fendale

I needed something to do some code reviews in my day job and threw this little app together in the evenings over the past month or two. I have held back on releasing it, as I am not really satisfied with it yet, especially the 'website' around the app, but everyone keeps saying release often, so here it is. I would like to develop this into a solid code review app, but I am running short of simple features to add, so I definitely need some users to guide me.

Any good and bad feedback is appreciated, especially around the application more than the home/tour pages, which I basically just threw together last night ... thanks.

Yea, well Rails was born out of Basecamp - certainly an impressive achievement.

Definately a good talk, and really inspires me to try and finally get something built and released in my spare 10 hours a week. I have been messing around with various projects over the last year or two, but it takes a long time to get anything decent done in 10 hours a week with one person before the motivation runs out.

One thing that just occurred to me, is that while DHH was working 10 hours per week on Basecamp, I'd bet that Jason Freid was putting in at least 10 hours on the design side too. For me, the programming side of things isn't the big time sink - its getting the application to look and flow correctly. I would guess that for every 10 hours I spend coding, I spend at least that trying to get the UI to look even half professional.

Thats not to take anything away from the achievement of building Basecamp in spare time, more an observation of how much more productive I would be if I had someone doing the UI elements along side me.

Was mentioned on this page somewhere that average scores are calculated asynchronously, so there will be a lag.

I'd go as far to say most girls around my age are attractive in some way or another, so 5% seems exceptionally fussy!

prgmr.com is very cheap and has worked well for me for the last month (which is when I signed up)

I haven't looked at the code, but it may be by scrolling the window so it goes out of view and then setting up the fixed menus etc.

I am totally guessing based on the comment in the article that if you double tap the top of the screen it brings the address bar into view, sort of implying it was just scrolled away.

If it hadn't been from 43folders,which I know is Merlin Manns site I wouldn't have clicked through. He has some good stuff on there, especially inboxzero.

I don't need to send many letters ... I haven't sent one for about a year now. So for my annual letter sending needs I'd easily pay above the odds, being that I still don't own a printer or stamps! I bet there are many people like me, but I've no real data on that!

You know, I came up with this idea ages ago, and did exactly nothing about it. I think it came about because I needed to mail a single letter and had no printer, no envelopes and no stamps ... surely there must be many more like me!

Would I pay £1 ($1.60) to send a letter - probably - beats needing to buy a printer (ok, I can use the printer in work) find a stamp, take it to the post box etc.

What about recorded delivery letters? I would need to queue up in the post office for those - maybe there is some why that could be handled in batches.

Also, I think companies who send lots of letters get a discount on the standard stamp price.

You could also have 'printing centers' in various countries around the world for cheaper and faster 'air mail'.

I think this idea has a lot of potential, but it would probably require TV commercials to get it to the masses!

Great reply ... I had a look at Chunkhost, but it looks like they are in beta only right now, and I am not in the USA :-(

Looks slightly better value than Linode - a bit more generous on the RAM and disk side.

I was actually thinking of signing up for one of your VPS'es, but it seems you're at capacity at the moment - any idea when there will be more space?

Some of these servers seem very cheap when compared to Linode or Slicehost ... I wonder what the catch is? Not so good support? Response to failure?

Eg picking one at random - celeron processor, 2GB ram, 500GB disk - 25 euro a month. Or with the same provider goto 4GB Ram and Quad Core for 40 euro.

You know I think you are correct when I think about it actually.

I have often though this in work project emails to a much smaller audience (under 20 people). If I get one person replying back to me asking to clarify something, then I have failed in some way or another in my explanation, so I always read everything more than once.

I have noticed that many of our off-shore contractors, where English isn't their first language are prone to sending unclear emails - it's actually quite frustrating going through several replies to get to the bottom of it, and it often causes things to be delayed unnecessarily. If only everyone thought so carefully before sending the email!

