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allbutloston I am a programmer

I know a guy (UK) who was able to retire after consulting for COBOL y2k compliance. I think big bucks were floating around back then at least, not sure about the current situation.

allbutloston [dead]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122000

And there was a whiff of astroturfing back then as well... Or perhaps I'm just being cynical

allbutloston Not cool, Reddit

Seems to be this acc. http://www.reddit.com/user/MarkDennehy/submitted/

allbutloston Testing IE6, 7, 8 and 9 on Mac OS X

Go to your user page and enable showdead to see comments that have been killed.

Some people may have been shadowbanned without realising it

allbutloston Why my Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone

I actually think he is being facetious. It may be true to say "it's not android", but as far as they end-user is concerned it _is_ android. It's got the logos, came with an android sticker on the box. For that user, when it comes to purchase or recommend another phone, will they make the same distinction or will their previous android experience influence their choice?

allbutloston My wife's and my holiday weekend project: A database of intro books

Really nice idea! Should save me trawling through amazon reviews to see if the particular book I'm after is suitable for newcomers.

heads up: http://bestintrobook.com/books/iphone+programming gives me an error, although http://bestintrobook.com/books/iphone+development works fine.

allbutloston Opening up Posterous to 3rd Party Developers

The documentation website and inline testing of this api looks great, but here's hoping they keep the old api (as documented at apidocs.posterous.com) alive.

They were kind enough to re-add location data to posts coming through the api on request as our just-launched project (http://innertubemap.com/) is dependent on it.

allbutloston Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

input[type="reset"] { display: none }

Should do it on most browsers.

allbutloston Code Standards & Front-end Development Best Practices

Using html5 (or 4) the meta tag doesn't need to be closed. Personally I prefer to do close or self-close tags anyway as I entered the game with xhtml, whose syntax I still prefer.

allbutloston Cloud9 IDE - Your code anytime, anywhere

Same, and I tried again with the same result a few times. Looks promising though - looking forward to giving it a try!

[edit] tried on FF 3.6.13 and Chrome 10, snow leopard

allbutloston Review My App: WhoMails.Me. Scrape Your GMail Account For Contacts

Without wanting to be too pedantic, I'd need to see a privacy policy before you get past the "A third-party service is requesting permission to access your Google Account." page.

I'm also not 100% what the content of the email you send me will be. A list of people who email me? What format will the export be in?

Nice landing page though!

allbutloston IE9 Release Candidate now available

I've been running the beta for a couple of months now, testing sites I've been building on it as I go along. I can tentatively say that yes, it falls into the "all the rest" category for most common css/js issues that have plagued all its predecessors to varying degrees.

It has still felt too slow, bloated and plagued with dialogues ("I can run faster, disable add-ons", "This page wants to use flash" etc) to serve as my main browser (currently FF for work and chrome for play), but the sooner IE users move to IE9 the better for front-end devs the world over. Thumbs up from me to MS for IE9.

allbutloston Running Pure Django Projects on Google App Engine

I can recommend djangy wholeheartedly, having been a happy beta user for a few weeks now. The guys are responsive & helpful and the service is great.

As someone new to python & django, my main pain-point was deployment (haven't picked up fabric yet). For this djangy shines.

allbutloston Facebook’s Gmail Killer, Project Titan, Is Coming On Monday

Fairly recent [1] stats seem to point to:

  hotmail:  360m+ active accounts
  yahoo:    275m+ active accounts
  Gmail in 3rd, followed by AOL webmail [2}

Although yahoo! mail seems to have a more active user base as it's ahead on most site ranking systems [3].

Sources: [1] http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statist... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/14/gmail-nudges-past-aol-email... [3] http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.ht...

allbutloston Learn Python The Hard Way Now For Sale

Just ordered, been waiting for this one - I find it much easier following a book like this when it's printed and sitting beside my computer, not as a browser tab to be constantly switched back and forth.

+1 for LCTHW from me

(ps coupon code LEAF305 will get a small discount on the lulu order).

allbutloston Ask HN: Anyone making a living from just 1 app?

Just bought totalfinder - great work, it solves a lot of issues I had with finder.

allbutloston The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

Ben Goldacre on badscience.net has a lot to say on this sibject, including a new related post today. http://www.badscience.net/2010/05/a-staggeringly-weak-interv...

allbutloston "Tough. Django produces XHTML."

<!DOCTYPE html>

easy to remember and triggers standards mode

allbutloston Ask HN: What's the best webapp UI you've seen and what was used to make it?

Campaign Monitor has an excellent UI, giving short client training sessions as a result. Built in .NET with jQuery