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Tracy › Comments
Android App developers are you listening? Good. Here's an app I'd pay $5 and I bet a lot of others would too.
Thomas Power, Louis Gray, Daniel Rowley and 17 other people liked this
Give me an app that will let me take a picture of some food in the grocery store (lets say Golden Grahams), query a database online, and tell me all the ingredients in that food and whether or not it has ingredients I've put on my "avoid" list (like HFCS).
- EricaJoy
It's a quite nice idea for an app. Unfortunately I'm not a developer at all, so I'm commenting just to make the voice spread ;)
- Markingegno - Donato
from Android
It really depends what range of products you want. Is it only packaged food with a barcode (that could be made) or that would include non-packaged food you may buy that doesn't have unique id or look (donuts, bakery bread, burgers, etc.)?
- Nenad Nikolic
Good idea. Have you tried taking pictures of supermarket boxes using Goggles to see if they show up in Google's database. If so, that would seem like the right place to start. If the Goggles app exposes a library that would make it even easier.
- Joel Webber
Not sure if it has the exact features you are asking for but they have a bar-code scanning iPhone app already. Can't imagine it will be too long before they have an Android app. http://www.goodguide.com/
- Tracy
@Tracy - Goodguide is very very close but the website seems heavy and there is a heavy focus on "green". I want for people with nut allergies to be able to know not to eat something without scouring the labels. I want hidden sugars to be made obvious and HFCS warning sirens to blast. Ok maybe that last one is a little much but essentially, I want to say "these are the foods I cannot/will not eat" and have the app say which foods are a go/no-go.
- EricaJoy
@jgw - Goggles integration would be fab. @Nenad - Packaged food mostly. Non packaged food is too hard to work with.
- EricaJoy
Maybe http://www.scanavert.com/ ? It is $48 / year though. They seem to be focused on exploiting the higher margin health market. Maybe somebody else licensing the Gladson data has a higher volume/low margin consumer strategy.
- Tracy
That looks very promising Tracy, thanks! Shame they have a subscription based licensing model. That's a bit much. I'd also prefer the data to be freely available and not walled in. Ideally this would product have a community built database to allow for faster updates and correction of data.
- EricaJoy
Hmmm just reading up on ScanAvert (research, research, research) and came across http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2009....
- EricaJoy
EricaJoy: Interesting warning about NDAs. Seems these patent-trolls and similar scumbags will try anything to make a buck.
- Andrew Perry
If you're already in the grocery store, can't you just look at the back of the package, which is required to list the ingredients? Things like HFCS are easy to spot.
- Andy Bakun
I suspect some derivative of barcode reader would do the trick, moreso than Google Goggles. All you need now is the ingredient database. Does the FDA publish such information?
- Robert Konigsberg
Well, picking up every box to scan the barcode or take a picture of every box isn't going to be much easier. If your goal is to find the one(s) that don't have something, you're better off doing a search online before you go to the store and getting the exact one you want. The musack in grocery stores would make me go insane if I had to spend that amount of time in them that what you suggest would require.
- Andy Bakun
@amarquart - http://dailyburn.com/foodsca... The database is crowdsourced.
- Tracy
YC-Funded Lingt Uses Games To Turn You Into A Language Learning Addict - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
mehmet t. akalın, Clare Dibble, Tracy and Paul Buchheit liked this
My prediction: we'll see a lot more like Lingt in the future. Call it Web 5.0.
- Daniel Dulitz
你好
- Tracy
Will Na'vi be next?
- Amit Patel
Twitter: A half dozen RT's and a few stars.
testbeta, Benjamin Golub, Christopher Chung and 9 other people liked this
Friendfeed: A dozen likes and several dozen comments.
- DeWitt Clinton
Facebook: <crickets>
- DeWitt Clinton
Facebook would be similar to FriendFeed
- Jesse Stay
Look at my FB stream. Every tenth post gets at best a "like". Those same messages start involved discussions on FriendFeed. And on Twitter, well ... people sure like that "RT" button.
- DeWitt Clinton
Myspace: A half dozen emo's and Rupert Murdoch
- Mo Kargas
Baker's Dozen: 2 half dozen buns and one more
- Mo Kargas
(Haha for your edits, Mo!)
- DeWitt Clinton
LOL I know, I suck :D
- Mo Kargas
Dewitt, you're right - there is much less activity on Facebook than on FriendFeed per capita
- Jesse Stay
at least in my experience
- Jesse Stay
I still think about what FriendFeed did right, and why it was so conducive to building discussion. Three things stand out: 1) long(ish) form comments, 2) blazingly fast UI with instant feedback 3) the ability to edit comments.
- DeWitt Clinton
And starting with a sharp tech-focused community that eventually grew to encompass more of the real world.
