zachc's comments | WingNews

A few years ago I leveraged some reverse engineering to stream individual windows as GIF images.

More info if you're interested: http://zachcimafonte.com/GIF-Window-Server

zachc | 14 years ago | on: Review my app: GroupDocs.com – Share, View, Sign, Compare and Convert Documents

Why did you choose to copy http://simple.com/ ?

I don't think the design really fits your service.

zachc | 14 years ago | on: Commit logs from last night

This was made by Abe Stanway at the most recent Penn Apps hackathon. You can see a video of his presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLIf9dyxMxY

Checkout the other projects, including mine here: http://www.youtube.com/user/PennApps2011#p/u

zachc | 15 years ago | on: Gmail Contacts size increased to 25000

Also see Path [1], a social network which takes an opposite approach and limits contacts to 50 people.

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/15/path-social-n...

zachc | 15 years ago | on: Facebook Acquires Daytum (Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton)

This is neat. Definitely checkout [1] if you're confused as to how it might be used. There are some good examples there.

These guys seem to have a unique perspective on human-data interaction and sharing. For example, the "Global Quick Add Feature" [2] is very intuitive. It seems like this is something Facebook is very interested in as it's essential to their product. I definitely agree with some of the other comments made here - I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook wants these guys working for them at least as much as they are interested in their actual product given their perspective and understanding.

[1] http://daytum.com/activity [2] http://daytum.com/about/how_to/global_quick_add

zachc | 15 years ago | on: Programming tool: The whiteboard marker

+1 for the melamine boards, commonly sold as "shower board" or "tile board".

I bought $30s worth and covered 3 of my walls with it -works great as a cheap white board.

zachc | 15 years ago | on: Why Escalators Bring Out the Best in People

Maybe Red-Cross should have their donation page start from the bottom of the page and scroll upward? That would be a cool A/B test.

zachc | 15 years ago | on: 20-line python Valentine's day gift from TotalFinder

The script makes 175760 permutations. For me the script takes around around 1.5 seconds to query the page each time. 175760 * 1.5 / 60 = 4394 minutes / 60 = 73.23 hours of constantly hitting the site. I'm not sure how the parallel connections it uses will impact the speed, but 3 days seems feasible. Not to say that this should ever be tried.

zachc | 15 years ago | on: 20-line python Valentine's day gift from TotalFinder

Yeah, it looks like it goes through each possible permutation of coupon codes for the BinaryAge Total Finder online store [1]. These codes seem to be in the format THANKSXXXX, where X is a random number/letter.

It generates a set of possible codes and then queries the website for each one of those codes. When it finds a correct coupon code permutation it outputs the code to the screen and writes it to a file. (Presumably so that the coupon can be reedemed for a free, illicit, copy of the program)

[1] http://sites.fastspring.com/binaryage/product/totalfinderfre...