I solved the embedded Chrome OS ad equation and won a Cr-48

http://www.sylvainzimmer.com/2010/12/10/first-to-decode-the-chrome-os-video-equation-won-a-cr-48/

by tonyskn • 16 years ago

324 87 16 years ago

sylvainzimmer.com

pavs• 16 years ago

Now its time to figure out how to set up a server that can handle few thousand viewers.

Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

jlongster• 16 years ago

I still really don't understand what's so hard about a couple thousand views. I've had a couple posts hit the front page (even #1 on HN and #5 on prog.reddit), and my server was fine. I use Apache to serve the resources and Clojure to handle web requests. Nothing fancy.

cd343• 16 years ago

Wordpress without caching on a VPS that is probably not configured well. w3tc or wp-super-cache would probably fix his issues. Installing it while the site is hammered.... will be fun. Perhaps as challenging as solving the easter egg.

blantonl• 16 years ago

Varnish, ahead of time?

johnrdavisjr2• 16 years ago

I can only view the cached version. Looks like he needs a mirror.

loire280• 16 years ago

Or he needs to implement caching on his Wordpress site.

Almost every day there's a popular blog post that misses a large portion of its audience because the author wasn't caching. You'd think that more authors would plan for a traffic spike from aggregators, since that's sort of the holy grail of blogging.

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

It's hard to plan for a problem you've never had before. Most people expect it's just going to work.

Jach• 16 years ago

In the same vein as caching (and why caching is good) but the less DB activity each page request can generate, the better. Shared hosts seem to be very conservative with how many concurrent DB connections are allowed to be open at any one time, HostGator's limit is I believe 25. But persistent connections are usually available; PHP has mysql_pconnect and mysqli_connect('p:' . $host).

user24• 16 years ago

> that's sort of the holy grail of blogging.

eh, I've lived through several spikes in the 6 years I've been blogging - the real holy grail is watching your search engine traffic increase bit by bit, month on month. I've been on digg's frontpage (back in 2007ish), linked to from xkcd's blog, I had a 20000 visit spike from reddit just this week. The spikes are fun, but they fade away after 2 or 3 days. The xkcd traffic lasted longer but that's because Randall didn't update his blog for weeks after the update that linked me.

But yes - even so, it's not nice to have your site die in the middle of a huge spike. It's just possible that that's the day Larry Page would have decided to tweet about you.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

From the article:

> most people I know including myself couldn’t live without Chromium/V8 anymore.

Is this a common sentiment ?

thenduks3• 16 years ago

The statement is definitely a bit sensationalist. That said, yes. Even non-techy people I've seen checking out chrome comment on the speed and how much they like the UI.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

I'll spend some more time with Chrome then, I have it installed but normally only use it for compatibility tests.

thanks!

joshuacc• 16 years ago

I'm not sure how common it is, but I share the sentiment. I find it incredibly painful to use any browser besides Chrome because of how slowly they run (even with all extensions turned off).

simonsarris• 16 years ago

I can relate, though maybe he is being a tad sensationalist.

I expect (say) my bookmarks to be synced between all my computers. I'm sure plugins do this on other browsers, though.

The biggest reason I don't consider Opera or FF for daily use anymore: Non-chrome browsers drive me crazy due to the way they close tabs. It is very stressful compared to mouse-closing tabs in Chrome and its "smart positioning."

boredguy82• 16 years ago

Using Chrome is like driving a luxury car for the first time. I remember when I got in a '93 Mercedes SL 500 in the rain and when I slowed down so did the windshield wipers. I know others replicated the behavior in later models, but driving that car made me realize that every other car was designed by people who didn't, apparently, drive cars.

I love using the 'smart tab positioning' example: how many times have people moved the mouse to close 4 or 5 tabs? Sure, it's not an impossible headache. But most of us do it regularly enough that it's nice to have the button in the same place for each tab. It's almost as if the designers used a web browser before. And it's great.

And hard to imagine giving up.

listic• 16 years ago

How is mouse-closing tabs in Chrome different and what is "smart positioning"? Didn't notice myself.

Splines2• 16 years ago

Compared to closing several tabs in Chrome, doing a similar thing in the Win7 shell (close several open folders) is infuriatingly difficult. The target size of the close icon is so small, and missing it is doubly bad: it makes you start the task all over again, plus a random window is now positioned to the front destroying your work context.

LordLandon3• 16 years ago

I've been leaning back towards firefox recently due to how chrome handles large number of tabs: poorly. It'll squeeze them down to the point that they wont even show the favicon, making finding an open page annoying - compared to firefox, which has a minimum tab length, and scrolls the tab bar if it grows too large to fit.

The rest might be a personal prefference, but I rarely use the mouse to close tabs anyway, ctrl+w is faster, and I can hit that as many times as I want without moving the cursor anywhere. I also preffer the / and ' shortcuts firefox has.

sylvinus8• 16 years ago

true, it was a bit over the top. I've edited to "can't go back to any other browser than Chromium/V8 anymore." which is closer to my actual feelings :)

And this comes from a former hardcore Mozilla fan :)

ramchip• 16 years ago

I've barely used Chrome before, but shouldn't you use mouse gestures to close tabs in Opera? It's by far the easiest way, along with ctrl+w. No need to aim and click on a specific button.

Qz• 16 years ago

That's a terrible reason not to use FF -- all you have to do is middle click anywhere on a tab.

crocowhile2• 16 years ago

I have been using Chrome since it came out but this month I am trying FF 4.0 and it's pretty good.

jharrison• 16 years ago

Could I live without it? Sure. In that way it's probably a little over the top.

