9oliYQjP's comments

The trick to SRED is to hire an outside expert who will work on contingency to get a percentage of the SRED rebate they generate. There are many companies providing this service. These folks are experts on writing the necessary reports/forms given your engineers have written detailed logs of their work. Don't try to do SRED yourself. It's just one of those things, like hiring a lawyer, where it's complete lunacy to do it yourself.

In theory SRED is supposed to be for R&D. You'd be surprised what can count for R&D. Doing A/B testing to solve the problem of which UI is more preferred/efficient? That can count for SRED work.

First off, I'm sorry about your situation. Nobody here will be able to judge with any degree of accuracy whether he has a point. I personally would not look at this situation as a technical one; this is a business relationship situation.

Regardless of whether there is any grain of truth, the CTO has lost confidence in you. Not just a little bit. He has asked you to leave. The rest of my advice assumes the CEO (your co-founder) has quite a bit of confidence in the CTO. If that is the case, I'm not quite sure you can come back from having the CTO asking you to leave, nor am I certain you should.

I think it would be advisable to talk to a lawyer to see how you can cleanly and professionally leave on your own terms. Save the emotional stuff for friends and your alone time. You will no doubt need to grieve (this was your baby). But I think it would be better for you to be proactive about leaving and professionally extract yourself from this situation. That said, make sure you know your rights and what your contracts entitled you to in such a situation.

Once extracted, take your hurt pride and prove them wrong.

Isn't TinyPNG a web GUI around pngquant command line utility?

The economy has been so crappy that people are crossing their fingers and pretending a bubble doesn't exist even though deep down they know it does. After all, it can't get any worse, right? It's like people who have terminal cancer and are otherwise rational skeptics who decide to pursue alternative therapy. Hope, even false hope, is a powerful thing.

I just commented and have pretty much the same opinion that you do. I've often wondered if this practical opinion on has anything to do with Canadians having to shovel the snow. Hear me out...

In the U.S., there are dramatic weather and natural disasters that bring communities together. Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earth quakes. We don't have these extremes. But what we lack for in extreme weather, we make up for in volume. In Canada, we just have snow that has to get shovelled often. That means waking up a few times a week in your neighbourhood to shovel snow and side walks. Folks that don't do it are shamed and pressured into doing it. But even if they hold out, somebody just shovels the damn snow, because we're all the better for it. There is nothing more annoying than walking 90 m down a perfectly shovelled sidewalk and then having to walk 5 m along icy packed snow because some jerk refused to pitch in.

With snow, when everybody pitches in their share of effort, entire cities can function. That has a profound impact on how you see government programs. "If I pitch in my bit, and everybody pitches in theirs, our health care/education/transit system can be pretty good". Moreover, when you actually see cities dig out from underneath snow, you debunk the myth that people are lazy. Most people, and a vast majority at that, pitch in and get things going. Again, this contributes a great deal toward our mindset on social programs.

As a Canadian I'd argue that this is a cultural trait that can easily be adopted by other countries. It is also a cultural trait we Canadians are rapidly losing. The reason Canadian universities produces these types of grads is because our universities are much more accessible to our citizens. It reflects our practical outlook on social programs like education, health care, and transit. Go on the TTC subway during the day and you'll find suits going to work on Bay St., kids going to U of T, and Tim Horton cashiers too. Get sick and you'll often have access to the same doctors that wealthy people do (though this has more to do with your geographic location... it's better to be in a big city).

You don't have to have a certain surname to get into Waterloo. You'd be much better off just scoring well on the Fermat Contest. When nobody gives a shit what you have, and it's what you do that gets you places, you tend to be more modest. We have a long list of financial tools to make school happen for students that have the talent and will to go. We also have a fairly strong set of public school systems that get students to university's door. Again, these schools are accessible.

One of the sadder things about Google's founder success is that more parents want to emulate this success for their kids by keeping them away from Canada's otherwise pretty good public school system. It will quickly deteriorate if more parents pick up on this trend to send their kids to private or Montessori schools.

