I really am starting to get annoyed and disappointed with Hacker News. I’ve been on that site for 1,180 days and counting, and I can tell you that the quality of discussions have not only gone down, but the behavior of up voting and down voting comments has changed significantly. It’s really made me question if “social news” is viable at all, but we’ll save those rantings for another blog post. Maybe.
What’s got me irked this time around (see Nobody Masturbates on Hacker News for other reasons) started out with this lazy and inane blog post: Android vs iOS: A Developer’s Perspective. I’m going to dissect and refute the post later on here, but what got me heated was that the comments dispelling the myths put forth in the blog post about memory management were being consistently down voted in the thread on HN and, instead, the glib, snarky and unhelpful ones scored much higher.
The fuck Hacker News? If it wasn’t for the sanity on reddit, I’d be totally losing my shit right about now.
Anyways, let’s get to memory management in Objective-C, because that’s what started this all off.
Continue reading Objective-C Memory Management For Lazy People
I have recently been working on the mobile UI for a site I built called Sessions+. Sessions+ is a poker bankroll tracker that has a companion iPhone application for live tracking during live poker games, and now a mobile UI for Android and other HTML5 capable mobile browsers which replicates the most of the important functionality of the iPhone app.
The framework I used to build the app uses a lot of separate javascript and css files, though the entire app is housed in a single html file. So I end up with a <head> element jam packed with stuff. While this is perfect for development, it’s no good for deployment or QA.
Continue reading Introducing makejs
I just downloaded the Wired iPad application, and like most iPad applications (and most magazines for that matter), I found myself bored with it within the first 20 minutes. I’m sure the content is engaging, I’m sure the articles are worth reading – but I am stumped as to why I would chose this over the physical magazine itself, or their website for that matter. In fact, for reasons I’ll get into below, I’m starting to believe that the physical magazine’s “interface” is vastly superior to it’s iPad cousin.
However, what strikes me most about the Wired app is how amazingly similar it is to a multimedia CD-ROM from the 1990′s. This is not a compliment and actually turns out to be a fairly large problem…
Continue reading Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?
My mom is totally going to love the shit out of this thing.
Continue reading My Mom is Going to Love the iPad
I just want to start out by stating that I, in fact, am a big fan of Slicehost and constantly recommend them to friends setting up anything more serious than blogs. They have a truly great offering and their customer service has only been rivaled, in my experience, by the support team from DataPipe – whom I whole heartedly recommend for any colo or managed hosting.
One thing that is truly great about Slicehost is that they offer an awesome API that allows you to do most everything you can do in their management console, but instead through web services. You can create new slices, reboot them, change and add DNS, as well as rebuild or destroy slices.
The only problem is that the API follows a “standard ActiveResource pattern” that comes straight from the bowels of Rails and is way too convoluted for something this simple.
Continue reading Slicehost API Notes for the Non-Rails Posse
