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jswanson's comments

jswanson | 12 years ago | on: Mac keyboard shortcuts

Agree completely. You may want to checkout Airmail. Nice looking client with all of the GMail keyboard shortcuts enabled.

Plays relatively nicely with Exchange too.

jswanson | 12 years ago | on: SR-72

They expect delivery 'by 2030'.

I wonder if satellites and newer weapons wouldn't be able to intercept its flight path by then.

You probably wouldn't have to match its speed to bring it down, just throw up a cloud of junk in its way.

jswanson | 12 years ago | on: A tcpdump tutorial and primer

If you're on a server that doesn't have an X environment set up for wireshark, you can use tcpdump to spit to a file:

   -w     Write the raw packets to file rather than parsing and printing them out.  They can later be printed with the -r option.  Standard output is used if file is ``-''.  See pcap-savefile(5) for a description of the file format.
--

You can then open this file in wireshark on your desktop for easier analysis if you wish.

jswanson | 12 years ago | on: How do game companies share massive files?

TLDR; Internal workflows, not customer facing. Enterprise dropbox.

The article title is misleading. They are actually talking about the internal workflow.

Raw assets, art assets, and such, can be pretty large.

When you have a studio in Country A doing PC, a studio in country B doing ps3, all wanting the base raw data but (presumably) transforming it in different ways, between how the build actually happens or artists tweaking something for a platform, it'd become a nightmare pretty quickly if you were to send it across a company private network (often just VPN pipes across the internet itself).

The article is, at it's heart, an ad for a company called 'Panzura', which sounds like an enterprise-specific dropbox. Boxes 'on-premise', security guarantees, and probably pretty expensive.

jswanson | 12 years ago | on: The Workman Keyboard Layout

Switched to Dvorak after plateau-ing in typing speed and experiencing pain in my hands and wrist. Helped immediately, but what also hleped almost as much was:

- Aliases for frequent shell commands - Remapping 'caps lock' to 'control' (on US keyboards)

jswanson | 12 years ago | on: ARM64 and You

From the article:

  The biggest change is an inline retain count, which eliminates the need to perform a costly hash table lookup for retain and release operations in the common case. Since those operations are so common in most Objective-C code, this is a big win.

jswanson | 12 years ago | on: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

I love Dark Souls, and constantly recommend it to friends.

And if they say 'Yeah, I picked that up on Steam!' I get really sad.

It feels like a game that is pretty exquisitely tuned, and that tuning is towards playing on a console with a controller. I'd even go so far as to say on a PS3 and a really nice TV.

Like how some people can't stand playing an FPS on consoles, only in reverse.

jswanson | 13 years ago | on: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

It's amazing how widely people vary on light. It's observable across major cultures, or even different families.

A Japanese IKEA I went through recently had a display which would allow you to switch between 'Japanese' style lighting' and 'Western' style, with western style being dimmer, and with warmer color temperature.

I immediately found the Western one more comforting, relaxing, while my wife (Japanese) prefers the brighter one. Internal lighting in Japan is almost uniformly overhead neon, without the baffles you'll see in many North American offices.

I've grown used to it, but would rather work in the dark.

I'm sure there are many people that, like you, feel that these LED bulbs are too dim. If you're at all curious though, I'd recommend that you find one and give it a shot, many of them /feel/ brighter than the numbers would lead you to expect when compared to an incandescent.

It might be better to compare on the basis of Lumens, as watt's are a measure of power instead of brightness[1].

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

jswanson | 13 years ago | on: First impressions of Leap Motion

It feels like you're taking a 3D interaction and smashing it back down into 2D. While neat, it's unlikely to catch on.

What would be amazing is using this to interact with a 3D display system. Not the 3D in a box that you get with TV's, but something closer to what we often think of holograms.

Holograms are probably a ways off (though they are doing interesting things with targeting light at retinas).

The Occulus Rift though (as others have mentioned) may be able to do something truly awesome when paired with an interface like this.

Both devices are incredibly exciting. If they manage to mesh up...

jswanson | 13 years ago | on: High Performance JS heatmaps

What version of chrome are you using?

  Google Chrome – WebGL has been enabled on all platforms that have a capable graphics card with updated drivers since version 9.[14] Google Chrome 13.0 and newer versions use Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) to control all WebGL cross-domain textures.[15]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL

jswanson | 13 years ago | on: I Don’t Need No Stinking API: Web Scraping For Fun and Profit

Search engines:

- Respect robots.txt (as mentioned elsewhere) which will often provide a limited subset of all data available

- Give something in return (potential traffic) for the data they reap.

I fully agree that scraping is great, and do it myself frequently. Site operators do have legitimate concerns in some situations though, and it probably comes from feeling as if they are being 'ripped off' somehow.

No one in their right mind is going to object to incidental scraping for personal use.

However, scraping is often scripted into cron or the like and that data is then used to profit someone else. I'm usually cool with that, but if someone is running a web site and they are dependent upon ad revenue to keep the servers running, I understand objecting to it.

jswanson | 13 years ago | on: I Don’t Need No Stinking API: Web Scraping For Fun and Profit

Totally agree, scraping is great.

I can see site operators being against the practice though, as it (usually): - generates no ad revenue - often enables someone else to use data that you struggled to put together, allowing others to profit with no gain for you - hit's edge cases that were never optimized for (as it does not follow real user access)

jswanson | 13 years ago | on: New lighting technology won't flicker, shatter or burn out

Being able to mimic the Sun's 'perfectly white light' is brilliant. Many people find CFL's really annoying.

Almost as cool though is the fact that it can easily be built in any shape desired, as it sounds like you run a change through a surface instead of having a specific light-generating element.

The example they give is of a 2x4 'panel' replacing CFL's in offices, but could imagine some fantastically cool applications of this in interior design.

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