- Louis Gray
That didn't hurt, Louis. But there are parts of the FF graph that are entirely unconnected with the original clique (in the graph theory sense of the word) that also mirror the conversation pattern, such as the various thriving international audiences. To me this suggests that the conversations were inherent in the platform itself, not just a reflection of the founders and their friends way of using it.
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, I agree - I think Twitter got first mover's advantage (FTMP), while FriendFeed took it to a whole new level. They are still early in this level of communication, and others will continue to emulate. It will be interesting to see, with its continued growth, if Facebook sees this and decides to push it as its own product or integrate the technology into its own platform or both.
- Jesse Stay
FriendFeed selling to Facebook was sad. Maybe Gravity will take it the rest of the way. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
- Tracy
Is this article about 7 dangerous food true? http://shine.yahoo.com/channel... List includes microwave popcorn, apples, corn-fed beef, salmon...
ThatDBD, Ruchira S. Datta, Michal Cierniak and 4 other people liked this
Dangerous relative to what? They all have better versions, but I doubt they are dangerous compared to twinkies.
- Paul Buchheit
The article implies that microwaved popcorn could cause infertility.
- niniane
Well, the plastics in the bag, really. Come to think of it, Alton Brown has a recipe for DIY microwave popcorn - three small staples to seal a paper bag, spaced reasonably far apart, should be microwave safe.
- Andrew C
Stables are metal, right?
- Cristo
Cristo, if they're small enough and far enough apart, it should be perfectly safe. I've actually tried it from his recipe. It was fine. No sparks or anything.
- ha3rvey (business time)
Yeah, but he says as long as they're small and not close together, they're too small to heat up.
- Andrew C
pan-popped it easy, too
- WorldofHiglet
It's definitely made me think twice about canned tomatoes.
- Rochelle
A friend of mine mentioned the canned tomatoes to me a year or so ago. I happen to use a lot of them, but I am also re-thinking it. The tetrapak sounds like a good alternative which isn't ridiculously expensive, but I don't think I can find them at the stores I shop at. No Trader Joe's in Colorado :( It does also make me wonder how one can know whether the can has bpa in the lining. I don't think they all do.
- Robert Felty
Do they have tomatoes in jars? Is everything in cans bad?
- Cristo
I've had no fertility problems with any of these.....just sayin. LOL.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
Cristo - I think that the acidity in tomatoes degrades the bpa in the lining of the can, in the same way that extreme heat can for water bottles. From the research I have done, BPA is not a carcinogen, and won't kill you, but it can mess with your hormones (at least in mice and rats)
- Robert Felty
Everything sounds reasonable to me. Just purchase Organic if your worried. For the popcorn just purchase a [popcorn maker] (first hit)?
- peter fisher
Especially if the popcorn was NK603 x MON810 maize. There is a scientific study that suggests that particular flavor of GMO interferes with reproduction. But that's just scientific evidence in mice. I'm sure the industrial food system will tell you that it hasn't been proven to cause any problems in humans. I have an old commercial touting the benefits of Raid: Home and Garden spray....
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- Tracy
What brand of popcorn can I buy, which is not NK603 x MON810?
- niniane
Presumably something organic?
- Andrew C
It is true, Nuke popcorn once the mark of civilization is proven to a Really Big Cancer causer.. You will find that healthy foods like Kimche and Rice fair up there on the good side.
- ThatDBD
The day we realized you can just microwave plain popcorn kernels was a glorious, glorious day. So cheap, so healthy, you pick the toppings. Easy enough to do while high.
- LAST DAY OF WORK
Make: Online : Open source hardware 2009 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009 - http://blog.makezine.com/archive...
I need more free time.
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
still in search of the perfect work music. currently listening to the same 3 songs on repeat.
Jim Norris liked this
You might try this: http://www.amazon.com/gp... Ambient music, nature sounds, and binaural beats.
- Ruchira S. Datta
After seeing "nature sounds" I misread that as "binaural beasts" =)
- Jim Norris
Depends on what you're looking for. I keep going back and forth between Pandora stations seeded with Thievery Corporation and Dresden Dolls. The former is probably better work music, but the latter just rocks so much I can't help it.
- Joel Webber
Depends. If I already know the code I need to write, slowly evolving psytrance sets a fast cadence. No lyrics though since I can't be having the music triggering my language processing. For something more contemplative (like a code review) I listen to something more downtempo and relaxing. Very nice headphones are a must have.
- Tracy
Why doesn't aluminium foil get hot?
Kol Tregaskes, ǝuǝƃnǝ, Micah Wittman and 4 other people liked this
Of course it does. In what circumstances is it not getting hot for you?
- Michael R. Bernstein
Large surface area and ability to dissipate heat makes it cool quickly.
