Meryn Stol › Comments

You can see all of your email settings at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Bret Taylor

*jealous* I no longer get anything but subscription emails. - Bruce Lewis

Not much is there right now, just the script that downloads a feed's content and stores it. - Andy Bakun

No, I didn't. It doesn't seem to download the media files, AFAICT. - Andy Bakun

To a software company, vulnerabilities are largely an externality. That is, they affect you -- the user -- much more than they affect it. A smart vendor treats vulnerabilities less as a software problem, and more as a PR problem. So if we, the user community, want software vendors to patch vulnerabilities, we need to make the PR problem more acute. - Meryn Stol

In Tips and Hacks for Everyday Life: Meryn Stol voted up an answer. Paul Cleary I created http://www.tab.bz which may help you out, I'm also working on a few other ways to help solve this problem. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In iPad mini: Meryn Stol added an answer. Meryn Stol 1024x768 on 7.9 inch (or 7.85 inch) brings the PPI (number of pixels per inch) to 163, exactly that of the original iPhone. Because the iPad mini packs those 1024x768 non-Retina pixels into 7.9-inches rather than 9.7-inches, it is slightly denser than the iPad 2, namely 163 ppi rather than 132 ppi. Not coincidentally, 163 ppi is exactly the same screen density Apple manufactured for years for the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3GS (which continued to be sold until September, 2012). So if you've used any of those early iPhones (or iPod touches), you have a rough idea what a 163 ppi screen looks like. From: Why Apple couldn't make the iPad mini with a Retina display On top of that, Apple never changed the recommended *pixel*-size of UI elements for iPad, reflecting its lower ppi compared to the iPhone. That means that UI elements if you follow the Apple guidelines turn out quite a bit bigger (in physical units) than on the... - Meryn Stol

@loader_path/../Frameworks - Meryn Stol

An alternative to Underscore.js, delivering consistency, customization, performance, and extra features. - Meryn Stol

Starting in 10.5, Apple provides @rpath, which is a solution to this. When placed at the front of an install name, this asks the dynamic linker to search a list of locations for the library. That list is embedded in the application, and can therefore be controlled by the application's build process, not the framework's. A single copy of a framework can thus work for multiple purposes. To make this work, Foo.framework's install name would be set to @rpath/Foo.framework/Versions/A/Foo. An application that intends to embed Foo.framework would then pass -rpath @executable_path/../Frameworks to the linker at build time, which tells the dynamic linker to search for @rpath frameworks there. - Meryn Stol

In this 2 part series I shall try to cover the basic principles and workflow of Cordova. Examples given are specific to Android but I am sure, principles stay same, it will be easy to translate. - Meryn Stol

Cordova now ships with a set of command-line tools that make it easier for you to develop cross-platform applications. You can build, clean, and launch an emulator with a single command. You can consider these instructions as an alternative to the Getting Started guides. Whereas the Getting Started guides help you get setup with the default IDEs and tooling surrounding the platforms you are working with, the command-line tools aim to provide a shell-based approach to creating and working with Cordova projects. - Meryn Stol

Often times half the battle to getting started with cross platform development is getting set up. I’ve blogged about this often times before, but now there’s a helpful new tool available from our Adobe engineers to help you set up a cross-platform project template quickly! The tool is called cordova-client, and it allows you to edit one code base and maintain and manage your overall cross-platform development project with almost no setup hassle or IDE (Eclipse/XCode) overhead. It’s run from the command line and takes advantage of the underlying Cordova command line interface recently released. It’s basically a set of scripts that do all the hassle work for you and keep the code base consistent by copying your latest source into the different supported platforms at build time. - Meryn Stol

Over the past 6 months we’ve been developing a hybrid application for Android and iOS which uses a WebView to render news content. For those of you who are considering this approach, we’ve run into a challenge on Android worth noting. It doesn’t matter how many WebViews you create. They all share a single javascript thread. - Meryn Stol

console.log("This should not be possible") // abc - Meryn Stol

Follow: CouchDB changes notifier for NodeJS - Meryn Stol

This Chrome extension is an extension bootstrap, a template so to speak. All you need to do is edit some values in the manifest.json file, modify which options you want your extension to have through fancy-settings/source/manifest.js and add your extension code. - Meryn Stol

The Mac Keychain provides a shared, secure storage implementation that includes API specifically for storing various types of web passwords (web forms, HTTP auth, etc.). The platform expectation is that we should store our passwords there, providing interoperability with other browsers (with the exception of Firefox), rather than simply using it a private secure-storage mechanism. - Meryn Stol

zxcvbn, named after a crappy password, is a JavaScript password strength estimation library. Use it to implement a custom strength bar on a signup form near you! - Meryn Stol

Most DNS providers don’t have the ability to use a CNAME-style mapping of your naked domain to a dynamic hostname like this. There are, however, at least three that do: DNSimple, DNS Made Easy, and Amazon Web Services’ Route 53. [...] The record you want to add a DNSimple is an ALIAS record rather than an A record. They act the same way but with ALIAS you are mapping to a dynamic hostname rather than an IP. So trash the three A records for your domain pointing to Heroku’s IP addresses and add one ALIAS record for your naked domain pointing to your-ssl-endpoint.herokussl.com if you are using SSL or yourapp.herokuapp.com if you aren’t using an SSL certificate. - Meryn Stol

