evanlong

The one true source for all things blocked in the Suez Canal!

Great minds think alike:

https://isthesuezcanalblocked.com

This is also worth checking out for folks interested in recording technology:

http://www.otrannex.com/papertapes/

So Iran is making their own "AOL"? perhaps they'll call it "IOL". Hopefully, they'll mail CDs to their citizens with FREE 1000 hours of internet time.

From the Atlantic article:

There are the more immediate health benefits of buying organic: you'll avoid the chemicals, preservatives, and hormones that conventional farms often use to treat their foods. In the Stanford study, just 7 percent of organic foods were found to have traces of pesticides, compared to 38 percent of conventionally-farmed produce. Again, that doesn't mean organic foods will supercharge your health -- you'll just be at less risk of exposure to potentially harmful substances, for whatever that's worth to you. Quantifying that benefit is a contentious area and certainly worthy of more research.

Listen to what Bruce Ames (professor emeritus of biochemistry at UC Berkeley and senior scientist at Children's Hospital of Oakland Research Institute) had to say on this mornings Forum: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201209051000

Basically, don't worry about those traces of pesticides. He explains it better than me. Listen.

LinkedIn app. It sucks. Rotation is clunky and slow.

Do you work on an HTML5 cross platform app everyday like FB engineers did? Guess what. That's when shit gets really tricky and hard.

You sir are genius for this line: "product quality for some notion of engineering perfectionism -- whatever it might be -- you're not doing your job as a professional engineer"

thank you this is awesome.

PLEASE GIVE SCRIBD MORE KALE!!! THEY LOVE KALE!!!

"We worked hard to make our mobile apps fast. Try them out and let us know how we did: we have an iPhone app, Android app and an HTML5 mobile version."

Yay they made loading fast apparently. But any user of the app will notice that the linked in app feels slow and clunky. Great shit loaded. But it still feels slow. For example, take an iPad and go to Flipboard. Rotate the device. Notice how fast and smooth it is. Now go to the news feed in the iOS LinkedIn app and Rotate. It's slow. It feels like a web browser. It feels like they spent so much time optimizing the loading of resources and spent ZERO time actually making the client feel nice and native.

You know I bet http://girlloveshaskell.com/ knows all about these places.

What prevents the waiter at the restaurant from doing the same. I'd rather pay with card case or my phone in some way.

Cool. Glad to see Crittercism using PLCrashReporter. Good stuff.

sigh ... when will people learn ... one-liners are not good. Especially when they lead to bugs. For example #4 in the list. If you that didn't jump out to you as a bug. You are a fucking idiot and shouldn't be writing production code.

Scribd has Kramm. You have already lost.

I LOVE YOU MATT RILEY... AND QUIN... GO TEXAS A&M

And that is why... you use node.js. checkout out @whyyouusenodejs on twitter.

It should be on by default.

WebViews are great for content presentation. Especially true when what you are presenting is static content. But beyond that you are just going to struggle a lot to make it interactive.

And were we complaining a few years ago about how the web was a bad application platform? Just seems silly to try and port broken shit... what do I know...

But seriously write-once-run-everywhere is bullshit guys. Just like it was for Java. There is a reason write-once-debug-everywhere was the silly comeback. I just don't trust a technology (trigger.io) that claims "dead simple" when they haven't told me how this is better than the "dead simple" easy cross platform stuff Sun spit out in the 90s. (great for servers terrible for clients)

Also this is a native app in the demo? The navigation bar scrolls off the screen. Are you fucking kidding me. This is one of the most basic stock components in an iOS app. IT DOESN'T SCROLL OFF THE SCREEN.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/126589/sharepicts/Screen%20Shot%2020...

Now I know that "fixed" in a UIWebView is kind of a pain in the ass. Because it doesn't work as you'd expect. But, you kind of have to solve that problem to make the UX native.

By using these tools for multiplatform development you give up the opportunity to get featured. Apple and Google like to show off glitzy apps that look good and show off the power of the platform. Not something that has been reduced to the lowest common denominator: Android 2.2 running on some POS LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile.

Adit has never seen Return of the Jedi. No credibility.

This is probably one of the coolest projects. The people working on this project are doing and figuring out some amazing things.

Come on people the future is node.js and MongoDB. WE DON'T NEED KERNELS!!! Async programming IS JUST SO MUCH FASTER!!!

One advantage to shared libs/dlls is that a security fix will be applied to all applications that depend on that. So if everyone statically links against insecure libA.a then all apps that depend on it need to ship a patch. Where as if libA is shipped as a shared library then one update needs to be applied. That's one advantage but maybe not the best.

I don't mean to be rude but was this really necessary :P

"Apple removed my software (how I pay the bills) from the Mac App Store"

"We've lost nearly half a month of income (so far) due to this and there is also some question as to when we might hope to see payment from Apple for the previous month's (January) software sales. It looks like that may not happen any time soon. (This isn't the only case where Apple has hurt people who do things right lately.)"