Just wondering if you could recommend some books or open source code that you'd consider to be a good role model of the kind of code you write. I use libuv in one of my projects and I was using it to better my C skills. I don't get to do C very much in my day job. But I'd like to be exposed to different styles of C so that I might understand why one style is used over another in a given context. Thanks.

If you look at his other posts for the day they're all short statements. Maybe he's just in a particularly non-verbose mood.

The acronym always makes me snicker but having dealt with some clients talk about their POS systems, it's a very widely used acronym. In fact, it was a big US company for which I was first part of a conference call where the acronym was used. I snickered in a "they're calling it an iPad? Really?"-way. Then I got used to it. Just like iPad.

I kind of cringed when I saw the name too. But I can understand why Shopify chose it. Potential customers are going to google for "POS" along with a handful of other keywords.

Actually, while client-side development is where it has gained the most popularity, I use some Yeoman generators for setting up some backends. Here is one such example that scaffolds a Node project: https://github.com/yeoman/generator-node. There's really nothing stopping you from using Yeoman for live reloading of a frontend and backend stack.

jpap, I don't quite fully understand the implementation (though I'd love to one day be proficient enough to). But maybe you can explain how the format compares to motion JPEG. Or maybe it's very similar? About 15 years ago I dabbled in live video recording on old Pentium II hardware with an old BT878 video input card. Motion JPEG was the only feasible option to obtain relatively high quality (for the time) results albeit at the cost of disk space.

Ask your teacher why you would be stupid enough to use a widely recognized template if you were trying to get away with actual plagiarism. My opinion is it is okay to use a template if you fully understand all of the functionality it brings to the table. It is no different than using a calculator if you've memorized simple arithmetic but just want to ensure accuracy, precision and speed in your math work.

IANAL but I'd imagine it is due to legal implications for Apple setting the rating. If Apple categorizes the app, it means they're essentially vouching for the app's capabilities. They need the actual seller to set the rating. That way if there's an issue, Apple isn't on the hook legally. They can wipe their hands and say "we just sell it, we don't vouch for the quality/integrity of the product".

Interesting. We should all beware. There are Reputation Management firms hired by people like Ortiz specifically to help "correct" what they believe are knocks against their reputation after a controversial incident. It usually starts off with carefully crafted and prepared statements followed by in-depth newspaper interviews in Sunday editions several weeks after the controversial incident. It ends when they write a book which presents their side of the story, uncontested, and provides an opportunity for them to have a newspaper article written against this one-sided story. In between they do have folks who would sandbag online forums like this one.

But in no other country are the chips stacked as high as they are against the defendants as they are in the U.S. in a federal case. Ortiz, via her office, charged Aaron with 11 counts of fraud. If you think you're innocent, there's no negotiating out of pleading guilty to at least some of the charges. That is fundamentally wrong.

Server rooms are increasingly Linux only with a token Exchange server. There are definitely lots of Microsoft servers but they are increasingly there for legacy reasons like a development team that opted for .NET over Java a decade ago. Most new deployments and all that popular cloud stuff is happening on Linux. Even Microsoft was forced to support Linux on Azure.

Overall, I'm happy to have official support from AWS. Are there any plans to support credentials via IAM roles? It looks like the two options right now are to set environment variables or read credentials from disk. I was just about to look into adding this capability to livelycode's aws-lib.

I know there are different definitions of pivoting going around, so much so that it has essentially lost its meaning. But I just wanted to point out that most lean startup definitions of pivot I have read involve the overall vision remaining consistent. That sounds a lot like what you've been doing, although your pivots are dictated primarily by what you want, and lean startup pivots would be dictated primarily by previous experimentation. Put another way, your pivots are more offensive in nature (i.e. charging toward the goal) and lean startup pivots are more defensive in nature (i.e. mitigating risk when an initial charge doesn't pan out).

EDIT: It turns out the definition of lean startup pivot I was aware of is just Eric Ries' interpretation. So I'm wrong.

I know URL file extensions aren't necessarily related to the technologies being used, by why is it that the URLs end in .php on taobao.com? Did they migrate from PHP to the new stack and then want to keep the existing URLs for some reason?