Swift now. I've worked with it in the last 3 weeks, but I'm more happy to see the C-stuff go and functional programming concepts arrive than the Smalltalk-stuff removed.

[3] Well, for a certain scale at least... not feasible for Big Data, but sufficient for your average mobile or desktop app.

I started out doing it between "coming home from work" and "having dinner", but that didn't really work out. Some days, I came really late and my GF was already waiting with dinner ready, other days I would go to meetup, hang out with friends etc.

I'm now doing Yoga and Meditation every morning after waking up, and there's just much less that can get in the way.

My GF and me are right now building an iOS app for forming a daily habit of Meditation and/or Yoga, based on our own experience and reading the book "Hooked: How to build habit-forming products". If you (or anyone else!) would like to beta-test, shoot me a mail at chris [at] screenscott.com :-)

I'm looking for (blurred) background photos onto which we can put iPhones for our editor. To give you an idea, please see the second and fourth example on our landing page at http://www.screenscott.com (please hover).

I'm most interested in a picture of an US Downtown (such as SF), looking from a sidewalk down a street. I've taken similar pics when I was in the US, but a) I was pointing the camera up, but to look realistically, the horizon needs to be in the upper half of the picture and b) if blurred with the camera lens, the pic looks much better.

It would be awesome if you could help us out :) Thanks!

Google (and Apple) calling my apps "free" did bring in massive amounts of bad reviews.

I think this is good news for any developer that wants to offer a "free-to-download" app with non-exploitative IAPs. Think of a magazine-app: People should get the app itself for free to be able to choose which issue they want to buy. There is no emotional engineering going on. You don't want to trick people into believing this app is useful if they don't spend money - in fact, you don't even want people to download your app if they won't spend money anyway. But the app store says FREE...

We had/have major problems with getting tons of bad reviews like "THIS APP IS NOT FREE, ASKS FOR IN APP PURCHASE!!11".

We played with the description, so it would start with "buy" or "purchase" (e.g. "BUY THE NEW ISSUE ABOUT XYZ"), which helped a little (although most people seem to skip the description). We tried screenshots of the point where one needs to purchase... which is sort of fine for iPad screenshots, but a waste for smaller phone screens. We do now also offer a lot more content for free initially, which seemed to have helped most.

I'm hoping for a consistent labeling of all apps (not only games!) that sets correct expectations for the user when downloading an app.

That is what I had in mind :) Actually, I want to start in Sri Lanka - been going to a great Sri Lankan restaurant here in Berlin that has a picture of Sigiriya, which I've looked at so many times that I need to see it in real life now :)

Definitely want to visit either Chennai or Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi. Maybe also Hyderabad. I'm still not sure whether I want to travel through more cities and spend less time in each, or visit fewer cities but have more time and experience the city in a less touristy fashion.

Well, I hope to be able to check my email at least once a day, but most hostels seem to offer wifi. For real working I plan to visit co-working spaces, though.

Thanks for your input, it's good to hear some real life experiences :)

I was planning to get a 2-month tourist visa and spend around 2 or 3 weeks in Bangkok, 4 weeks in Chiang Mai and another week or two in Krabi (they've got awesome rocks for climbing and deep water solo there!).

I was also considering staying the whole 6 months in Thailand, in which case I would have taken a language course (not only for the visa). But I figured I'd rather travel to more countries and may do that some other winter :)

Peter's blog is awesome and his post on bootstrapping in Bangkok was really encouraging to give it a try!

From what I've read, Bangkok is definitely more startup friendly, but Chiang Mai is also a very interesting town and has some great options for bouldering and rock climbing :)

I probably should have mentioned that I'm planning to switch cities regularly to see a broader range. I don't want to overspend money, but... I also wanted to travel the region for a long time and I will definitely mix in some holidays. Currently, I can keep the business running with 1 - 2 days of effort per week. I'd like to spend more time on it, of course, but it's not strictly necessary and I can spend some time sight seeing :)

I had three fellow students doing an internship in India, all within western companies. They all liked the country a lot - but I guess it's a lot easier when the company has already organized most of the stuff.

Do you have experience with co-working spaces in India? Do they have their internet connections sorted out?

I'm currently freelancing to get some $$$ in the bank again after using all my savings for our startup. We were planning to escape the German winter and work from SE-Asia and/or India as well.

I was seriously considering Thailand and liked the idea of spending time in Chiang Mai a lot... but the recent political turmoil has me worried. From press reports, it's really hard to make out what the impact on daily life is like and whether it's a good idea to go to Thailand at the moment or not. Where are you situated? What's the situation like at the moment?

Best of luck anyways!

The translation was no better than, say Google Translate. A mashup of Siri + Google Translate wouldn't have been any worse, and both technologies exist for some years. This is, unfortunately, hardly a breakthrough. Rather a 24h API hackathon project ;)

Re PR: I didn't suggest they should not be using PR, I said they should not play this silly PR game. It is not the method I'm after, it is the content.

Instead of pointing fingers and calling names, airbnb could lead a constructive dialog. I think they actually do have a valid story to tell on how their service is a net-benefit for society as a whole, how it's different from running a hotel and why their micro-entrepreneurs should therefore be taxed differently (!= not at all) from running a hotel.

Obviously, a micro-entrepreneur, like any other entrepreneur, runs a business, and the laws for businesses apply.

As an airbnb customer, I'd be more happy if they'd properly work on improving the legal situation than playing this silly PR game.