As many replies to your comment suggest, the user experience is pretty great. However, in my opinion, OP was probably referring to the awesome performance of V8 (the Javascript "engine" under the hood). Chrome has become my defacto recommendation to anyone who uses Javascript-heavy web apps. There's also a nice set of developer utilities for Chrome that make it a very useful tool when developing web applications. Perhaps he's suggesting that, as a tool, he finds it indispensable?

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

Chromium/V8 specifically, no. Recent versions of Chrome/Chromium, Safari, or Firefox are all acceptable IMHO.

I would hate to have to go back to browsers older than 1 or 2 years though. Or IE.

Soupy• 16 years ago

The equation - http://img545.imageshack.us/i/chromeequation.jpg/

cosgroveb• 16 years ago

Thanks for the link but the first few times I tried to load this page the image was broken. imgur is awesome, give it a try sometime!

riobard• 16 years ago

Some symbols are hard to see, but I hope it is right.

LaTeX'ed version: http://yfrog.com/gyegnp

jonovos3• 16 years ago

Yes, this is what I saw. HOWEVER, when you run he numbers, you can NOT get the same values that Google represents. The value for "C" is WRONG! It should be 8338041. This changes everything. ===> http://goo.gl/fpJsJ

daok2• 16 years ago

I dont get that : "we realized “900.91″ did actually reference the goo.gl url shortener"

I do not see how he did that?

watty• 16 years ago

You don't see any similarities between "900.91" and "goo.gl" ?

thenduks3• 16 years ago

Just tilt your head a bit :)

    9 -> g
    0 -> o
    1 -> l

daok2• 16 years ago

oh thank you! haven't realise that!

thasmin• 16 years ago

There isn't one standard way to convert a latitude / longitude coordinate into a x/y coordinate for a map. Google Maps was the first to use the Spherical Mercator projection. The EPSG (?) number used to reference the Spherical Mercator was originally 900913. EPSG:3785 now refers to the Spherical Mercator too.

http://docs.openlayers.org/library/spherical_mercator.html

flawawa22• 16 years ago

Well, now please make Jamendo a joy to use...

sylvinus8• 16 years ago

true... we're not happy with the current state of the jamendo.com website. 2010 was mostly focused on getting close to breakeven thanks to jamendo.pro (which we did). We also did a management buyout from our former VCs, laid of a lot of staff, so all in all, we're just happy to still be there, growing, and hiring again :)

Now we have several ongoing usability projects, we released a HTML5 player a few weeks ago (replacing the old Flash crap) and are now working on layout and stability improvements on the main pages. It will definitely make Jamendo a complete joy to use again, if we can just spare some time from breaking Google easter eggs ;-)

cheers!

p206• 16 years ago

I think the site is great! One minor annoyance: the volume gets reset to about 75% when I close the player completely and re-open it (but not when I switch to a new album with the player still open). The problem with that is that it is too loud for my setup, and I end up having to lower it each time. It would be great if it could remember its last value.

sraquo• 16 years ago

While you're fixing UI please consider fixing Jamendo PRO search interface. Your database seems to have more information than you allow to filter by (I really need to filter by tags, e.g. I want something fast, dark and agressive). I spent days trying to find music for my game on multiple websites and I can definitely say that pretty much everyone's music search sucks. If you make yours awesome, you'll definitely stand out.

kilovoltaire• 16 years ago

24 occurrences of ";-)" — true happiness!

mcav• 16 years ago

Kudos. Too bad that special page didn't also include a job interview offer.

sylvinus8• 16 years ago

hi guys. I'm Sylvain who solved the thing, thanks for relaying the info here! :)

The blog indeed crashed, it's on a very small VM with a remote filesystem and even with a WP cache plugin.. not so much luck, even with apache stopped.

However our company blog has a proper sysadmin ;-) So after I setup a redirect there no more issues... until we get on slashdot maybe ? :)

Cheers!

nategraves• 16 years ago

From the screenshot of the form you got after solving the equation, it looks like you need to have a U.S. address to receive the Cr-48, and it would appears poor you're located in Paris/Luxembourg. You need someone to forward it on to you? ;)

sylvinus8• 16 years ago

yes that's also a funny side of the story. As I was going trough the border on tethering, with barely any cellphone reception, I was trying to fill out the "one-time" form without any U.S. address in mind ;-) Luckily I have a cousin in Houston so gave him a quick call to get his address and I submitted the form as soon as I got my data link back up :)

generally speaking, it's extremely frustrating for an european startup to see these regular U.S. only launches from Google. (come to mind Google Voice, ebookstore, google music, and now Cr-48...) But well, small price to pay to enjoy living in Paris most of the time :)

codeglomeration• 16 years ago

From the screenshot of the secret page: "Also, we can only give you a Chrome notebook if you live in the United States and ... "

I find it such a shame that these types of conditions are so popular for most contests / easter eggs, etc.

Are the legal issue regarding this that complex?

I'm assuming Google is not really that cheap regarding postage costs, since we're also only talking about 1 notebook here.

Also interested how it all worked out for Jamendo, since (from what I see) they're based in Luxembourg.

chris24• 16 years ago

It appears to be an issue with wireless regulations.

jonhendry• 16 years ago

I doubt it. It applies to most giveaways of any kind (free posters, free calendars, etc). They usually only accept entrants from one country or equivalent legal entity. I expect it's because of variation in contest-related laws between countries, tax laws, etc.

xaverius• 16 years ago

Google Chrome blog has a post about this. Congrats to the Jamendo guys. http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/12/x-g-chrom-3.html

jonovos3• 16 years ago

Google's blog should be read carefully. There are errors in this. ==> http://goo.gl/fpJsJ

jonovos3• 16 years ago

Uh-oh. No you didn't. The value for "C" is INCORRECT. ==> http://goo.gl/fpJsJ

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I solved the embedded Chrome OS ad equation and won a Cr-48

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