Cheers for the info. I will get round to upgrading eventually then, but I reckon I will give it a few months until any compatibility issues are ironed out!

Yes, 3km swim sets 4 or 5 times a week. Doesn't seem to help mesleep at all. It does make me knackered, but sleep is still elusive!

I wonder how its going to work. If you have Leopard and your hard disk dies - do you have to install Leopard and then upgrade to Snow Leopard (which would be a pain), or will the upgrade allow a clean install onto a blank hard disk?

Still on Tiger here too, which is my main reason for wondering if I can get away with the $29 version!?

No, but surely they have a better chance of tracking that person down than Seth does, especially if they are asking him for a favour. It certainly wouldn't hurt to spend 15 minutes trying, or as others have said, say you will try. The main point is that blaming someone else inside your organisation to shift the blame from yourself is not cool.

Just checked it, and I cannot see them on Console, only the Net tab (Firefox 3.0.12, firebug 1.4). Perhaps its different in Firefox 3.5

That could easily have been me yelling at it last week. Took me ages to find the Ajax post requests were now in the 'net' section instead of console!

I think he is trying to imply you cannot catch up. Doing that lost hours work consumes another hour and so on. The only way to catch up is to extend your working day by an hour.

> Besides seeing my housemates in Palo Alto I had no social life.

If you can look at yourself and say that, its time to sort out the social thing immediately IMHO. No project, success or amount of money is going to make you happier than having fun with your friends.

Personally, I cannot even imagine working 70 - 80 hour weeks, I have no idea how folk can do it!

Also consider that if you have a 100M row table and the column has only 4 values, but those values are highly skewed (ie 3 values are 99% of the rows, 4th is 1%), then a function index on the skewed column can be very useful:

    create fbi on table(case
                          when skewed_col == 'small value'
                            skewed_col
                          else
                            null
                        end)

The null values are never indexed, so now you have a nice small index that is good only for finding you 'needles in the haystack', so long as you put that case statement in your queries.

If you have a table that you basically always query by primary key, then Oracle offers a 'Hash Cluster table' which uses a hash instead of an index locate the data. It generally makes PK looks up very fast, but it has downsides.

1. You need to know roughly how many rows the table will have, and the row size at table creation time. 2. Oracle will allocate all that space at creation time, and so a full table scan will take a long time.

So long as you know the deal with them, hash cluster tables can prove very efficient for the correct problem.

Well, certainly in Oracle, it can use an index on a like if it is structured:

    where col like 'str%'

However, doing

   where col like '%str'

Means it cannot use any index. So in the example given, it would be able to use an index because there is a leading 'path' before the %, assuming MySQL can do the same thing.

In Oracle you can do hierarchy query's using the 'connect by' syntax, which means you can structure your table with id, parent_id and get all the rows out efficiently in a single piece of SQL, which is nice!

> It happens with large RDBMS systems anyways after about 5GB of data, same type of scalability decisions have to be made.

I work every day with a > 4TB database and its all on 1 machine (a very big machine) with some very fast SAN. If you have money, Oracle can get very big on the right hardware. I am willing to bet MySQL or Postgres could do very well on that sort of hardware too.

I would say all drugs have side effects and should be avoided.

If you are always procrastinating on your studies, maybe it's because you just are not very interested in what you are studying? Getting through a 3 or 4 year degree you have little interest in is a very tough task. I have seen very smart friends fail just about every CS exam they took for this very reason - they had no interest, no will power to study and ended up failing.

Anyone know what font the 'fontsquirrel' logo at the top of the page is in? I want it at the top of my apps page!

I reckon I am about 1 month away from a 'Sandy' type replacement - hopefully by publicly saying this (even if only a few see it), I will actually pull my finger out and get it finished, instead of wasting time on HN!

Hadn't thought of Twitter integration all the same, and I never actually used Sandy (started working on this before I even heard of Sandy, very much a part time project) so I may be in danger of disappointing fans of Sandy!