- Brian Sullivan
shiny side _reflects_ heat
- MikeAmundsen
Brian, that's assuming it's been dissociated from a heat source. If, say, it's still wrapped around the baked potato, you'll find that it's pretty good at dissipating heat into your fingers.
- Michael R. Bernstein
That's because the foil is directly touching the—pardon the pun—hot potato as opposed to being tented.
- Akiva Moskovitz
We're baking a pie right now at 375 °F and I put foil along the edges to prevent them from burning. About halfway through I took the foil off, and within seconds it was cool enough to crumple up by hand. In fact, it wasn't even warm. That surprises me every time.
- DeWitt Clinton
(Sitting here with my aluminium foil hat on)
- Joe
DeWitt, so what you're really asking is "why doesn't foil stay hot?". In which case Brian's answer is correct.
- Michael R. Bernstein
Ahh, so the foil was hot while in the oven, but because it is so thin and so good at conducting heat that it dissipated nearly instantaneously. Thanks, everyone. I can sleep at ease now.
- DeWitt Clinton
Will this become a Googe interview question? :P
- imabonehead
Not now, we spoiled it for everyone.
- DeWitt Clinton
BTW Akiva, that wasn't a pun.
- Michael R. Bernstein
I used to have this metal (unknown alloy) oven pizza plate that was pretty amazing like this. After taking it out of the oven and removing the pizza, it was almost instantly room temperature.
- Ray Cromwell
DeWitt, one correction -- aluminum has very low specific heat, 0.9 J/gK. Thus it is a very _poor_ conductor of heat. Foil also has very little mass. So 20g cooling by 200K only releases 4000J. If your 100g fingertips were mainly water (4 J/gK), they would gain only 10K from that 4000J, a condition which our nerves describe to us as "not hot."
- Daniel Dulitz
Daniel - that's not a correction, that's a freshman year physics class in comment form. You win FriendFeed.
- DeWitt Clinton
This was like a mini stackoverflow-style Q&A in a friendfeed thread - who knew the ff team built-in that in that kind of virtualization!
- Micah Wittman
Daniel Wins the Internets!!!
- Roberto Bonini
I'm going to memorise that comment for the next time I'm cooking.......
- Roberto Bonini
Well, if this is freshman physics quiz... Aluminium is a good conductor, it just can't store heat. Conduction and heat storage are different (like resistance and capacitance). cpu heat sinks are often aluminium because they quickly conduct heat to the surface of the fins.
- Tracy
So aluminum is the opposite of the space shuttle tiles?
- Amit Patel
HowStuffWorks on the Clover coffee maker: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets... @mattsly
Tracy liked this
PID control is nice, but I can only drink Fourier control coffee. Sure, it's a pain retesting my system response all the time but the oscillations about the setpoint temperature on PID controlled broilers just ruins it for me. :)
- Tracy
: )
- DeWitt Clinton
$2 million verdict against Bayer CropScience - STLtoday.com - http://www.stltoday.com/stltoda...
"Bayer CropScience LP must pay about $2 million for losses sustained by two Missouri farmers when an experimental variety of rice the company was testing cross-bred with their crops, a federal jury ruled."
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
"The variety eventually "contaminated" more than 30 percent of U.S. ricelands, Don Downing, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said at the start of the trial."
- Tracy
Tick tock. Looking more likely that genetically engineered crops could trigger a collapse of the industrial food system. A bias towards optimism and human errors capable of self-replication does not bode well.
- Tracy
Fwd: Online Journals and the Evolving Genre Ecosystem of Science http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses... Diss. on rhetoric of online sci.comm. (via http://friendfeed.com/coturni...)
Tracy liked this
"For a parallel in the history of technology, Basalla (1988) argues that invention sometimes precedes necessity (pp. 6–7). In other words, technological artifacts can evolve in form first, with social necessity following. Such an argument may be unfashionably determinist unless one sees the necessities themselves as being socially constructed, but even though communication and genre are...
more...
- Tracy
Though this may be a stretch in terms of analogous behavior, there is a good deal of social science research showing that children/adolescents participate in more adult-like behaviors long before they are developmentally ready them; for example, "going together" or "telling jokes". Maybe we adults do the same with technology; a kind of "build it and they will come" spirit.
- Mickey Schafer
TheFunded publishes a plain vanilla term sheet for VCs | VentureBeat - http://deals.venturebeat.com/2009...
winckel liked this
Called the “Plain Preferred Term Sheet,” the document (embedded below) was inspired by a recent debate sparked by entrepreneur Chris Dixon (co-founder of Hunch) and investor Fred Wilson, who have been seeking a way to simplify the complicated provisions that have crept into the average term sheet.
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
The Generic Dilemma - http://research.swtch.com/2009...