While this sentence is obviously a generalization, I'd say it applies more to the city in itself than to the startup scene. "The scene" is quite heterogeneous - yes, you'll find anti-capitalistic parts, but then there are also many people who once worked for one of the Samwers companies, the corporate incubators (axel springer, telekom, ...) etc. These people are probably not as hipster (although the corporate incubators try hard...), but they're everything but anti capitalist.

Of all the bigger scenes in Berlin, the startup scene as a whole is in my experience one of the least anti capitalist.

We've been using the desktop version. Would love to use something similar on a server, but jpegmini is overpriced for our scenario (I'll not have a dedicated AWS instance running for compressing images every second day or so). Will definitely check out this project :)

> Like the spam filters developed on top of email, the best Bitcoin services providers will develop the best software to iron out any details the Bitcoin protocol has still left open to abuse.

While spam-detection is certainly a lot better than, say, 5 years ago, it's not perfect. And while the cost of false-negatives is relatively low, false-positives can have bad consequences.

I don't think average people want to trust their money with something that is as trustworthy as a spam-filter is today, let alone go through the equivalent of "I had 10 penis-enlargement-scams in my inbox this morning"-technology-maturing-phase for a payment technology.

I haven't done any side-by-side testing of Chrome and FF (and am currently not working), so I can't reproduce the issue now.

The two little things that annoyed me most:

When inspecting an element, the element is per default collapsed (i.e. it's children are not shown). Often, I want to see the children as well - one more unnecessary click. This may be a good design decision if the tools are running on a laptop screen inside the main browser window, but I'm using two monitors and the tools take a whole screen.

Related, my main monitor has a terrible (=no) contrast between white and light gray if viewed from some angles. Often, if I inspect an element, I'm missing the highlight (light gray on white)... Yep, I should probably play with the monitor settings, although FF seems to be the only tool I have this problem with.

These are obviously not big issues and I don't miss the Chrome tools too much, so I'm sticking with FF. Keep up the good work!

How do you source translators? Does someone proof-read the translation? Basically, I'd like to know more about "Unbabel Crowd Translation community" :)

While I'd say this is perfect to support an app/consumer product, would you recommend it for a higher price SaaS product?

Depending on the size of the change, a reasonably competent programmer can pick up enough of a new programming language or framework in something between a weekend and a month of playing around with it.

However, if a company has invested years of work into a product, they can't simply switch the programming language or framework. Worst case is that they have to rewrite everything.

I'm in a position where pretty much exactly 5 years ago, at the company I worked at we evaluated which web-framework and programming language we should switch to and rewrite the product in (that was previously written in Perl).

We decided to go with Java, as it seemed a safe bet. That was before Sun was bought and, while Java wasn't an innovation leader, the language was being properly maintained. E.g. Lambdas didn't seem to far away, there was talk about replacing get/set methods with properties etc. Then Oracle came along and drove the whole process straight off a cliff. Meanwhile, even Objective C has both properties and blocks!

We chose the Seam Framework: Open Source, innovative, trying to get their stuff into the standards. The last part actually worked somewhat, however stateful web framework have proven to be a looser: Especially in enterprise, back in 08/09 browser performance was terrible and you'd try to do as much as possible on the server. Today, it's the other way around.

Plus, the stateful Seam Framework works really bad in the cloud. Each server needs memory to store session state. Want to load balance requests between servers? Want to be able to kill a server? Synchronize the state between servers and loose as much performance as you gain by adding a new server. Plus, you'll always have to buy beefy instances to have enough memory at hand. 5 years ago, cloud was much more about IaaS than PaaS and during the hype anything was ready-for-cloud and every solution had lots of initial quirks.

We tried to make a couple of safer bets 5 years ago. We lost. As a programmer, I easily moved on to greener pastures. But migrating that product off to something like Angular in the frontend or to a stateless architecture in the backend? Even if the new technology doubles the development speed, halfs the maintenance effort and hosting costs, it'll take a massive investment... by the time it pays off, half of the technology is probably hopelessly outdated again.

Your debugger should be able to display the corresponding .js file for each line in the call stack. Jump down the stack until you find your code.

Yes, it doesn't solve the problem (wanna talk about debugging freaking JSP or TinyMCE plugins? :p) but you won't

> spent the better part of a day trying to track down the source of this problem.

Anyway, for future reference, you may want to learn how to use the JS debugger (both Chrome and Firefox are quite good). You could have set a break/watchpoint on the variable 'foo'. Once it has changed, you can inspect the stack and would have found that the set('bar', ...) method was involved. Should be much quicker than printf-debugging...

> In the last 12 months, I've written over 115,000 words. The typical book is about 50,000 to 60,000 words, so I have basically written two books this year.

No, he hasn't written two books. A book is usually not a collection of random articles, but has a clear structure. Furthermore, only writing the book will never get it published. Whether one wants to self-publish or work with a publisher, both things will need a significant time/work investment at various points in time, and will most likely not be covered in his (initial) system.

Similarly, if you wanted to launch a software business, you'd probably create a system that includes writing software. If you're good, it may also include talking to users. If you'd forget about your goal and just followed that system, you'd never launch. Even if you arrive at a state where you want to release your software, you need to (consciously) break your system and care about one-off tasks like setting up a company, terms of service and what-not.

If you don't need a laptop, save the money and get a mini. Even though it hasn't been updated for well over a year, it still buys you the most RAM/$ and CPU/$.