RobGR

I would like to get a Dell XPS as my next laptop, so that I can try out their Sputnik project, which I think has some interesting ideas ( config management built into a desktop for switching between different development profiles ).

1) Ebay / Paypal take too high a cut. 2) Forced use of the Paypal payment method. 3) The auctions aren't real auctions - if they extended the bidding time each time a bid was placed, it would eliminate sniping software. 4) Instead of fraud prevention via software triggers placing arbitrary limits, they should devote some money to a team that would buy and sell igconito and seek legal prosecution of people who commit fraud. 5) A specific kind of fraud, shill bidding, is actually in Ebay's interest in the current setup, because it tends to raise prices overall.

If you start a competitor, you will face the chicken-and-egg problem of all social or peer to peer businesses - no sellers will come if there are no buyers, no buyers will come if there are no sellers. You might be able to break through this by focusing on products that Ebay currently bans, such as guns or used software.

Another method of breaking in might be to focus on people who are doing well on Etsy but moving up and out of craftsman to small manufacturing. To get them you would offer a combination of capital ( pre-pay for the product, for example ), connections and advice in dealing with various manufacturers, and a fullfillment service. That presumes you can get capital your self, of course.

My next linux laptop will probably be a Dell XPS from the Sputnik project: http://bartongeorge.net/2012/05/07/introducing-project-sputn...

I think it's interesting because of the notion of having some sort of Chef or other configuration management on Github, and then being able to fork that for particular development purposes or preferences and switch between them. I gather from some of the other interviews that the sputnik project is aiming for something like that.

As far as hardware goes, I like Lenovo ThninkPads best, and the Dell E65xx series that kind of copy them are also pretty good. I expect to screw around googling driver settings and etc on any new hardware I buy, so I'm not to worried about "just working". Someone else's definition of everything "just working" probably isn't good enough for me anyway.

Running clones of specific production environments in a VM is a good idea, using it as your main everyday interface is not, IMHO.

For this to work, they have to be able to use your work to make more money than you charge them. If they can't, politely explain that to them; tell them they need to think of a way to get more out of what you do, or you will have to find other clients.

It's hard, and I am bad at it, but I think doing this is key to "growing up" and being a successful freelancer.

I agree with this assessment, except that as a person who specializes in scaling Drupal I tend to be familar with the more common problems, and not too intimidated by them. In addition, you can now buy fairly scalable hosting from Pantheon or others.

I would add one comment: most projects fail because they don't get written, and they never get to the stage where scaling matters. Thus, I would focus on picking a tool that will allow you to get your project to the minimum viable product stage as cheaply as possible.

I don't think you are using the word "bully" correctly.

GoDaddy is a powerful and monied entity that has been caught paying money to convince the most powerful and monied entity in the world, the United States Government, to implement a set of rules that would generally make it easier for rich corporations to silence poor critics. The GoDaddy boycotters are not bullying the SOPA supporters.

The GoDaddy boycott does have a certain amount of groupthink and mindless sloganeering in it. Perhaps this is what you mean when you say "bullying".

GoDaddy tried to recruit the largest power in the world to help silence the smallest, and you find lobbying others to boycott them "piling on" ?

You say "GoDaddy is entitled to their opinions" but remember, GoDaddy spent money to make it easy for you to have your opinions removed from the internet. They didn't just "express their opinion" that a corporation should be able to shut down critical sites just for asking, they set about to make it happen. They engaged in no dialog or conversation with you, they just tried to get it done.

Firstly, I think the point of the demo of loading that many integers into the array, was to get a good measure of the memory usage per array item; by making the array big small one-time overhead memory usage is washed out in the average.

As to why you would want to do that in real life -- if you have written a large system with accompanying libraries, objects, or other infrastructure, then even if you pass of some sort of calculation to background or crontab tasks, you still might want to use your PHP code. I do this for some of the Drupal sites I work on - I setup drush commands that will do intensive calculations like most-related-article and etc to run behind the scenes have the results cached.

The best solution would be to improve PHP's memory usage so that the benefits may be had on page loads as well. I suspect (but have little hard evidence) that the size of PHP code and data structures impedes performance as threads and processes get pulled in and out of the CPU.

A secondary solution would be to take some of the libraries out there for doing specific operations, like scientific commputing and numerical libraries, and make them available to your code as a PHP extension. Obviously that doesn't solve as many problems as fixing PHP does.

