hashbo

I have to agree, I've programmed in a good few languages over the years and really you need to go with what makes you happy and keeps you paid. I write in Java everyday and love it to bits. I have a fantastic IDE and I know my language inside out as well as a good few APIs.

But you know what, a JavaScript programmer could say just the same or a RoR guy.

The 'Get over yourself' part maybe a little harsh but there is some reality to it. Do what works for you sure, but generating negativity towards other languages will just make you unhappy. Instead ask top developers in each language/platform why they like their language/platform you'll learn loads and maybe gain an appreciation for the variation and multiplicity that we're fortunate to have.

Then go and work somewhere where you like the language :-)

+1 You can’t trust the Referer header.

It’s usually a bad sign about the interviewer’s interviewing skills, not always them as a person or the team.

I have worked for some nice, amiable smart folk who interview like crazy people. It’s the whole > IT skills < social skills thing.

But I empathise - I really don’t like interviews which are like that, especially when they’re usually a game to try and make the interviewer seem smarter than the interviewee.

Great idea, get apps out of the ghetto!

Added, and extra fonts and colour depth fixed :-)

Yeah I think it’s the ‘with finesse part’ that is worth pursuing for sure.

Why thank you kind sir/lady.

So this came about because people keep asking me for what tool to use to full page snapshots. And while there are tools that do it on your local machine, most web tools are just focussed on integrating with other sites not the user experience. So I thought I’d give it a quick go - I’ll probably add the scaling stuff at some point, just want to keep it nice and easy for users at the mo.

Thanks for the feedback!

It’s a test of the water in regards to a more user focussed website snapshotting service. Rather than the usual aimed at integrating into third parties. In reality it was put together in a couple of hours as a POC - underneath the covers it uses the code from main project http://boardcast.it which is still pretty experimental.

Love to hear of any ideas/suggestions you have, feel free to drop me a line neil AT snapito.com if you like too. I’m all ears.

Josh if you see it still let me know. I just hacked a quick JS fix and tested in FF10 and all seems to be well. But as you know each version of each browser has it’s own little features :-)

It knows your naughty thoughts and is busy thinking nice thoughts.

Or in fact the website has some missing artefacts which confuse Snapito! Consider that bug firmly raised.

Yeah snapshotting itself is a big no-no :-) nice try ;-) LOL

Javascript is on but this is running on headless Linux without TTF so there’s the rub, clearly the fonts are a big issue so I’m thinking about the whole elegant rendering aspect actually. I think the comments about rendering on OS X actually have some merit if the cost can be kept down.

What a fabulous little idea Andy! Duly noted.

Good idea! Will do.

:-) I use wkhtmltoimage but I’m considering a move over to PhantomJS it’s a known bug that if a page contains a missing resource which 404s then the whole thing 404s. Hence why I’m considering PhantomJS as it’s at least a lot easy to program error detection etc.

Josh that’s really interesting, what browser were you using, because the app doesn’t say ‘Please enter a URL’ this must be a browser feature working against input type=‘url’. I’d love to know the browser you were using. It certainly shouldn’t require a http:// at the front.

Yeah you’re 100% right about the fonts, I definitely plan to sort that out ASAP.

Thx. Really, without the http:// - darn - do you have an example, that would be awesome if you did. I just tried a few and they seem to work. But clearly there’s a bug somewhere so I’d love to squash it!

Yeah, sorry that was another past hack :-) that’s kinda moved over to it’s new experiment at http://boardcast.it

And the app was done in (the apparently uncool :-) Java - it was just a quick hack because I noticed that snapshot services were cluttered and complicated and most folk just want a simple full page image. Anyway it was written today out of some code used in http://boardcast.it.

Hey wow thanks for the feedback, appreciate that a lot. Hacker News folk just rock!

Interesting idea RE: skitch, certainly worth some consideration - I had considered annotations at least, and will take the idea very seriously.

RE: KISSinsights, I’m a bit of an amateur really so I just used the recommended free questions to get started with. But point taken :-)

I’d be interested to know what other options are around, it’s the only one I’ve come across to be honest and debugging multicast is such a pain.

When the concerns of an individual are focussed so intently on a particular licensing agreement for their works that they lose the perspective that the death of any being is a sad thing. At that point, I’m afraid, I no longer can regard that person as sane, i.e. in control of their own mind.

I am grateful for the work the FSF has done in the past, but I’m also grateful for the work Steve Jobs has done.

Fanatical and extremist views lead to misery for the owner of the views and for those they effect. It doesn’t matter if the views are religious, political or just software licenses.

I don’t believe you need to defend RMS - I can separate the ideas from the man. However the FSF has just had it’s reputation burnt severely and if they want to have any useful contribution towards the ongoing debate about how best to move the industry forward they should reconsider the ir public image.

That is if they want to increase their support and not end up a fringe group.

