angkec

It's too expensive and has dangerous vendor lockin. I myself was burnt 2 years ago and vowed never to return to that platform. Now we use combined Heroku and AWS services. However I do miss GAE though, its deployment is smooth, their auto scaling up is great. It's just that I don't want to be locked in any more.

That being said, we still use GAE as a platform for fast prototypes, as a cron service to keep our Heroku instances up + firing up an EC2 instance every night to run a script for 5 minutes. So we only use GAE when there's minimal risk of being locked in.

Thanks so much for the tip! Greatly appreciated.

Mediocre designer here. Yes I had to use Bootstrap and glyph icons because my 2-man workshop has to publish software. We use flat design of course, since we really don't know what else is suitable. Any designers care to point out a path that we can make ourselves go past the stage of following what's easy and trendy? Some books to recommend or online courses would be great.

I thought all of the junk goes into gmail's spam folder by default.

first comment on the article page:

"Good thing google is focusing like a laserbeam . . . on . . . I dunno."

I was looking for some long term solution that is not guilt-driven. Still, thanks for the link and I'll probably eat my words someday and try it out.

Any one has any tips to form meditation as a habit? I know meditation is good for oneself, and I have personally meditated on and off for 20+ sessions. But the habit never sticks. Somehow after a few days of meditation I feel massively better and then I forgot to do so. It's like stop taking pills after I recover from sickness. Anyone has any tips? Thanks.

I can relay to this. I'm like you, starting things but can't persist. I grow tired and frustrated easily from mundane works such as make a pretty landing page, beef up our application's UI etc. Anything that requires 40+ hours of working is like a sea of burden to me.

However I had the great opportunity of having an awesome co-founder. He seems to be picking up where I left and finishes them off beautifully. Server side coding? check. Server side UI remake? check. Landing page details? check. I grew very interested in the fact that facing the same amount and type of work, why can he persist and why not me?

I think I had the answer this morning after quite of few months of introspection. The difference between me and him is that I look at how things were supposed to be, while he looks at how things could be. Let me make an example.

Remember the old story that half a glass of water can be both viewed as still a half remaining or a half missing, generating different moods? Well my tiny story is a twist to it. Say you were to fill a bigger glass with a tiny ink converter. Let's say it will take about 2hrs of mind-numbing work. After one hour with half a glass, I would look at the task and say, oh my, still a half to go. How grueling can this be? Then I'd feel frustrated and give up. Just like what I did to many of the tasks I started but never finished. My co-founder, I suspect, will look at the remaining work and say, oh my, only one more hour to go then I'll have this wonderful filled glass of water! That's why he stays up and working and never seems to have burn outs. I guess positive emotions never gives you burn outs. It is persisting under negative emotions gets you burn outs.

So I'm guessing the key is to catch yourself thinking in a bad way that is generating negative emotions, then turn the thinking in a better way that generates positive emotions.

I just realized this this morning. There should be a few points that I'm missing but I think I'll figure more out in the coming days/weeks. Meanwhile I am logging my thoughts and see if I can turn my emotions around and if that makes a (at least) personal difference. Hope it is useful for you.

Sometimes I know exactly what app I wanted to launch, I could envision its app logo, the exact look of the app itself, but I would have a hard time remembering what the app is called. Is it called digital something or picture something then after some agonizing minutes trying to fuzzy match the app name in Spotlight I'll have to dig through the application folder and find the app I was looking is called ImageCapture. Anyone else have this problem?

from the article: "Initial fixes were in place within 24 hours." So it's all fixed? Great! I'll stick with Heroku as my hosting provider like the author does.

Just curious, but what's the rationale behind the withdraws?

Personally I think this will generate some social unrest in my hometown where foxconn has a factory. Those robots will drive millions of young workforces out of a basic job. I'm pretty concerned about the near future.

In the long term though, this seems to be the only way to go: automate boring jobs.

Totally. I would pay $10 for the code if it works for Kindles.

So excited about iPad mini. Wether it sells for $199 or $249, it will be in a price point where most of the small businesses could afford.

Exactly what I was thinking. First reaction from me was that they will raise the price again when they gain market share, second reaction was a quiet note to myself that if they ever drop price on AppEngine like they did to GMap I shall not go back since my startup was hurt so bad with their vendor lock-in and dramatic price raise.

See Virgin Galactic

Ok so I went ahead and bought the service. Here's what I found out: You'll have to keep the tether client application running on your Mac or PC. So not gonna work for wifi-only iPads. Then you will need to keep the html5 webpage open in order to receive data. They instruct you to set iPhone's screen lock to "never" so it doesn't automatically shuts the web page down in 1 minute or so. So I imagine you can't take phone calls when tethering as the webpage will go offline.

Pricing wise, the first year costs $15 and will be $30 from second year on. They set my paypal up for recurring payment.

Performance wise it's pretty fast on my iPhone 4. Setting up took about 2~3 min, very easy to do. The html5 app needs to connect to both the tether website and the client computer. Took me a few tries to connect to both but once they are connected the speed is pretty comparable to tetherme in jailbroken iPhones.

Get outside and away from computer for a few days. Then come back and go straight to work.

This seems really interesting. Have you played with it? What's your experience?

Site down for me. Anyone has a cache link?

Agreed. They effectively pushed my startup from Appspot to Heroku.

I heard rumors they are shutting down Sliverlight. So this is surprising for me too.

Yup, living only in the current moment without worrying about the past or upcoming moments solves this too. Easier to get into work flow, and much more fun when skiing!

If you just think you will probably die tomorrow it won't really work because secretly you don't believe that. It didn't work for me until I was talking to myself the moment is _all_ my life. If it's not all your life you'll feel fine wasting it because you always have more.

As for external motivations, I guess everyone is different. I sweat on external pressures and I avoid doing them at the last moment then I procrastinate because I feel worse and worse missing the deadline. I guess everyone works differently :)

You don't need to work every minute. All you need to do is to not waste it away. So go skiing for a full day is still considered making good use of the current moment than reading reddit. For me, I think not wasting my life away means I'm either contributing to the society by working or I'm making my self a better person by working out, skiing, reading books etc.

Here's a realization that scared me to death that I don't procrastinate any more: The whole life only exists in the current moment. The reason being that the past doesn't exist any more, and the future has yet to come into existence. Hence all my life exists only in the current moment.

This leads to the conclusion that if I procrastinate for even a bit moment, I'm wasting away all my life. This is the most scary conclusion I've ever had and it works wonders to drag me back to work.

That's annoyingly funny. Is there a way to change the limit?

Is there a way to remind me everyday to fill out my questionare? A daily email will probably work.

I know! And it's ridiculously high, beats any property tax in U.S. That's probably one of the reason why the Chinese government is so rich.

The propaganda has invented a new saying, calling this the Chinese Socialism, and it tries to credit itself for the economic boom after the 1980s. We the people think that the gov is just trying to collect massive money after they abandoned soviet communism so everyone had a chance to make a better life. The chance is getting slimmer as the gov is getting much more greedy than in the 80s.

No. The worst thing is it's going down: living costs are getting much higher because of inflation while wages are far from catching up, real estate is still in a bubble, and it feels like the gov is getting more and more corrupted, blocking ordinary people from having a decent/good life.