gvnonor

Nice book, covers all the fundamentals well. Thanks to the authors for this gesture.

Now a digression, while Meteor hasn't hit 1.0 yet, I still wish it had some form of MVVM support baked in instead of the simple/dumb templating with Handlebars. I find Handlebars incredibly frustrating due to its lack of propert reusability/composability. It makes sense for server side apps that have a small client-side codebase, but on its own it's seriously limited and you end up generating hacky html strings using helpers.

DabbleDB was a very forward thinking product, pity it was shutdown. Could you share an estimate of the number of man-hours it took to build it?

I was hoping that it wouldn't kill grub but unfortunately it's just like before. My kubuntu partition lies idly as I haven't bothered re-installing grub yet.

Windows 8 only makes sense on tablet/laptop hybrids. I think you'll feel differently about the usability of the system once you get to try it out on newer devices that are coming out. Here's an interesting article about one such device http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/9/3475334/acer-iconia-w510-p...

WinRT development is actually quite pleasant. You can put together a decent app in very little time using just html and javascript.

Deciding what to do with the large screen real estate is challenging though. There's no chrome and the entire screen needs to be filled in with an app's components. Without a designer working, it's very difficult to put together a nice looking app.

In case ammmir decides takes you up on your offer, I'd advise him to ensure that a contract is in place before committing to do any work.

Never say never. If someone had told me that i'd be able to buy a high-end(processor and brand) tablet for $200, I would've laughed in their face.

Depends on the person. For most people, having a 10" screen will suffice, because they use the computer mostly to browse the internet and only occasionally need the full capabilities of a desktop OS, like when they need to write a word document or preparing a presentation.

Android is open source, but that isn't reason enough to rip off someone else's UI. Atleast Microsoft's innovating and not just copying stuff wholesale(which admittedly it used to do a lot in the past).

Regarding opportunity, the MS store will very likely be the biggest opportunity for software developers in a decade. There are more than 500 million Windows 7 users, and assuming that only 20% of those people upgrade, devs will still have a 100 million strong customer base.

I think they just wanted to get some excitement going, and it looks like they've met that goal.

The editor is a former communist and the editorials reflect his pro-CPM views, but on the whole, the articles are mostly neutral and reported in a matter of fact way.

  The truth is that most of Indian dailies are not fit for reading any science related news or even news for that matter.

With Smalltalk you can have your cake and eat it too! Its refactoring and IDE support is better than those of other dynamic languages and only slightly lagging behind statically typed languages(due to its relative obscurity, its ecosystem isn't as huge as Java/C#'s).

I think you meant effect.

Are you being sarcastic?

From a couple of presentations I watched and reading online, nodejs advertises that it makes writing web servers easy. Do everyday programmers actually need node or is it meant to be a niche language?

Or one could simply use a ready made blog-platform like Wordpress which supports a majority of the features listed and maybe modify it a little

> Allow signup/signin

Check.

> Allow public sharing of journals/non public

Private and public posts.

> Allow submitted “ideas”

Use comments for getting those.

>Make it look decent

Thousands of free and premium themes available.

Well, in most cases they want a real good reason to switch and the software must market itself as a replacement. Case in point Firefox and Chrome gained a lot IE6 users by

1.Having multiple tabs which is the killer feature

2.Marketing themselves as a secure and less-crashy alternative.

This might seem like an unfair example(not everyone has Google's or Mozilla's muscle) but the basics are the same for any type of software and given sufficient effort and planning, they can compete in competitive markets with established players.

Your points are valid, but I think the percentage of inexperienced Windows users far outnumbers the users with 'expertise'. Those type of people

1. Do appreciate applications that "just work" and are willing to spend time choosing the right apps that suits them.

2. Haven't learnt of BT yet or even if they have, they're willing to pay to save the hassle of checking for viruses, trojans etc.

3. Do appreciate user friendly applications, they'll choose a better looking application with lesser features over a featureful app with bad UI.

Going after this crowd can be lucrative indeed, just ask patio11 ;)

> I don't think this is true of anyone, even Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.

I meant that as a figure of speech of course :)

> It's really difficult to let someone get away with stealing from you. The Winkelvoss twins may feel they've been legitimately slighted, since it would seem they're not just in it for the cash

Yes it must hurt, but they received adequate compensation. The point however is that they could be doing something more productive with their time. They'll go nowhere trying to bring Zuckerberg or Facebook down.

After The Social Network portrayed them in a good light and Zuckerberg as a thief, you'd think they'd feel vindicated. But that hasn't stopped them from throwing more lawsuits demanding money.

Exactly. They have a Harvard education, more riches than they could spend in a lifetime and still all they want to do with their lives is act like money-grubbing losers.

Learning to use a text editor(or atleast trying) is easier than learning to touch type but anyway people kept touting the power of Emacs and how extensible it was and I decided to give it a shot. On trying Emacs, I loved features such as being able to run a shell, a really good python mode and the extensibility using .emacs files.

However since Emacs has a lot of key sequences for navigating between text, modifying text and doing pretty much anything involves not using the mouse, it got really frustrating looking at the keyboard every 2 seconds courtesy my typing illiteracy. So I decided to learn touch typing just so that I could use Emacs properly.

One interesting little tidbit.. I had tried around 3 or 4 times previously to learn touch typing but failed. However after I started learning both Emacs and touch typing simultaneously, I succeeded. So I guess the relation is somewhat symbiotic, learning to touch type helped me learn emacs and vice versa.

The single best thing I did to become proficient using Emacs was to switch my CapsLock key to Ctrl. Learning to touch type comes a close second.

I think the question is why would they want to try Erlang. There isn't any compelling reason for them to, when most of what they(and most web developers) do is write CRUD apps.

Small nitpick..I think you meant alley instead of ally.

Being in the zone is more acute and recognizable when one plays an outdoor sport for a moderate period of time. I used to play tennis competitively and I could clearly tell when I was in the zone. It would be amazing, I would feel like I could take on anything my opponent would throw at me and without even breaking a sweat. I would expend very little effort but still end up playing the best tennis of my life.

In programming, I doubt if it's as easily discernible. I've been programming for a few years and had a few productive stretches coding 8-10 hours at a time(with small breaks in between of course), but never felt like I was in the zone even once.

oops...edited

I once heard in an Alex Karp interview that they sold their products to other governments too(China and India IIRC). I found it quite odd, it would make sense to provide exclusive access to a particular government like the US or some other large country. This isn't a consumer product, it deals with a lot of sensitive data and i'm assuming a lot of governments would be wary of using the same product/company (especially one with 20 somethings at the helm).

edit: I'm not against 20-30 year olds running a company, but i'm assuming government officials would be.

Py2exe is quite easy to use, i've used it for a few gui apps and did not run into any problems(actually had a small problem getting image resources recognized, but that was in wxpython's end).

btw, How are you deploying your lua apps?

I found the part where Ham applied for a patent for the act of basically redirecting typo traffic from unregistered domains to a single domain( and bribing top government officials for exclusive access), quite amusing.

Considering that the patent system is downright broken, I would'nt be surprised if he was granted one.