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ianloic

82 karma · joined May 3, 2010

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ianloic··on Apple rejecting applications which use Dropbox
FWIW, the Rdio iOS SDK now avoids linking to the Rdio web site, or even talking about the existence of an Rdio web site :(
ianloic··on Apple rejecting applications which use Dropbox
Apple has been doing this with other APIs for a while. If your app links to a way of signing up for an account that could be used to pay for something you'll be rejected. If you mention the existence of such an account you'll probably be rejected.

Personally I don't like being treated like this - as a user or a developer. So I take my time and money elsewhere.

ianloic··on Novocaine: painless high-performance audio on iOS and OS X
Is this open source? The source files say All Rights Reserved.
ianloic··on SIM Cards Must Die
The problem here is that Americans haven't ever experienced a competitive mobile telephony market where all carriers use the same network technology and switching networks is trivial. That's probably why our coverage is terrible and we pay 3-5 times more than people in other countries.

(North) American telco misregulation is a disaster.

ianloic··on Compromised Linode, thousands of BitCoins stolen
Why the fuck are people putting their bitcoins on servers that they don't control? That's just stupid.
ianloic··on US legislation would eliminate overtime for CS professionals
If we had a union for software engineers they'd be lobbying against this.
ianloic··on Google's Rubin split his Android bonus with team
I worked for Andy for a few years at Danger. He's a great guy. He's got a great mix of technical skills, business savvy and being a generally nice bloke.

He's also ridiculously generous. Also, he builds cool robots for fun (or at least used to).

ianloic··on Concurrency in Ruby almost as good as Node.js
But node.js doesn't have any concurrency. It's single-process, single-threaded and event driven, so by definition it's not concurrent. It's just not blocking.

Also, was someone really trying to run performance benchmarks on a shared machine running on a VM and expecting to get anything meaningful out? Really? Like really? I'm embarrassed for you.

ianloic··on Screenshots using vector graphics (gtk3 apps only)
This is why Gtk+ implements icons as a set of vector / raster images to be displayed at various sizes. It makes resolution independence really easy. This has been important to Gtk and GNOME for a long time since it's a big issue for accessibility which is not only important socially and morally, but actually a key legal issue for adoption in large companies and governments.
ianloic··on How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
Comparing the size of Ubuntu 'main' isn't interesting.

A more thoughtful assessment would have examined what packages were installed & used rather than which ones existed. That data is really easy to find: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/

ianloic··on Rdio: No REST for the wicked
Off the top of my head a couple of things that didn't map well were:

* search

* deleting songs from a playlist (safely)

* multidimentional stats queries (eg: http://developer.rdio.com/docs/read/rest/Methods#getHeavyRot...)

Perhaps we could have modelled these in a REST-like manner, but it seemed simpler to make the functionality available through an RPC protocol - simpler for us to implement and simpler for developers to integrate into their software.

ianloic··on Rdio: No REST for the wicked
Jens Alfke suggested PEST - Post Everything STyle: http://jens.mooseyard.com/2011/03/dudes-this-is-so-not-rest/...
ianloic··on Rdio: No REST for the wicked
Not to brag, but at least the Rdio API doesn't allow non-idempotent calls over GET.
ianloic··on Dudes, this is so not REST
Yep, our API isn't really technically REST in the classical use of the term. We changed some of our wording and made a blog post: http://developer.rdio.com/blog/read/No_REST_for_the_wicked
ianloic··on Stop complaining and pay programmers more
Hiring managers don't list a salary. If they do they're looking to hire really junior engineers who probably can't write a linked list reversal program anyway. In my 13 years working at startups I've never applied for a job that listed a salary range.

Ultimately, within reason, good programmers are worth whatever you have to pay them and bad programmers aren't worth what you pay them. There are way more bad programmers than good programmers and money isn't the way to attract the good ones. You have to attract them with interesting problems and a great work environment. If they're there for the money then they're probably no good anyway.

ianloic··on ZSync - Open Source Syncing Library for iPhone/iPad
If there's no source code then it's not open source.