I think the Java option is missing that Java punts on primitives. All Java generics use reference types. If you want to have a list of chars or bytes, you have to use a custom collection for efficiency. So the 90% case has no overhead, since most of the time, you're storing objects anyway. In the cases where you need ints, longs, or bytes in your collection, you need a non-orthogonal...
more...
- Ray Cromwell
@Ray - is that true in the age of autboxing though? I wonder if there are actually more full objects stored now than before because of the convenience of complier assisted marshalling.
- DeWitt Clinton
Probably depends on programmer experience. There are times where you might box primitives for a Map, but I almost never see anyone trying to model a String as a List<Character> or List<Integer>. The idea of List<Byte> in Java just seems bizarre. I think the Go comments are coming from the standpoint of C++ STL where vector<char> can be pretty efficient. Java sacrifices orthogonality for...
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- Ray Cromwell
So, with Java, you lose nice orthogonality, you can't run sort(), or map(), or filter() equally on a collection of references or a String, or a primitive array. Certainly, there's an argument for doing so, but it would almost certainly lead to less efficiency.
- Ray Cromwell
via drhodes in the comments: "A snippet from the abstract: ... a comprehensive comparison of generics in six programming languages: C++, Standard ML, Haskell, Eiffel, Java (with its proposed generics extension), and Generic C#" http://www.osl.iu.edu/publica...
- Tracy
NeuroDojo: For new brain cells, go to the wild - http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2009...
Tracy and Ruchira S. Datta liked this
I wonder how much of this applies to humans. I've noticed that the outdoorsy people I meet tend to be smarter and better adjusted than the average joes.
- Piaw Na
New stimulation doesn't have to come from the "wild". I would suggest urban living also helps.
- Andrew C
Use it or lose it. That's why I can't speak spanish anymore. Somewhere (probably Friendfeed) I came across an article mentioning the disorienting and stress inducing psychological impact of dense urban areas. A professor had one group of students take a route through busy city streets and another group of students take a route through a park. The group that went through the park scored...
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- Tracy
Uh, Andrew, wasn't there an article somewhere during the last year about the impact of city living on humans? I might be remembering wrongly, but it wasn't good.
- Piaw Na
Found it: http://www.boston.com/bostong...
- Piaw Na
Oh yeah. I remember seeing that on FF before, and I didn't think much of the claims back then.
- Andrew C
But still, "A city is so overstuffed with stimuli" - this is the exact opposite of the worst case scenario your first post noted - being caged and unable to even make basic changes to one's environment.
- Andrew C
Yes, there needs to be a balance between "no stimulation" and "over-stimulated". The city goes too far one way, and the cage goes too far the other way. Silicon Valley, with easy access to nature, is just right.
- Piaw Na
I like to think it's a matter of personal taste, the way a particular Scoville measure of spicy heat in food can be too mild for some and too hot for others.
- Andrew C
It's not a matter of personal taste if the studies show that you think less well in a city. :-)
- Piaw Na
If studies showed that, then fine. They don't. They show how -on average-, suburban milk-fed students, or 'losers', to use the technical term, couldn't handle urbanity. Ahem.
- Andrew C
Hm... Seems to me that it's not a coincidence that the hot-beds of tech innovation (Bell Labs and Silicon Valley) are both in the suburbs.
- Piaw Na
Well, it is cheaper to have facilities in the suburbs. But actually many people prefer living in cities even if they have to commute to the suburb to work (which is what many people do in the Silicon Valley). But this might be because of the demographics of the type of people working in tech area.
- Henner Zeller
Man, I hate industrial parks with a passion.
- Andrew C
I've seen lots of cases where a young couple move to the city, only to move back to the suburbs after they have kids. And despite the stereotypical startup founder being in his 20s, most new businesses are started by folks in their 40s.
- Piaw Na
This is partly because the urban core of many American cities were broken down or cut apart from the 50s to the 70s with highways and 'urban renewal'.
- Andrew C
Again, it is cheaper to get bigger places in the suburbs which you need if you have kids. But I would always prefer a city to a suburb, especially if I have kids. But then again, I am used to pretty green European cities with safe schools.
- Henner Zeller
(Compare Vancouver, which was one of the few cities to escape that trend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... )
- Andrew C
European cities are definitely very livable. I didn't hate living in Munich, though I did manage to live out in the suburbs there too. :)
- Piaw Na
Well, Vancouver probably doesn't have the rampant theft that San Francisco does. My friends who live in San Francisco get a bike stolen every year.
- Piaw Na
I don't buy that it's cheaper to get bigger places in the suburbs, at least, not when you compare Silicon Valley to San Francisco.
- Piaw Na
Rent in MV in 2007 - that is, pre-crash - was more slightly affordable than in SF. Rent in SJ or the far reaches of the East Bay was even cheaper.
