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MikeW

206 karma · joined January 23, 2008

#--hackrtrackr:SaZzAaIO1pFmF2YJxpsMXNdQAiNPH9#
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MikeW··on Amazon.com down
Your DNS may be poisoned. I guess this is another positive argument for SSL cert pinning in browsers so you are less likely to accept the invalid cert
MikeW··on Customizing the Mac to behave like Xmonad
The guy doing this review was only able to get 3.5 - 4 hours out of the battery. http://www.nomobile.ru/reviews/162216.html Mediocre horizontal screen resolution for a 14" too
MikeW··on Engadget's Samsung Galaxy S III review
Under the same conditions, the SIII came out bottom of the outdoor test here: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/45801/which-smartphone-best-...
MikeW··on Back That Gmail Up
imapsync doesn't work perfectly with gmails imap server. There are multiple scripts out there just to work around as many edge cases as possible.
MikeW··on Show HN: my Mac app just got fireballed
Will you post traffic stats and any other measurements you can come up with?
MikeW··on Swiftype (YC W12) Builds Site Search That Doesn’t Suck
Does this use ElasticSearch?
MikeW··on Combinator v1.1 - A simple Hacker News client for Windows Phone.
I just had a look at it, going back from a page to the listings gives a full second of a lag/black screen while the Top article screen is being recreated.

You truncate all the article titles. Don't do that, it means I can't read them.

MikeW··on Show HN: Native Analytics (work in progress)
Building analytics from access logs is massively unreliable. I have a few domains that answer for http traffic but only serve "Welcome to nginx". When I tail the access logs I see thousands of requests from obvious bots, but also that traffic seems to be pretending to be other forms of traffic also.

There are some bots that pretend to be phones browsing around, IE, firefox.

Just remember that relying purely on access log analytics isn't something that will return accurate results.

MikeW··on Bootstrap for Facebook apps
Wonderful. I recently built a Facebook iFrame app and burned so many hours trying to make my app look vaguely inline with what a user expects a facebook. This is absolutely the perfect kit for that. It's a really terrible reflection on Facebook that they didn't provide exactly this themselves.

Every other "platform" provides UI guidelines with libraries/frameworks to allow others build products native to their platform. Facebook have made no good attempt at this, which is why this is a great project!

MikeW··on PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute
My poor Violin cost less than USD $100, you really ought to have got a very nice violin for USD $2500! If you still have it, it might be worth examining it and looking for a better resale value all these years later.
MikeW··on AskHN: Help me raise funds for my first Windows Phone for WP development
I don't know why he needs $1000 either. I bought a cheap older unlocked WP7 device for under $250 just by keeping an eye out for bargains.

Contact your local MS rep. I nearly every market, the MS evangelism people have devices for people to test on.

MikeW··on Show HN: Export your data from Twitter/Facebook/Gowalla/Google+ as JSON
It's against Twitters TOS to provide a service that can present a users tweets as a downloadable dump. This new restriction was brought in earlier this year.
MikeW··on $80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next?
I got my Blade/San Francisco for £75. From time to time there are deals, Argos was selling them on discount, some online retailers were too, Orange had a weekend sale on them a few months ago, and of course the second hand market. But yes you are right, they are closer to £100 than £50.

http://blade.modaco.com/ is a real gem and truly the best place to get all sorts of roms for the phone.

MikeW··on $80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next?
I have a variant of that Huawei phone charging in front of me. The battery life is appalling - It is charged twice a day. Luckily there are android mods that have multitouch integrated back into the rom.

However I paid €25 for it on prepay after a rebate from my operator. An incredibly inexpensive device!

MikeW··on $80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next?
I have that phone. I run an Android 2.3.4 mod for it. I now get several days worth of battery life, multitouch and a very smooth responsive UI. That phone has proven to be a very hackable device and there have been some GREAT roms released in the last few months for that aging hardware.
MikeW··on Top Gear caught faking another electric car "failure"
How would they know the car was driven in loops for 10 miles in Lincoln unless the device was recording {the GPS coords, engine state, battery state}.

This sounds like spyware. I'd love to know if that data was being periodically fed back to Nissan wirelessly or read at the time the car was returned.

I'd love to know if this tracking is fitted in all their cars of this model, or just ones they hand out for review.

Such fine-grained tracking doesn't sound like a good thing at all.

