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I have my iPhone on vibrate all the time and use it for an alarm.

I get in to trouble when I turn the volume down. I would expect to hear about someone who missed something important because the phone wasn't audible if it were the other way.

On the other hand, it would only affect those in the future, not those in the present.

gryon Small teams are dramatically more efficient than large teams

Another key MMM point is it naive to expect build large systems on a meaningful schedule with small teams.

gryon Mocked And Misunderstood

The economist Lant Pritchett notes big ideas follow this pattern:

   silly -> controversial -> progressive -> obvious

http://kottke.org/09/06/big-ideas-from-silly-to-obvious

Fred's post touches on the silly part. I haven't been able to find much more of Lant's model other than the slide Kottke links to.

gryon GoDaddy is scrambling to do damage control

Same here. I've moved most of mine to gandi.net. They are foreign sites now.

gryon A shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history

Reminds me of a previous thread. Stacking decks in your Texas Hold'em favor:

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113299

gryon On Programming Deadlines

The reference:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/nagappan-1...

gryon [ask HN]: OS X App for multiple File Transfers/Remote Sessions?

FUSE.

http://osxfuse.github.com/

gryon Apple Reports Q4 Results, $108B in annual revenue, $26B in earnings

Why? Genuinely curious.

gryon What should Apple do with the iPod?

It will become like the Mac business. Routine updates with nothing to announce unless it's special; unibody fabrication or designs like the Air.

That is until they reset their business.

The iPod product will be rebranded and remain iOS device that does everything but have a phone. iPod rebranded with iPhone form and function, except no phone functionality.

A Mac line, iPad line and a handset line. Face it, calling is now a feature on a computer. It's not a phone with features.

gryon Which web language to pick up for a new developer?

Why this as opposed to:

  * Clojure on Heroku
  * Java on Heroku
  * node.js on Heroku

They aren't doubling down on Ruby, let alone Rails.

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/8/25/java/

gryon Which web language to pick up for a new developer?

From by biased perspective scripting languages are leaders for web development.

* Ruby * Python * JavaScript * PHP

These are also the most brittle because they invent and change quickly.

I used to be a PHP developer and I thought the frameworks borrowed heavily from the stable Ruby and Python ideas for web app development. You'll find the crazy ones in Ruby and Python and a safer ground in PHP. Safest in Java. My bias.

Vibrancy != longevity. Rails 3 bit me tonight because I didn't understand a 201 status code and I almost hacked the path and then what was going on…it felt like the most correct, wonderful thing to do. I'm happy with the result, especially because the code is clean and browsers honor it without a fussy redirect.

Ruby and Python are vibrant, hungry communities.

PHP is vibrant, more stable.

Java is stable and most difficult to introduce an idea to unless it's a language atop the VM. :)

gryon Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple

Apple's going to be fine.

Jobs brought back Apple from the brink in 1996. Depending on who you talk to, they were months or weeks away from bankruptcy.

Fifteen years later, its flirted with being the most valuable company in the world.

Cook is the only choice. He's so good at not being Tim Cook, Apple is the focus. Barring Steve having failing health, this is a masterful transition.

gryon [dead]

It is 50% of the population. The rest may be more specific, if it sways one way. Just how I read it...

gryon Firefox update policy: the enterprise is wrong, not Mozilla

A note: I'm 10 years removed from the enterprise. It seems to me, organizations who respond to change are the ones best staffed, skilled and tooled to weather change.

The FF fighters are in a tough place. It seems the momentum shifted and is on the side of rapid and responsible products closer to what is a SaaS offering, but desktop software is beginning to deliver updates near SaaS pace. Yet a major version number isn't reflective of features/functionality these days. It's a schedule. Perhaps that's the most unnerving aspect -- shifting rev numbers. It's not difficult, but takes a leap of faith and sales to your manager.

I'm guessing the organizations will have to make a major IT expenditure to meet the One True Path -- not buying into a vendor's plan, but making your own. A vendor should get you closer to your vision, but not dictate it. Ten years ago, enterprises got burned on web apps. You bought into a vision. Now, you can pick the best of the best and relatively cheaply, integrate them. I remember a multi-year, multi-million dollar project to get Siebel and JD Edwards to play well. I dearly hope it's not the case. There are young billion dollar companies running on commodity hardware and software with profit margin inbetween.

gryon OnSwipe

Quite. Mobile Webkit-based browsers were a joy to use long before we had responsive design. I'm not saying responsive design is a bad thing, though I'm not on the bandwagon because mobile browsers handle most websites with aplomb.

OnSwipe is definitely not responsive design -- it's changing the behavior of a site for specific a devices which already have wonderful natural web UX interactions.

gryon OnSwipe

The problem is, people think they have to adapt for non-pc devices (read: mobile). The rub is, the mobile browsers are good.

Build a clean and fast site. You'll be fine.

gryon Running Pow Over SSL

I follow.

I should preface it by saying I'm working with a team of about 10 developers. For every developer to have to the software working on their local machine, it's a burden.