- Andrew C
and in general, I'm not sure it's wise to generalize Silicon Valley to all suburbs. (and in fairness, it would also be unwise to generalize Vancouver (or SF, or NYC) to all [American] cities.)
- Andrew C
I think the crime I describe is rampant in all US cities, not just San Francisco. Munich, on the other hand --- I saw bikes locked up that wouldn't survive 20 seconds in San Francisco. And in Japan --- nobody even locked their bike.
- Piaw Na
In the past couple of weeks, the tap water at my house has gotten very bad. The shower smells like a swimming pool, and it's unpleasant to drink. Anyone have experience/recommendations with whole-house water filters?
Jeff P. Henderson, April Buchheit, Amir and 6 other people liked this
Does it smell like sulfur? We had this happen a while back and it was the hot water tank lining. If it breaks there is some harmless bacteria that can get in there. Test this by checking the hot water running and see if it smells/tastes different than the cold only running.
- Jason Shellen
It sounds like your municipal water is having a hard time staying in spec and is dumping in chlorine to keep the bacteria down.
- Clare Dibble
hope this can help http://www.consumersearch.com/water-f...
- chaz2b
I'm pretty sure it's some kind of chlorine compound since it smells like a swimming pool and is in the cold water.
- Paul Buchheit
and it just ruined my cup of tea -- I had to pour it away and startover with filtered water :(
- Paul Buchheit
It would be expensive to put a whole house filter on to remove the chlorine. I have a small Reverse Osmosis system. Any tap water that will be consumed comes from the RO system. The fish is happy in it too! I got mine here: http://jimstrains.com/page...
- Bill Scherer
looking into it (i had never thought about putting the whole house on filtration) i see the costs range from $700-$7,000 (basically speaking) and i bet you can get govt rebates too, so its not as costly as i first thought
- chaz2b
My mom has a whole house filter system and loves it (definitely on the lower end of the price spectrum quoted above). It helps reduce mineralization in her various water fixtures in addition to removing that pool smell (she couldn't take a shower without her eyes watering).
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
We have 2 water filters. Whole house by Purwater FHT-384 http://www.purwater.com $75 (installed at water main in basement) and a 5 stage osmosis unit by Watts Premier https://www.wattspremier.com/product... $200 (installed under sink with spigot). For the whole house filter, be sure to get the higher end filters made with carbon that filter out "scale" deposits (best quality)
- Susan Beebe
Maybe you should have that water tested to know exactly what's going on?
- Sean McBride
Have you been getting a lot of rain where you are? Sometimes they'll increase the chlorine because of run-off. Not likely to do damage to you, but it's still foul.
- Junebug (aka Sarah Jill)
In Ft Lauderdale we got a notice in our last water bill that they were going to be dumping extra chlorine in the water most of this month. I found a website that deals with this subject extensively http://safeusawater.com They don't sell anything, just provide info. I emailed them the notice I got and they put it on their site so they are pretty responsive.
- Victor
Victor, that site seems to be a referred funnel (they sell your info): "4) We route your request to 3 Water Quality Professionals in our exclusive network. We work with only the most reputable and experienced companies. 5) You will be contacted directly by Qualified Professionals who will provide you with a free price quote. You decide which company you will work with."
- Paul Buchheit
Whatever you go with, think about dropping a line to your water district. If you can smell that much chlorine, that isn't good for people to be drinking. They should be held to account for that.
- Spidra Webster
This seems to be the only whole-house filter around: http://www.aquasana.com/product... (though maybe I'm not looking in the right place)
- Paul Buchheit
I take that back, there are more: http://www.puritec.com/store... I'm still not sure what to get though. There's so much spam and so little unbiased info :(
- Paul Buchheit
Portland residents west of the Willamette must boil their water now.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Paul, I live in a healthy house constructed by a Purdue Engineer, John Bower. If you are concerned about shower water alone, Sears makes a reasonable system for the money. That catches most of the problem and then an RO system after that will take care of the rest. http://www.amazon.com/Healthy... They lived next door to me for awhile till he built another house closer to town. :)
- Melanie Reed
Paul - consider calling some local plumbers and inquire with them what whole house water filters they install. Get some product model numbers and check them out in advance.
- Susan Beebe
Perhaps ping your neighbors to see if they have the same experience? It could be your pipes or some other local problem rather than a systemic problem.
- Todd Hoff
From the water dept: "Good morning, Santa Clara Valley Water District is performing maintenance on one of their transmission pipelines until January 15, 2010. As a result, we are providing water service to customers using company-owned wells. You may experience reduced pressure, increased hardness (higher deposits of calcium), and a possible change in taste during this time period. We...
more...