I don’t think mobile is going to stop growing. We are not going web-first because people use the web more than mobile. I use my phone more than anything else. I just don’t think that an entrepreneur who wants a real shot at success should start their business there. The Android and iOS platform set us up to fail by attracting us with the veneer of users, but in reality you are going to fight harder for them than is worthwhile to your business. You certainly need a mobile app to serve your customers and compete, but it should only be part of your strategy and not the whole thing. - Meryn Stol

It appears that those planning to use cloud storage for long-term archiving should plan on storage prices dropping a few percent per year. or up to 10%/yr for very large amounts of data from some providers. - Meryn Stol

Interviews in California and England with former Autonomy employees, business partners and attorneys close to the case paint a picture of a hard-driving sales culture shaped by Mr. Lynch's desire for rapid growth. They describe him as a domineering figure, who on at least a few occasions berated employees he believed weren't measuring up. Along the way, these people say, Autonomy used aggressive accounting practices to make sure revenue from software licensing kept growing—thereby boosting the British company's valuation. The firm recognized revenue upfront that under U.S. accounting rules would have been deferred, and struck "round-trip transactions"—deals where Autonomy agreed to buy a client's products or services while at the same time the client purchased Autonomy software, according to these people. - Meryn Stol

Hewlett-Packard showed “willful blindness” to the accounting problems at software firm Autonomy, noted short-sell Jim Chanos told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “This whole thing is a debacle and probably should have never happened,” the founder of Kynikos Associates said. “We had been short Autonomy in our European fund in 2010 and 2011, and watched in horror as it was taken out at a big premium by Hewlett-Packard. It was one of our absolute favorite shorts at the time.” - Meryn Stol

investors looking simply at metrics such as price to earnings may mistakenly view HP as “cheap,” or a “value” investment opportunity, according to Chanos. What’s more, the personal computing business is in decline, Chanos said. The growth of tablets and smart phones will continue to eat away at PC sales, Chanos predicted. “People will still buy PCs. It just won’t be a very profitable business,” Chanos said. - Meryn Stol

Although some investors believed that HP was cheap enough to be considered a “value stock” because its price-to-earnings ratio was relatively low compared to competitors, Chanos said that HP appeared to be masking the true costs of its basic R costs with spending through acquisitions. If those costs were expensed as operating costs rather than capitalized as acquisitions, then revenues and cash flow at HP were basically flat, Chanos said. - Meryn Stol

For my purposes here, whether Hempton’s suspicions prove to be correct is almost beside the point.  To read his posts is to witness the due diligence process as it ought to be.  Digging, asking questions, digging some more, cycling back around, finding obscure information, and considering the possibilities in favor of or opposed to a thesis. The comments on the blog postings are interesting both in content and what they represent regarding new ways of open collaboration on serious investment topics.  By and large, there are very few of the garbage comments that clutter so many finance sites.  Instead, you see a reasonable dialog, with some mediocre comments, some insightful ones, and some real nuggets of information along the way.  Hempton actively seeks out opinions and alternative ideas from readers to help him in his research. - Meryn Stol

A few weeks ago I presented at the Santangels conference in New York. The conference was held under Chatham House rules. My topic: how to fake your accounts from the perspective of the fraudster (and hence how as an investor to tell if a company is faking its accounts). At the end I suggested that even if you were right and the company was a fraud you could still short the stock and lose money - someone with deep pockets might buy the fraud. The example I gave was Autonomy which was purchased by Hewlett Packard. - Meryn Stol

As for HP's own accountability, Whitman said that the two people who were responsible for the Autonomy deal – former CEO Leo Apotheker and former chief strategy officer Shane Robison – were gone from the company. She added that one of the issues during the Autonomy deal was that the due diligence department reported up to the chief strategy officer at HP, which was Robison at the time, not to the chief financial officer – something that she rectified as soon as she took over as CEO. - Meryn Stol

With Autonomy under its wing, HP plans to help enterprises with a big, complicated problem – how to manage unstructured information for competitive advantage. Here’s the wrinkle – Autonomy hasn’t solved that problem. In fact, it’s not a pure technology problem because content is so different than data. It’s a people, process problem, too. - Meryn Stol

The real issue with Autonomy may be less its questionable sales than its core technology, said Leslie Owens, who follows data analysis software at Forrester Research. “H.P. thought it was an entirely new platform, but Autonomy’s clients said it wasn’t as good as Google’s corporate search product,” she said. Autonomy, which was founded 16 years ago, “was based on using powerful algorithms,” she said, but the software was not attuned “to new kinds of search signals, like what your friends are doing, what people like you are doing, what other data you might draw off on.” Over time those new methods attracted customers. - Meryn Stol

“[Autonomy] countered that by saying that they were high growth, which can absorb working capital and make conversion worse … my model suggested that it was still lower than it should have been even though they were growing higher,” he said. “And now we know — we think we know — that they weren’t growing as fast as they said they were, and therefore the cash conversion should have been even better than I thought it should have been at the time,” Morland added. “There were only a few of us writing this sort of stuff on the accounts,” he said, noting that JPMorgan’s IT services analyst Daud Khan had also questioned the company’s accounts. - Meryn Stol