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kalak451on Hand Scraping a Truly Flat Plane (1908) [pdf]

I assume he is talking about Richard King. I don't think he has his own channel. but as mentioned Stefan Gotteswinter and Keith Rucker both have videos of the scraping skills they learned from him. (Rucker has actually hosted several of King's classes in his workshop)

edit: I clearly misread the end of OP's post. Definitely not talking about Richard King.

kalak451on Open Connect

I suspect that if netflix went to the ISPs to cache their data, the ISPs would be more than happy to charge them for it like to do with other content networks. In this case, netflix is assuming that the volume of netflix traffic at the ISP will drive the ISP to request on network caching. Netflix is happy to provide this, but is not willing to pay the ISP for the privilege.

Does netflix care about how much traffic they are directly serving vs how much is hitting caching servers? Are they playing chicken with the ISPs hoping the ISPs will blink first and put caching servers servers onsite for free?

kalak451on The Kindle Index

I read books constantly, and I do own a 2nd generation Kindle, but I think it is buried in a box somewhere from a move I did last fall. I do 99% of my reading these days on either my Android phone, my laptop or my desktop PC. I really think the killer feature that Amazon bring to its Kindle brand is actually "Whisper Sync" more than eInk displays or any other specific device. Being able to pick up my book from where I left off on any internet enabled device is the #1 reason my books purchases are almost exclusively from amazon.

kalak451on [dead]

You would think so, but I still see new projects started every day using Apache for something nginx would be a much better fit for. I think that mostly the admins and architects on these projects have simply never heard of nginx, or if they have, they don't really know what it does.

kalak451on Coding Skill and the Decline of Stagnation

The getter/setter stuff in java is a huge waste of space and time. However, at least in the enterprise space, all of the tooling and frameworks assume your code follows the java bean naming conventions. For this reason alone I always make sure all my classes follow the pattern and whenever I train new developers I make sure they get a large amount of experience building out bean definitions and understand how much time is saved with Spring and Hibernate as long as the conventions are followed.

But yeah, its a bunch of ridicules, generated spam.

kalak451on Standing in the beam line of a neutrino detector

Great article, but they seem to barely mention the most mind bending fact about the experiment:

They are generating a 1km wide blast of neutrinos in suburban Chicago and sending it 450 miles through the ground to mine in Minnesota.

I had to read parts of the article 3 times and follow some of the links to make sure that is really what is going on.

kalak451on An introduction to static site generators

A few months ago the NY Times wrote an article about how they did static generation for their election results mini-site. The HN discussion was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025611

kalak451on Hulu Is Popular, But That Wasn't the Goal

Some people were watching TV online before, now lots of people are watching TV online. Hulu has played a big part in that. I suspect the number of people watching Hulu every week dwarfs the number of people who were "illegally" watching content online before, at least in the US market. Most of the rest of the world is still forced to find extra-legal methods to obtain the same content.

kalak451on Tweet later with Delayed Job

I really appreciate that this example shows a useful testing strategy and handles the big scheduling gotcha (rescheduling jobs.) Neither are hard solutions once the answer is known, but having them spelled out will save someone a lot of time.

kalak451on Regulators probe Apple 30% subscription plan

Does google require you to use their service the same way apple does? Or is their service just there for developers that want to use it(at a 10% cost?)

kalak451on Apple: if we get you subscribers, we deserve a cut

I guess my point is that it really does work both ways, the iPad existing may help me sell things, and me selling those things helps sell iPads. So how about both sides just focus on taking money from the customers instead of each other.

kalak451on Apple: if we get you subscribers, we deserve a cut

Hmmm....and if my app gets someone to buy your iPad, what do I get?

kalak451on MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video Codec

So is this being driven by people working on the VP8 codec or the WebM project? Or is MPEG LA just trying to show that VP8 really is just a patent encumbered at h.264(and protect/add to their revenue stream?)

kalak451on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I had to read this as part of my Rhetoric class my freshman year of college. I hated just about every minute of it, very hard to absorb, more than a big long winded in places. It also didn't help that my TA for the class was convinced that the book was written about him (not really, but every other class was a discussion about how what was happening in the book was related to his life.) However, attempting to deal with, understand, classify, define "quality" is one of the few explicit activities I did for a college class that I spend any time reflecting on today.

kalak451on New Lifehacker

I noticed they did this to Jalopnik the other day, makes it much more difficult to browse the list of headlines. I very rarely want to read the first story on the list, or each story for that matter. I use sites like Jalopnik, LifeHacker, and even Hacker News as a stream of content during the day (that doesn't care if I skip a day, unlike my RSS reader), I pull up the page a few times a day, scan the headlines, and pick out 1 or 2 stories that actually attract my interest. The new interface for Gawker sites actually makes this process harder, not easier.

kalak451on JavaEventing - An easy to use eventing library for Java

Kind of neat, but what is with all the static methods and inner classes? Makes things kind of ugly, and very hard to write independent tests.

kalak451on The road to faster tests

JUnit stores all of the meta data about each test case in the test instance itself, so all of the reporting is based off of these classes. It has always puzzled me why it was done this way, why not just store a collection of "meta-data" objects and report off of them (allowing the test instances to be garbage collected,) but I assume it would break most of reporting the plugins/tools to change it now.

Note this is for the older 3.x versions of JUnit, I'm not 100% this is still true for the 4.x line.

kalak451on The road to faster tests

Ruby’s Test::Unit library (which we use for Basecamp’s tests) creates a new instance of the test class for each test. Not only that, but it holds onto each of those instances, so if your test suite includes thousands of tests, then the test suite will have thousands of TestCase objects.

On the Java side, JUnit does exactly the same thing. However I usually see this manifest itself as out of memory errors rather than a time sink. Over the years I have gotten some VERY strange looks from clients when I null out instance variables in my tear down methods. Usually takes a couple of hours of explanation to gain some level of acceptance, if not understanding.