- Paul Buchheit
That explains it. We are on a well and the water sucks. Jan 15(ish) is pretty close, especially when compared to the time it would take to fully install a filter system.
- Todd Hoff
which city has the cleanest tapwater http://friendfeed.com/chaz2b...
- chaz2b
The book below cuts through some of the noise. No ebook, but according to google books it is in quite a few libraries down in the valley. http://books.google.com/books...
- Tracy
Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter? - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2009...
Tracy, Andrew C and Hein Roehrig liked this
A great profile of Jon Blow.
- Piaw Na
GDC was in March. Why is this just coming out now?
- Rob Shillingsburg
Hey, I have a little time now, so. OK, the headline is just silly. DIY will no more supplant FPSes than indie movies supplanted blockbusters.
- Andrew C
The very sentence "Braid is something you could show to Roger Ebert and say, 'Here is a work of authorial intention,' " raises my hackles, perhaps unintentionally. I really don't like the auteur theory in film and I don't think it applies to most videogames either, Braid and other ultra-small-teams aside. By analogy, there actually are great works in TV and film that come from an entire team. A great screenwriter, director, editor, DP, composer, actors, production designer, sound editor, and so forth.
- Andrew C
I guess my point is implicitly made in that sentence "Some observers say the success of Braid is an "Easy Rider" moment for video games." Indeed, there was an explosion of indie films in the 1970s. And I applaud that. But H'wood films didn't go away. And now every major movie studio also has a unit devoted to making "indie" films too. Movies, of course, have a much better system of ancillary revenue streams than games do, but I think to some degree that problem can be addressed or otherwise worked around.
- Andrew C
Have you heard Jon's talks? I think he's right in that the major games that heavily abuse gamers by using techniques such as: "using levels as candy", "forcing gamers into repetitive task that are not in aid of the game". I think that having people like Jon around is good for reminding designers of such weaknesses.
- Piaw Na
No, I haven't heard his talks, but... what's wrong with candy?
- Andrew C
Jon has been at it for a long time. It's great to see him getting recognition.
- Tracy
Why are we equating FPS with the commercial mainstream? It is now, though there are plenty of other genres on the market. Will FPS be the primary genre forever? That's a depressing thought. I find shooting kind of... tedious. Braid was, of course, awesome. Passage is meh.
- ⓞnor
I like candy.
- Amit Patel
When I think of commercial mainstream, I think of Sims, World of Warcraft, Wii Fit, Mario Kart, Grand Theft Auto. But I guess there are some big FPSes too (Halo comes to mind but I think there's a new one released last week that's getting some attention).
- Amit Patel
Alright, FriendFeeders, which one should I go with?
Myrna, Mitchell Tsai, James Stratford and 30 other people liked this
The one on the left. :-)
- MaryB, BrandingBroadOfFF
The first one
- Dan Hsiao
Right.
- τorƍue
first one ;) may b u can change colors but as theme? definitely first one =]
- emre dede ve haremi
The one on the right caught my eye first than the one on the left because of the pictures. The text on the left catches my eye more than the one on the right.
- imabonehead
I love the photos on the second one best!! I like both designs, but like the first design a little better.
- Rachel Lea Fox
first one
- VAL D. Zone
The one on the left with the top pic of the right swapped for the first pic. Not that I enjoy being difficult or anything. Is this Tinyprints?
- Heather Solos
loving #1 left
- barbarars
The second one; on the right
- Itachi
Why don't you test the pages with google website optimizer?
- Serbay Arda Ayzit
Can't go wrong with either of those. First one is better.
- ashish
First one.
- David Schmidt
The one on the right. The lighting is much warmer. The lighting on the left is too cold. The first photo on the left looks foreboding.
- Tracy
Left. Right feels too much like some sort of promotional piece.
- Kevin Fox
Left, definitely.
- Jason Huebel
I like the one on the left better, but the first picture could be replaced with the photo from the bottom left on the right version and it should say 2009 somewhere.
- Clare Dibble
The left, but I agree with Clare's idea of switching those pictures.
- Penguin It's Cold Outside
I like the big picture on the right the best; the kids look great and they're facing the reader. And the pop of green brightens the card.
- m9m, Crone of FriendFeed
If it's a personal card, go with the one on the left. If it's for professional/business acquaintances, go with the one on the right.
- Curtiss Grymala
I would say the left one.
- Mitch
Another vote for the left.
- Yolanda
Left.
- Junebug (aka Sarah Jill)
LEFT :)
- Susan Beebe
Right but swap the Peace, Love, Joy with the one from the Left. Makes it more playful and less...corporate?
- EricaJoy
The first one.
- Alex Hellstrom
from iPod
The one on the right.
- Paolo Ferrandi
from iPod
the one on the right ^^
- al3lilo
right
- viki saigal
right
- JA Castillo
I like the one on the left better. (Glad we could help you decide.)