I would think a lot depends on the demographics of your market. Impulse buyers will be deterred by a non-standard payment method, meaning you have to have the most common. An audience like ycombinator readers will be more likely to evaluate, sign up, and use something alternative, and may be more likely to refuse to use Paypal at all.

My advice is to pick on what is easiest to integrate with at first. Regardless of the payment method, you should be able to validate the idea by getting at least a few customers, and then add payment options going forward.

At the Texas Linux Fest, there was a great talk that reviewed non-Java ways of programming on Android:

http://texaslinuxfest.org/sessions/decaffeinated-robot-devel...

http://www.deepbluelambda.org/events/live/decaffeinated-robo...

There are some comparisons of code size for the different languages and environments. That was probably the most informative talk I attended at the Linux Fest.

I attended this session. It was very impressive. Obviously quite a lot of work went into surveying the whole field of Android development environments.

I've been playing with python and the Android Scripting Environment for Android stuff, but after this talk I will probably look at writing some "native" apps in C/C++.

I do, and I read them.

Proof read yours carefully, and make sure the cover letter is not a form letter. You might use the same resume for all applications, perhaps with a few tweaks, but the cover letter should show that you did some research on the company and the position.

A few disconnected thoughts:

* They own the business, not you. If you owned a part then you would be able to make decisions like spending resources on improving the codebase. In the end, it is up to them to run it, not you.

* Businesses come and go, relationships stay. If you think the guy is a good boss stay in touch; even if your notice causes a lot of bad emotions and someone throws a drama fit, just treat it like a temporary thing and it will be -- call them back in two months to see how things are going and they won't even mention it.

* Don't believe that you owe them any sort of extended stay. You can help their new hire transition via email support from your new place. If you agree to stay longer than 2 weeks, they are likely to delay the new hire by that much.

Another great one:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW...

It is always great to revisit this archive. Here are two of my favorites:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW...

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1305...

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW...

Perhaps others might also post their favorites here ?

The Internet Archive or the Library of Congress may archive much of the material:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitters_entire_archive...

http://www.archive.org/

If you want to archive it in a searchable way yourself, you may find that a very technically daunting task. People use large clusters of computers and pretty advanced technology to attempt stuff like this.

On the other hand, if you restrict the amount of data you want to ingest, you can get pretty far just by configuring existing software. You could set up Drupal on a hosting service that include Apache Solr search/indexing, such as Acquia or Pantheon, and then configure Drupal to pull in information from selected twitter searches and feeds of various blogs, and archive it.

Eventually you would run into space and volume restrictions. If you picked enough data sources, you eventually might max out the rate of wrties to MySQL. But you can go pretty far just by point and click configuring what exists.

According to the link, Bernstein was at least partially successful when represented by the EFF and his case was dismissed when he represented himself.

I wonder if he still thinks it was worth it.

It's sad to think of the enormous amount of human effort wasted by people who blindly copied that behavior in a cargo-cult like attempt to get rich.

I would advise against that. There are too many places in he mess of tables of data configuration that might refer to specific auto-increment id columns were things will get out of sync. Basically you are trying to do MySQL replication on specific tables only, but there are too many relationships among all the tables.

If it is a small amount of content, such as a handful of pages for a brochure site, putting them in a feature might be best.

If it is a site where customers or visitors generate content on the site, then periodically re-initialize your dev and staging environments with copies of the live DB, running it through a script to anonymize all the user info and change passwords and etc.

If you want to create content on your dev and move it live, then doing a full database copy and moving it live, with settings that are particular to live overridden in settings.php, is probably the best way. I advise against this, basically you are re-launching the site for every change.

If you are truely desiring to be able to create content in multiple different places and move it to live, then probably the best thing to do explicitly program and configure for that, by specifying feeds of the content and setting up the different sites to ingest each other's feeds.

Professor Damith seems rather reasonable in this correspondence, and I don't think you are providing any evidence that "innovation is marked down."

Damith points out that your grade is based on the product, not the process, because he can't measure that; a good product is a proxy for what must be a good process. He might have added, that in the real world only the product matters, and if a process was against all rules of Software Engineering and produced a better product, then the rules of Software Engineering would be rewritten.

It is very hard to rate or grade programmers. If you continue in the business you will soon find yourself attempting it, when you interview people to select your employees or your boss. If you can come up with any good ways of doing this, you will go far :)

When it comes to "how innovation is discouraged and frowned upon in an Asian context", I would suggest that the quickest way to find anti-innovation sentiment is by looking at any large bureaucratic institution or company, not by looking at ethnicity or region. I recommend to you the book "The Organization Man" by William Whyte, particularly the chapter "The Fight Against Genius". You may find it resonates with your experiences.