MikeW··on New university to rival Oxbridge will charge £18k a year
I worry that bringing these type of colleges to the UK will directly reflect what has already failed in the USA. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n11/howard-hotson/short-cuts
MikeW··on Hacker Typer - now you can type like a hacker in movies
Nice easter egg when you tap alt 3 times.
MikeW··on Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS
As far as I can tell, there are no Open Source streaming servers that support (realtime) HTTP Live Streaming. I think this is a massive shame and I would LOVE to see one.

So I think it makes great sense for Adobe to add support for this as there are so few HTTP Live Streaming solutions out there right now.

MikeW··on Chatroulette for text messages
Lissn.com reminds me of a far more polished "chatroulette for text" except I was able to talk to a lady in Japan for half an hour about the recent tragedy on Lissn, and I didn't have to disclose my cellphone number to anybody or get billed for using the service.
MikeW··on Michael Robertson (mp3.com) discusses Entrepreneurship and the Music Industry.
This is a very interesting item as I believe the 4 out of the 5 user accounts that have commented on this (in the last 3 hours) are part of a voting ring.

Fascinating to see it.

MikeW··on Why LaTeX is Superior to Office
When writing my dissertation I burned a couple of days trying to get up to speed with LaTeX as it came so highly recommended by smart people I respect. However the tooling let me down. Now I understand one of the joys of LaTeX is the ability to write with any text editor but there were a many things I wish made my life easier. Like an editor that actually ships with Spelling, tag completion, helpers and importantly... good documentation for how the UI works.

I was constantly frustrated. What about inserting a picture? I was pointed to packages to try to locate for my OS & install, perl scripts to convert my PNGs to whatever format my tex distribution uses. I wished whatever editor I used had a simple Insert->Picture menu that could do all of the work behind the scenes.

So I ditched that and bought Office 2010 Student edition for €69 and wrote my dissertation in Word. I got the formatting just how I wanted it within a few hours. The Navigation View was fantastic for visualising the structure of my document. I was able to drag and drop paragraphs, sections, chapters around with ease and even though I spent a few hours fiddling with the styles, I was able to turn out a PDF that looked absolutely terrific that had none of the formatting mess in that article.

I will take the time to learn LaTeX better in the future, but if minds are to be won, better intuitive tools need to be built that HELP the writer, not writing long articles saying why it's the best.

MikeW··on Gmail accidentally resetting accounts
Do not do this.

I mirrored my Google Apps email account by setting up a rule to forward to my Microsoft-hosted Outlook.com account. It uses the same spam filtering system as Hotmail. A serious problem happened when perhaps 10 spam messages over a few days made it through gmails spam filter into my inbox, and on to my Outlook.com account.

Sadly when my gmail inbox started filling up with bounce messages from the MSN Postmaster, I realised that Outlook.com blocked my gmail account for spam abuse - SYSTEM WIDE. I was completely unable to send ANY mail to ANY Hotmail or similar Microsoft-hosted email service.

Dealing with the MSN Postmaster team was very frustrating. They told me to go to complain to gmail instead.

TL;DR: Don't forward all your email to Hotmail because their spam filter is so crazy, they'll eventually block your email address from mailing into Hotmail hosted servers again.

MikeW··on Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff
NaCl is disabled by default on the Cr48 development laptop. I would at least hope this means they start enabling NaCl by default in the ChromeOS source tree.
MikeW··on Mozilla’s Rejection of NativeClient Hurts the Open Web
Google don't even enable NaCl by default on their Cr-48 laptops!
MikeW··on Review of the 11" MacBook Air
Are you sure the Unibody Aluminum Macbook (Macbook 5,1) supports 6GB of RAM? I have this laptop and both the apple specs and crucial say it can only support 2x 2GB.
MikeW··on Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone
The author says Marketplace approval is usually quick at about 2 days.

Except when you are one of the many developers whose apps get stuck in the marketplace, that never get approved or rejected because of lousy infrastructure on Microsofts side.

A developer I highly respect wrote about his ongoing struggle getting his Google Voice client out for WP7. If he wasn't already known from his MVP work, it's unlikely he would even have got those [extremely unhelpful] responses from Microsoft.

http://www.koushikdutta.com/2010/12/windows-phone-marketplac...

MikeW··on Dremel – Google's tool for analyzing trillion-row tables in seconds [pdf]
Seeing 'Haggis' really brought a smile to my face. I wish it were the case but 'Honeycomb' is the name there.
MikeW··on Heroku for...
There's also Moncai.com and the author frequents this site
MikeW··on Leaving .Net
Do NOT use the fastcgi server for ASP.NET. They are too unstable for use in production. Use mod_mono instead.
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