- Bruce Lewis
I'm on Team Right
- Jesse Stay
Left.
- Alix Whitmire
+1 for Left
- Atul Arora
Left.
- H0llywoodWh0re
Easy -- on the Right. Bigger pictures over bigger fonts on a holiday card every time. They're not for reading, they're for looking at!
- Eric Borisch
I would like to put in a write-in candidate for a card with a picture of the whole family - Paul, April, Camilla, and Thomas. I like seeing the adults too!
- Robert Felty
The one on the right.
- Alex Scoble
The one on the right
- Pete Gilbert
left
- Sinem Co
+1 Right
- Mitch
wrong left
- imran
right
- Helen Sventitsky
Left. and switch the pics like everyone else said.
- Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah
The one on the right but switch the green for the brown from the one on the left.
- Adewale Oshineye
I'll pick the second one!
- Milton Ramirez
I like the one on the right more.
- Josh Haley
I like the photos on the right, but I like the design on the left.
- Karen Padham Taylor
Thanks for your help, everyone!! :) I think I'm going to go with the design on the left, but replacing the picture on the left panel with the picture in the middle panel and putting the picture from the bottom left panel of the design on the right in the middle panel of the design on the left. (Am I confusing you yet?) I'm also going to make some changes on the font, as well.
- April Buchheit
They both look good, but with the change you decided on it'll work very nicely.
- James Stratford
Rob: Getting a picture of the whole family has proven to be a difficult task for the Buchheit family. Obtaining collective cooperation from all members (both children and adults) is a daunting endeavor.
- April Buchheit
Heather: Yes, this is from Tinyprints. :)
- April Buchheit
April - tell Paul I'm expecting the full family for 2010.
- Robert Felty
Rob: Aye, aye, sir! :)
- April Buchheit
April, I work @TinyPrints so won't be much help deciding:) But, you know we're local in Mountain View right? Happy to set you (or anyone else) up with our best discount if you're interested. Feel free to reach out. I'll need to DM the code.
- Rick Bucich
April, it sounds like it'll turn out cute :) We have four kids and can't get them all to look at the camera either. I went with a single shot of each to save my sanity.
- Heather Solos
Hiring Tweeters and Bloggers to Send Ads - http://www.nytimes.com/glogin...
Dan Hsiao, Itachi, Tracy and 3 other people liked this
"ONE new company trying to add transparency to the business is Likes.com of San Francisco, which plans to introduce its ad network in December. The company encourages bloggers and Twitter users to specify their tastes in restaurants, movies, books and other products, and then to publish those recommendations to their blogs and social network pages."
- Gary Burd
from Bookmarklet
And you thought I had all these friends because I like people? I want to say one word to you. Just one word. ... Monetization. Seriously though, my concern would be that I don't have a huge incentive to bother unless I'm a "professional" liker and able to scale up my monetization. Micro-monetization might be interesting in conjunction with FourSquare or some other local geo play but...
more...
- Tracy
Agree on throwing the astro-turfers under the bus... Also agree with you in the beginning this is only for medium to large "influencers" .. I think there are number of things you can do to align publish incentives to provide legitimate recommendations similar to how Google ads are optimized for quality.. You know all about ads-quality :)
- Bindu Reddy
PubSubHubbub Security Concerns ･ 詹姆斯 - http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog...
"If the hub supports XML entity expansion (and some implementations clearly do), the attacker could easily create a feed that is minuscule on their end, but would expand considerably when pushed to the victim’s server." Heh. XML sucks for data representation. WhereTF are the NoXML meetings? I'll buy the pizza. Long live JSON. Die XML-scum. Regardless, a lot of these server abuse issues have to be dealt with for any type of server that will be processing untrusted input.
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
"In the meantime, I'm happy to say that I think every issue he points out has already been or can easily be mitigated in the hubs that are out there, the biggest help being automatic subscription refreshing (http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/svn...) which can narrow the window of any attack significantly." http://groups.google.com/group...
- Tracy
You Don't Know Jack About Software Maintenance | November 2009 | Communications of the ACM - http://cacm.acm.org/magazin...
Sometimes I feel like a Caltrans worker late at night. I'm not sure that I agree that "Maintenance really is easy." There have been some architectural changes that had to be performed in-flight that I called many things but easy wasn't one of them. Things are really interesting with so many public APIs changing so frequently.
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
Writing Robust Bash Shell Scripts - http://www.davidpashley.com/article...
Dan Freeman and Andrew Perry liked this
Nice old post on writing bash shell scripts.
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
Better (IMHO) advice: write any non-trivial script in Python (or Perl, if you swing that way).
