esad's comments | WingNews

esad | 5 months ago | on: Helium Browser

Maybe it's just me, but from time to time I try latest Servo build and it never survives more than few minutes of usage before crashing. Last time I did it was 3 days ago, I opened a website and it crashed with "RefCell already borrowed" in what seems to be a logger module. This always strikes me as weird because one of the selling points for Rust is memory and thread safety (quote from the website: "eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time").

esad | 1 year ago | on: Servo's progress in 2024

I think Servo's killer application would be a mobile-first browser for postmarketOS/Mobian/other mobile Linux distros. It's a weird vacuum because Firefox has its Android port, but when you run Firefox on small linux (touch)screen, the experience is very suboptimal. I'd call it unbearable if it wasn't for bunch of tweaks in form of https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/mobile-config-f...

Chrome is no better, as it has a very weird hardcoded minimum window width of 500px.

esad | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Want to Acquire Thinkpad T400s

Btw. what happened to the XO-4 order? (I couldn't leave a comment on that post of yours because I found it too late)

esad | 7 years ago | on: NetSurf Web Browser

@kylikki Would it be possible to get a recent build with Cocoa frontend?

esad | 7 years ago | on: NetSurf Web Browser

I was wondering if one could build an alternative Electron with Duktape and Netsurf's rendering engine and what the memory footprint would be? Most Electron apps don't even use animations and they could be "backported" to HTML4 and CSS2 :-) Webviews are kind of great for portability, but having full blown HTML5 is overkill for most of the apps.

esad | 7 years ago | on: An Elm compiler for the Erlang Virtual Machine

This reminds me of Elchemy (https://github.com/wende/elchemy) which uses the Elm compiler to output "readable" Elixir. I wonder if anyone has played with both and can compare them?

esad | 13 years ago | on: Chef 11 released

What's even worse is that the install script at https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh is also unavailable, which is the default way of getting chef installed onto newly provisioned server.

esad | 13 years ago | on: Github ClassicMap, Google Map tile rendering for iOS6

Does Google actually allow you to use the tiles, as long as you credit them? Could I do something similar in a commercial app?

esad | 14 years ago | on: The Art Of The iOS Icon

The author of the article seem to think that a good iOS icon is a one that uses a perspective trick to produce a faux 3d effect. I'm not sure these are very usable when sized down to 57x57 pixels which is default iPhone icon size (double that for retina).

esad | 14 years ago | on: Silkscreen: Automatic Preview of PSD on iOS app

For now, it will show only the first page. Swiping between Fireworks pages is something we have on our roadmap.

esad | 14 years ago | on: Did a basic email take down US defence contractor RSA?

So F-Secure has access and randomly digs through e-mails going through their virus scanner?

esad | 15 years ago | on: Last week I asked about iOS components, today I released one. Feedback?

Red Laser is doing something similar, and being on the other side (we were developing an app that needed to use barcode scanning) I strongly disliked the idea that I have to share my sales data with them. There are also cases where agencies are doing development for their clients and have no overview over sales once they finish the app. Communicating to clients that they have to pay % of sales to some library vendor might be very hard.

Superpin is not an app, and even as a component (in difference to something like an flash/ActiveX chart component) it has a very limited market (iOS devs doing something with maps and needing to handle lot of annotations) and with sale volumes we're projecting, pricing it down to something like $19 would never pay off for the time that went into developing it.

Clustering annotations is not all too hard, but it's certainly not a trivial problem and it will take even an experienced developer (such developer should be charging at least $100/h) a day or two to do it right. If you can buy a well-tested off the shelf solution for this money, why not do that instead? This is basically the thinking behind our "big" price.

esad | 15 years ago | on: Last week I asked about iOS components, today I released one. Feedback?

This behaviour is implemented with few lines of code in the sample app, but we should probably make this the default behaviour in the framework itself with an option to override it.

esad | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Would you pay for iOS components?

Good point. I haven't really thought about this, but one problem that I see with distributing source code is avoiding that it appears on piratebay after a while, on the other hand I can understand that it's a must for some developers.

Could sources be sold as an additional feature? I'm thinking of having two versions, binary and source which would cost like 3x as much. What do you think?

esad | 15 years ago | on: Mark Bao tracks down his stolen laptop and has the last laugh

I'm not sure Mark is the smarter one in this one. If the thief has been able to auto log-in as him and fill his browser history, this probably means that he can also read Mark's history and the rest of his home directory is lying there unencrypted, with his identity wide exposed.

esad | 15 years ago | on: Lots of Hackerspaces on Wikipedia are suggested for deletion

Why is inclusionism so bad? So what if we had a wikipedia article for every office building in Chicago or every Pokemon out there?

esad | 16 years ago | on: The Next Mainstream Programming Language: a game developer's perspective

Off topic, but it always surprises me how someone with all this knowledge can ..well, use Comic Sans for the presentation. While I understand that it's about games and that Comic Sans is supposed to be perceived as a "fun" font, this is really an odd choice.

esad | 16 years ago | on: Pretty Pictures: Ray tracing in Lisp

I'm puzzled why the author released one-time "snapshot" of the current development state instead of placing the code in a world-readable repository (errr...github?)

esad | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: What do you think of GitX?

I know this fits probably better into separate tool, but one thing I still miss about TortoiseSVN are the statistics.

Although these were very basic, still it was fun to see from time to time how long the project has been going on, how many commits per day you had and other information porn.

Anyway, GitX is a wonderful tool that does it's job and it's great complement to the command line. I use it mostly for history and branching visualization and except that it something it would hang on large commits (not file count-wise, more when trying to show big diffs), it has been serving me well all this time and I have to thank you and all the contributors!

esad | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?

I don't know if they allow that, but I was thinking of getting one of the advertised-as-unlimited-storage dreamhost account and using rsync to do my backups. Anyone using this already?