So the individual hasn't seen a check for 2 months. We are a nation that loves to buy more than we can afford. Why should I feel sorry and bail someone out for making poor choices prior to this two month period of suckiness handed down by Apple?

I am taking it as an opportunity to remind people. That rainy days happen. And it's best if you plan in advance. However, we as a society would rather buy a brand new iPad 3 instead of put money in the bank.

Sounds like really poor personal finances. An individual should have at least 6 months to a year of savings so a 2-4 week outage is really no dent at all to your well being.

My Google interview experience:

Google Internship January 2008: Had a phone screen. First question as I heard it: “Given a binary tree tell me if it is a binary tree?” I was a bit confused and said I didn’t understand the question and requirements. Given A tell me if it’s A. Yes? The interviewers response to my confusion was: “Do you even know what a binary tree is?” Yes, I do. When he restated the question as “given a binary tree tell me if it’s a valid binary search tree” I understood the requirements efffed up something in the implementation though. Then was asked to do another problem. Something with number sequence and iteration. Got told “division is slow” so don’t use it. Couldn’t see a solution without division on the spot. Then got asked if I know about Java serialization. My response: “implements Serializable” and you can write out or read in objects but I have never really used it in any serious way before.

I got the reject. Which I expected more or less. Kind of frustrating since I felt the interview was pretty much done in the first few minutes since I was asked: “do you even know what a binary tree is.” Kind of an uphill battle from my perspective.

YouTube February 2010: Applied for YouTube because I saw an ad in gmail. Why not.

2 phone interviews. And 4 onsite.

I thought I did ok solved everything to the best of my ability. Frustrated that I didn’t get it. Really enjoyed it. Seemed like a lot of fun. One interviewer told me my current job sounded boring. Not at all professional.

Google Kirkland June 2010: I applied for a developer position after I saw a Google Kirkland is hiring ad. Applied for Software Engineering role and said I’d like to work on Google Chrome.

Eventually a recruiter got back to me and would set me up with a phone call. Yep, I thought it was the initial HR phone screen for a software development role. The HR phone screen was rescheduled and I was told that in the mean time they would be happy to set me up for a call with an engineer for a test position. So the things got pushed off a few days. I still ended up talking with an HR rep before the engineer. She seemed a bit surprised that I had just interviewed at YouTube a few months before. All I thought was wow your HR software sucks. So I jumped through the HR phone screen and technical phone screen.

The onsite in Kirkland was interviews with two developers and two testers. Standard interview technical interview questions. First one was count number of bits in a 32 bit integer. I sent straight for the mask. Add the bytes in parallel. Then add the 4 bytes together. Interviewer was shocked I got that so quick. Ya, crazy when you have been asked the same question in the past, in school... you tend to memorize it from practice. The other interesting thing from the interview was the interviewer worked on the video tag of Chrome. Said the hard stuff was video and audio synchronization and doing that right across 3 different platforms. When I was at YouTube they said they used H264 because it was a good codec for quality and bandwidth and didn’t foresee themselves switching anytime soon. When I asked the Chrome guy if the company was willing to align on not h264 would it happen. The response: oh yeah we are on the same page. Yeah, and then shortly after my interview this was posted: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html. Oh yes Google, you are a BIG company. Admit it!

The last interview of the day I remember slugging through and just not doing well on. Yeah, didn’t get the job.

My recommendation to Google: Phone interviews and Google Docs don’t mix. There is no auto-indent (that I know of) and I have mentioned that during an interview and got a yeah I know type of response. I would recommend: http://collabedit.com/ or something Google owns: http://etherpad.com/.

Books have been written and sometimes speak of the problems Google faces. In my opinion the biggest problem: “hubris”. I say that from my own experience as well as this book: http://amzn.com/1594202354. They live in their own insulated bubble it seems.

Professionalism is important. Sentences with phrases “do you even know” or “your job sounds boring” are rude.

Your HR software seems to suck. I am not actually interested in a role in “Test Engineering.” Yet, whenever a Google recruiter digs my name up and emails that is the role it is for. My recommendation to someone starting their career: Never ever ever take a job as a SDET/SET. It will hang over your head for years and hold back your career.

I used to really want to work at Google. After a few years in industry and these interviews I no longer have that interest isn’t there any more. For me, it depends on the team and people I’ll be working with more than the product or the company. Part of what has changed my mind: working at Microsoft a startup and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc.

Or you could realized language bridges are stupid and just write the Android and iOS code. Seriously, all you do is trade one set of problems for another. Might as well deal with the native platform problems and make an awesome app for that platform.

I believe Bump does the same thing and I am willing to guess other do as well.

THE FOUNDER OF APEDICK.COM. YOU ARE MY HERO!!!