- Tudor Bosman
I think it depends on which layer of the system I'm working on and my perception of how heavily/tightly modeled I want this piece -- which depends on how long I think I will need the piece and how much I will build on top of it. If I need to manipulate the system via command line tools for a quick hypothesis or some ops emergency I rely heavily on bash. Pieces of the system that are...
more...
- Tracy
LANjackal to LANjackal's feed, Android, The Facebook Experience, TheNextWeb Forum, RWW: The Future of Tech, building43
Does anyone know how to get upload full-size pics into Facebook via the Android app instead of the itty bitty ones? No obvious setting I can find. Thanks! (UPDATE: FIXED)
Reed Porter, sean808080, 'Like' robot (frɐnc) and 3 other people liked this
"The largest dimension should be at most 604 pixels (the largest display size Facebook supports)" -- http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index... You can use Pixelpipe to upload to both SmugMug, etc. (for the original) and Facebook at the same time.
- Tracy
PROBLEM SOLVED: The answer to this is to simply take the pictures directly in the Android 2.0 camera and upload to Facebook from there. Do NOT use the Facebook for Android app itself.
- LANjackal
DroidDrop – Remote Logging for Android - http://talkingandroid.com/2009...
imabonehead and Tracy liked this
DroidDrop Remote logging gives Android Developers the ability to log data from their applications to a drop on drop.io.
- Tim Hoeck
from Bookmarklet
This technique is also useful for Android developers: "Remotely log unhandled exceptions in your Android applications." http://code.google.com/p...
- Tracy
mysql-cacti-templates - http://code.google.com/p...
Alex Kapranoff and Dmitry Khrustalev liked this
I should look at the cacti templates for monitoring mysql at work
- Jeremy Zawodny
What do you currently use for mysql monitoring?
- Tracy
Stanford friendships fed success of social networking innovator FriendFeed - http://soe.stanford.edu/alumni...
NaHi, Anne Bouey, Lizunlong and 6 other people liked this
"How did three Stanford computer science alumni and a friend make a huge mark on the world of social networking? With social networking, of course. The story of the founding of FriendFeed, an influential social information sharing site acquired in August for a rumored $47.5 million by Facebook, is a tale of investing in relationships."
- Eric Borisch
from Bookmarklet
"At weekly dinners, Buchheit and Singh offered Taylor and Norris critiques and advice on their ideas."
- Tracy
CouchDB emerging as a top choice for offline Web apps - http://www.infoworld.com/d...
Susan Beebe, Tracy, Hariprasad and Rob Schonberger liked this
decent high-level article on CouchDB
- Jeremy Zawodny
The sweet spot for offline apps would seem to be mobile devices but I wonder if CouchDB is too heavy for those environments (for now). I could find only this digging around on the internet for footprint/efficiency issues: http://chrismoos.com/tag... . A server-based distributed framework for sqlite with some synchronization assistance would be awesome since sqlite is about to be everywhere thanks to Android.
- Tracy
On Going Overboard - http://onehungrychef.blogspot.com/2009...
Tracy, Bret Taylor and Anne Bouey liked this
Hey Ben, congratulations on all your success, long way from the old OM days of cars driving in circles and popping balloons to say the least.
- Travis Corriher
Please shoot me an email when you get a chance, I want to run an idea by you... tcorriher@gmail.com
- Travis Corriher
wasn't someone asking about recipes in a functional programming style? ding! ding! ding! http://onehungrychef.freewebhostx.com/blt...
- Karl Rosaen
The visual representation is nice. The images on the blog post have exceeded their photobucket serving quota, btw.
- Tracy
The Immune System of Red Algae vs. Ebola - http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog...
Tracy liked this
"... researchers at the US National Cancer Institute have discovered that red algae emit a compound called griffithsin (GRFT)." ... "In mice infected with SARS, 70% of the animals that received no antivirals died. By contrast, among those that received an intranasal dose of 5 milligrams per kilogram per day of GRFT for 4 days, 100% lived."
- Tracy
Insane Coding: The Sorry State of Sound in Linux - http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007...
Christopher A Carr and Mike Chelen liked this
The sad tale of sound in Linux.
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
interesting background, though much has since changed
- Mike Chelen
It's true, much has changed, but not necessarily for the better. Pulseaudio _promises_ to fix various issues and become the standard Linux sound server ... but at the moment it's still a source of grief for many Ubuntu users (myself included). I've followed the evolution of Linux sound as an end-user since the OSS-only days, waiting, hoping, that it will stabilize - it hasn't happened yet. Linux distros seem to get lots of things right, and so it's puzzling why sound has been so consistently stuffed up.
- Andrew Perry
Awesome: The Game Crafter Lets You Build And Sell Your Own Custom Board Games - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Andrew Perry liked this
DIY board games.
- Tracy
from Bookmarklet
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