Our unit/functional tests run clean when SSL is stubbed out from client requests. We use webmock (https://github.com/bblimke/webmock) to mock 3rd party integrations. Upon deploy to staging, integration tests (Selenium) sweep through.

Our monitoring software ensures the app and its 3rd party services are responding to those integration points.

So yeah, developing by yourself, it's ok-ish. Though I still prefer having infrastructure be predictable. Mocking the SSL configuration through a reverse proxy feels brittle to me...it usually isn't how production is configured.

I guess another way of putting it -- I'd rather not inspect to make sure the app and its components behave over SSL. I'd rather it not work. Fail fast as they say.

I should draft up our approach and clarify the points. Maybe this weekend.

gryon Ask HN: Which are your favorite Apps(Apple, Android)?

iPhone:

  Byline
  Tweetbot
  news:yc
  Instapaper
  Dialvetica
  Calvetica
  Highlight
  Thoughtback
  Soulver
  OmniFocus
  Simplenote
  iPod
  Safari
  Carcassonne

gryon Running Pow Over SSL

> However, there is more more to this then verifying it renders.

How do you mean?

gryon Running Pow Over SSL

I used to think this was a good way to test SSL, but it's a lot more work to bootstrap a developer and doesn't maintain good separation of concerns. SSL should belong in all your non-desktop/laptop boxes -- production, staging, test.

In test setup blocks:

  @request.env['HTTPS'] = 'on'
  @request.env['SERVER_PORT'] = 443

You can stub out TLS/SSL. Then, ensure your require SSL definition in your controller returns a HTTP 426 status if it's not over SSL.

Your tests expect a 200 response, not a 426 or 302. 302 is bad -- you've already submitted via plaintext once (I'm looking at you, ssl_requirement). Fail fast and fix your code.

SSL will be disabled for only localhost requests.

  def ssl_enabled?
    !(request.local?)
  end

This has been tested on dozens of computers.

gryon Ask HN: DNS provider suggestions?

I'm very happy with http://www.zerigo.com/.

EDIT: Just noticed they were purchased as well. The plot thickens.

gryon Ask HN: Education-focused start-ups?

I'm working on http://www.sophia.org/. We went out of private beta in March.

gryon The NY Post, the iPad and the web

It's not Apple's responsibility to "fix" a misbehaving company. To stop sending information identifying you as an iPad user breaks the web just the same by not honoring the user agent spec in RFC 1945.

Mobile implementations abuse agent sniffing, no doubt. This is a clear example of organizations who don't get it, or are willing to exchange readership attrition for a perceived benefit with an app. Or in this case, an attempt to create revenue.

I'm ok letting these organizations die on the vine. It means those who plan better are greeted with opportunity.

gryon Twitter Search is Now 3x Faster

If your system looks like it did the first day you launched, you're doing it wrong. It's difficult to communicate to this...

Am I the only one who reads it is only removing RoR from the search stack? It seems the rest of the front-end will probably exist as RoR in some form.

gryon UX is 90% Desirability

"If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monotony would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product."

- Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface

gryon Talker group chat changes pricing, unlimited chatters for free

We've been using Talker with our team in Minsk. It's been fantastic, some things, like JavaScript plugins are ingenious.

Cobbled together a plugin to auto-link FOO-1234 to our JIRA installation. Plus, multi-line pasting creates an EtherPad session.

  plugin.onMessageInsertion = function(talkerEvent){
    $('td.message').replace(/(FOO-\d*)/gi, '<a href="https://foo.onjira.com/browse/+$1.toUpperCase()+ target="_blank">'+'$1'.toUpperCase()+'</a>');
    $('span.msg').replace(/(FOO-\d*)/gi, '<a href="https://foo.onjira.com/browse/+$1.toUpperCase()+ target="_blank">'+'$1'.toUpperCase()+'</a>');
  }

It's a fantastic, fantastic collab tool.

gryon Show HN: SparkBin, idea gathering for companies (25 invites for Google Apps)

Great little service. I found when I submitted an idea and didn't complete the pitch, the error screen doesn't draw much attention to what the error is. "can't be blank" is the same size/treatment as Name/Pitch/Tags.

gryon Getting Comfortable With Rubinius’ Pure-Ruby Internals

I'm more and more impressed by Yehuda's ability to translate technology.

While cooking last night, I listened to The Pipleine, Dan Benjamin's podcast with John Siracusa that episode's guest. John and Yehuda feel like long-lost cousins. The dudes are in the trenches rooting around interpreters and instruction sets. Then, they give the rest of us quasi-nerds something to grab on to.

gryon Ask HN: Is TDD/BDD hampering your startup's agility?

The rub with agile is people conflate process with communication. Things agile (hopefully) expedite commuincation, however, are only as good as those who guide it. So perhaps, more precarious.

It's not a blue pill.

gryon Apple.com gets a redesign

Apple often updates their site to reflect treatments in their desktop OS. A lot of the elements here, I expect in Lion.

For fun, here's a Flickr set since before time, including now.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernelpanic/sets/283374/