I’m a great fan of open source software and have been for the last 23 years but let’s be clear - the producer of software always has the right to choose what license they have, that is their freedom and that was the freedom that Steve Jobs like many others chose. Sometimes the license was open source (Darwin, WebKit etc.) sometime it wasn’t, he chose, that was his freedom as the producer of the work. Freedom is such a loaded word but how often do we stop to see the freedom of other people not just our own when we cry it’s name.

When people cannot see the freedoms of others but only talk about their own freedom, be suspicious. Because their agenda is the most important thing to them, not the wellbeing of others.

I wish a long life to RMS, to the FSF and to open source itself. I would like to see a very quick end to a world view that is filled with contempt and hate for other people which is poisoning all three.

Somewhat amusingly the site is down and we’re left to guess what exactly is 3.5 inches in length ...?

Hi so I believe you’re asking how does CoW solve consistency issues. This seems to be a recurring theme. I suspect and correct me if I’m wrong this comes from the fact we’re using a non-RDMS database or is it because our actual caching is by nature distributed. In either case the questions being asked are applicable to all distributed caching, if you need to have an absolute guarantee of consistency (nuclear power plant, large financial transactions) then I would personally avoid using caches anyway and reconcile these relationships in the database anyway. I might add this is not our use case :-)

My experience has been in both high volume financial systems and consumer startups and I personally have found that sometimes ACID behaviour is near essential. Or at least near essential to keep the implementor sane :-) And other times it’s just a hinderance. Nothing in my article implied that I’m out to solve all these, interesting cases I hope - rather that a particular pattern which can be implemented in different ways has a set of benefits. For the record Neo4J supports ACID transactions, in case I have inferred otherwise.

What’s interesting to me is that in various of the comments I have received seem to extrapolate my article into, I believe an attempt to remove or somehow change the working of RDMS systems. Which I can honestly say has me at a loss, goodness knows what I said to trigger that view. No offence to the commenters I just am uncertain where this came from. What I was discussing originally was a design pattern which I have had recent experience of within the context in my case of persistence.

Again forgive me if I misunderstood but I believe you are talking the internals of your database when you’re talking MVCC. This wasn't the problem we’re trying to solve. In fact Neo4J is a very high speed transactional database that we’re more than happy with.

In fact we’re not trying to solve a problem, we needed versioned data so we implemented that, now we’re getting lots of benefits including zero cache invalidations which means we have a safe write through cache, which of course can be caching application style representations of the data (i.e. objects). And the various other benefits I mentioned.

I can only state my practical experience here, which is that we do get a massive benefit from being able to arbitrarily cache data without fear of stale data.

But hey horses for courses, enough from me for tonite - a huge pile of code awaits me and a beta needs to get underway - if you’d like to get back to me, please drop a comment on the original article and I will be pinged. Always happy to chat.

Thanks for the discussion!

Neil

Really appreciate the combination of honest and helpful feedback. I will certainly keep doing exactly that :-)

Hiya, by an index. The index of course isn’t cached. This model applies equally well to RDBMS as well as non-RDMS systems. You can index which is the most recent version without losing the benefit of caching the data (and potentially it’s de-serialized form within the application). Not suggesting one size fits all, just highlighting a useful strategy.

Hi.

Yep agreed, I did I believe mention it is most valuable when you have mostly have creates & reads and less updates like in the example of web applications. Of course there are valid in memory level operations, quite famously in the Java world we have ConcurrentHashMap which is a CoW semantic. However naturally one size doesn’t fit all, but then it never really does :-)

Hey Robert

It’s not attempting to give intrigue, I just really haven’t figured the right copy out yet:) Take a look at some more of my blog articles if you like, they explain at least the general idea of what we’re doing. We hope to get everyone on the beta soon.

The problem for me is that it’s actually difficult to describe what it does and is better experienced then you can make your own valuation as to whether it suits you or not. Much like when the Internet started, it was easier to show than explain. So while we're just in the early stages of beta I didn’t want to prejudice people by giving partial information.

So I’ll see if I can get some feedback from early beta testers to find out what words they use to describe it - that may help me get a more unbiased view.

Glad you liked the animation btw., we’re (mostly) a one man band in reality, and I’m a techy at that, so any complement towards design is gratefully accepted.

All the best and thanks for the feedback, it’s really helpful to know what people think, Neil.

Absolutely but that is internal to the database and cannot be cached locally. With copy on write semantics being at the application level it means you can cache your data locally and not have to worry about distributed cache invalidation etc.

In theory yes, as it avoids holes in the databases or files used for storage. It’s also the semantics of ZFS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Actually a history on a state machine give’s you undo functionality a fairly common pattern, no? You have a stack of states instead of a single state. Trouble is though inter-related states isn’t it :-) things can get messy if you don’t have atomic states.

Actually someone else just pointed me in the direction of Event Sourcing - every pattern has a name somewhere - http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html