Look into these guys:

http://wpengine.com/

Look into the cheapest Rackspace cloud servers.

I think it's an interesting question, but I think it will be technically difficult to differentiate between a person using data (say, with a plugin that indexes everything they browse, or a separate program that indexes their browser cache) and something like the Bing toolbar.

Could you make one with a piece of card taped to a microswitch ? You could adjust the size of the card and the angle of the microswitch until it detected if the fan was on or off.

There's this fellow who posts by the name "gnosis" on the interwebs, and I'm pretty sure he's the real killer of JFK. The DNA evidence for his innonence is . . . wait for it . . . NONEXISTENT !!!11!!! OMFG CALL NANCY GRACE NOW !!!

Can you give any information or share any scripts about how you generated and converted these ?

Move on as nicely as possible to everyone, including yourself, but move on. If you don't have ideas and plans on what will make the sale happen, don't sit around waiting for lighting to strike.

Tell the founders your thoughts. Tell them that you will stick around for 2 months to interview and train your successor, or that you can just walk away if they want to go "clean" for a replacement, and indicate that if you are presented with the replacement to train you'll leave early. Spin it along the lines of "This situation is not one that I am improving, so I need to find a different position somewhere, where I bring a lot more value; this is in your interest and mine. We both need to be doing something different, because the current track isn't giving us our sale, so if isn't going to happen with me hopefully it will happen with a new person."

It's possible you might regret it later, but that's true of all big decisions. If they are sold soon after you leave, it's not necessarily that you missed something, it may be that your leaving catalyzed things and lit a fire under the appropriate asses, either buyers or sellers, and that it wasn't something that would have happened if you had stayed.

It's impossible to say what will happen to your reputation or etc; but after all, just coasting for a couple of years doesn't necessarily look good either.

I say all this mainly because it sounds like you want to leave anyway. Many people would regard 15% of 1.5 million in a stable company a very good position, and would stay and accumulate savings.

You don't mention what opportunities you have elsewhere.

If this is the worst, you must not have read very many :)

This is basically a nice collection of the arguments of the anti-global-warming crowd, not that well structured or anything but worth flipping through the slides at least.

I LOL'd at page 77, the trend-graph of seawater rise projections.

I doubt there is the evidence to support the twin claims that 1) a program of some sort could change the temperature trend and 2) humans would benefit from changing it.

I suspect that to the extent that humans have changed global trends, a large portion of it has to do with water vapor from our vast increase in agricultural irrigation and diversion. It is probably not possible to address that without starving a lot of people.

In fact, I think that inspite of any warming effect, we probably should be increasing the amount of water diversion and storage. If the water that is currently washing away whole towns in Australia could be stored somewhere or diverted into the desert, the payoff in world food prices and economy would be large. Those are the types of huge projects that typically can only be done by national or even international organizations, and if everyone is meeting in Copenhagen or whereever to discuss huge amounts of international money, that's what they should be talking about.

I do web development using Ubuntu. Which linux distribution you use is really a matter of how you intend to do systems administation, as the tools for web development are pretty much the same on all the distributions.

I agree with you, but I think your terminology is inexact when you say:

"The money is being absorbed by the wars and the trade deficits."

Wars do not absorb money, they absorb wealth -- money is paid to make a bullet, and after the bullet is shot the money remains to decrease the value of all money, and the bullet is gone.

Trade deficits can move accumulated wealth (or money) around, but they also don't absorb it; a foreign country might absorb money, if they decide to stockpile it.

Those mail-in rebates are bad; they depend upon a minority of people being able to successfully redeem them. They hide from the market the information that should be encapsulated in a price that reflects cost and demand.

If a manufacturer's product is not moving, instead of a mail in rebate, they should pay the retailer directly to lower the price. This forces manufacturers to face the music when they make something that no one wants or is overpriced; they will be more careful next time, or the bad ones will go out of business; that is the way the market is supposed to work.

Tolerating these rebates is like allowing bad manufacturers to cover their loses by offering gullible consumers a game of three card monte.

The way to make it honest, is to setup a table outside the door to Fry's or Best Buy, and offer a dollar, a cup of coffee and a donut, or some other small reward to every shopper will agree to sit down right there, fill out the rebate, apply the stamp you will supply, and mail it. With any kind of reasonable rate of return the rebates would vanish.

The reason why your idea will fail, is that it is too hard to transmit all the purposefully burdensome documentation required to retrieve the rebate.