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nickb | 17 years ago | on: Better lighting for your computer

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

Say what? Look like the sun? CFL or LEDs are just white light sources. Most of them are not even full spectrum and they're not mean to 'look like the sun' at all.

All this program did was cast a yellow/pink overcast over my screen. If you're doing some graphics work, this is useless.

If you're on a Mac and your eyes feel tired from a lot of light late in the evening, give this a try: http://docs.blacktree.com/nocturne/nocturne

nickb | 17 years ago | on: If Chrome doesn't look native, why does the toolkit matter?

The problem is.... Google's Chrome for Windows doesn't look native.

And which app does? MS Office doesn't look native either. Neither does IE. In fact, very few MS apps actually use their guidelines and default widget sets. Office, for example, has a completely different widget set and even has a different toolbar (ribbon).... not to mention a completely different window chrome and that big round button in top left. And many other Windows apps don't follow the guidelines either.

A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product - from the codebase to the user experience - and that to the end user it shouldn't matter what OS you're on.

Except that people today do use different OSes and nativeness does matter! Inconveniencing and annoying your users with an intent to make them aware that your app is somehow different is opposite from what you should be doing: conforming to their learned patterns of how their UI works and making the transition to a new app painless and 'invisible.'

I'm in complete agreement with Goodger on this one: none of the cross platform widget sets feel native on any of the OSes. Firefox still feels awkward on OS X and has a lot of deficiencies in the way the text boxes work, keyboard navigation for assistive devices. In-browser widgets like buttons and drop-down menus are just off when you compare them with native widgets (drop-down in particular) and feel weird.

They invoke that 'the uncanny' feeling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncanny They look like the real thing but aren't and give you that uncomfortable feeling.

nickb | 17 years ago | on: Web 2.0 Dies - Enjoy Hell

What a silly conclusion. Web 2.0 is so successful that it has become synonymous with Web. When people think of web, do they still think of old, mostly 'read only' apps, or do they think of new, social and user participatory apps?

If you take a look at the charts of top visited web sites, you'll see that the answer to that question is quite clear and that the Web 2.0 has conquered the Web.

Now, the fact that a trademarked search term 'web 2.0' is losing its steam is O'Reilly Media's problem since that's their property. You could say that Tim O'Reilly has been pushing it so hard that he was too successful at it.

nickb | 17 years ago | on: Google pulling plug on radio advertising service

When they purchased DMarc Broadcasting few years back for something like $100M, it was a pretty big deal. Some were calling for anti-trust investigations even then.

But like some other Google acquisitions, this one didn't work out that well.

nickb | 17 years ago | on: Portland Ten launching new incubator program, charges entrepreneurs $1500

[We’re looking for] an entrepreneur right on the cusp of starting a high-growth business. A teachable entrepreneur who will commit to the required activities, and the optional activities when possible. An entrepreneur who will consider themselves the first investor in the project and raise the funds to pay the $500/month program tuition.

Huh? They should be paying THEM to participate! What value-add do they actually provide? If they're mentoring, what credentials do they have? From what I can see, they interview you and tell you your idea/product sucks or rocks and either boost or crush your ego. Is that all? You can find a desk in some quiet office for less than that amount and hack something out on your own and let the market tell you if your product is any good.

They don't even say if they're taking any equity for this 'service' that they're providing... but they must be. They also don't say how exactly they'll find your project once your own funding runs out. They're throwing the $1M figure around but they're not saying that they'll be actually providing you with that amount of funding or they expect you to make $1M by then end of 2010. My guess is the latter.

nickb | 17 years ago | on: Friendster relocates to Australia

Friendster has the biggest office in Manila, Philippines. If the execs are smart, they'll relocate to the same spot. Having all of your devs in Manila and execs somewhere else doesn't work well in practice.

nickb | 17 years ago | on: Ruby 1.9.1 Released: First Stable Ruby 1.9 Release

I wonder what will happen to 1.9 branch. It's not supported well by anything. 1.9 is suppose to be a transitional branch anyway... a place where Matz can experiment a bit. 2.0 is suppose to be the next big thing (like Python 3000) but I have no idea if that will ever see the light of the day.

I'm placing my bets on JRuby, Rubinius and MagLev in the meantime.

nickb | 17 years ago | on: Poll: Rails Deployment: Passenger or Mongrel or?

Well, in what stage is your app at? How many users do you have to support? What's the app serving... lots of images or mostly text out of database? How much RAM is your app using with mongrels (check it with top)? What's your hardware setup like? If you're on slices, are they 32bit or 64bit and how much RAM do you have?

Passenger's great if you have a lot of RAM (say over 1gb). If you're on 256/512Mb slices, I'd stick with nginx+mongrel (or thins) since that combo will utilize less RAM and won't swap.

Finally, you should test and see for yourself how the app performs when you load it with httperf or something like that.

nickb | 17 years ago | on: Ask HN: hn for biz students?

Not only that but a lot of traffic on NM is from corporations. And I mean, there's like 50% of traffic coming from various F1000 & banking institutions. Problem with them is that some are too afraid to post anything that might be traced back to them.

I'm thinking about adding SSL and removing IP logging to facilitate communication. Not sure yet what the best solution would be.

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